On the Trail of Genghis Khan

by Tim Cope

  Weeks later I happened to be talking to Gansukh in Mongolia on the satellite phone and recounted the story, mentioning that the aul near Kuat’s farm was known as Ortaderesin. In turn, he told me that orta in Mongolian means “tall,” and deres is the Mongol term for ak-shi—something probably unbeknownst to most local Kazakhs, since orta is also a Kazakh word meaning “middle.” Still, that piece of information made it seem all the more likely that this Mongolian hoofprint had withstood the test of time.

  The men at Kuat’s farm were ecstatic about the prospect of a birthday party and set about cleaning the hut in preparation. Kuat, meanwhile, agreed to drive me 50 km west to a market in the small copper-smelting city of Balkhash, and that night we returned in high spirits with delicacies such as fruit, salted fish, cake, salami, salad, the filled Russian dumplings called pelmeni, orange juice, and, of course, a few bottles of vodka.

  As we pulled up at the farm, however, my spirits faded, for parked outside the hut was a military police vehicle. Word had clearly spread via the uzun kulak or “long-ear news” of the steppe. Kuat went silent.

  Inside two inspectors stood in winter army garb. They ordered me over. “How can we understand your journey? What is your business here? Are you really Australian?”

  I reached for my letter of introduction—which had been written in Russian on United Nations Development Programme/World Wildlife Foundation letterhead by Evegeniy Yurchenkov, who had given me invaluable assistance upon my arrival in Kazakhstan—hoping they wouldn’t request my passport. I had never shown my “business” visa to officials, had not registered it, and wasn’t sure it authorized my journey. Perhaps these men had a connection to the railway and the police in Sayak?

  “We don’t need papers. Just tell us, are you really from Australia?”

  “Yes, I am from Australia, where kangaroos are from.”

  That was all they needed, and their expressions softened. “It’s true! We have come to wish you a happy birthday!”

  Like so many people I met during my travels, they had heard on the winds about my journey and wanted nothing more than to see me with their own eyes. My Australian saddle, in particular, was legendary, and I was more than happy to bring it in so they could look over it and try sitting in its deep leather seat. What’s more, one of the men went out to the jeep and brought in a bag of barley.

  “This is for you, a gift for turning twenty-six. My grandfather taught me that a palmful of this uncrushed grain is enough to keep a horse going when it is tired.”1

  After the police had gone, it was endearing to see the way the herders put on a proper feast with all the frills. They donned their finest for the occasion, including old creased dress pants, and combed their disheveled, unwashed hair. One of the young herders took on the role of tea pourer—something that was usually strictly for women.

  In such a male-dominated environment there was a danger of falling into a pit of neglect and alcoholism, so it was admirable that they seemed to be consciously compensating for the absence of family. The men working here operated on shifts, returning periodically to homes in the aul. The exclusion of women was partly because of the paternal culture of the Kazakhs, in which men dominated physical herding work, and also because of Islamic influence, but mostly it was a legacy of Soviet collectivization. Nomadic life traditionally depended on family and kinship groups, and women were known to gallop alongside the men. Unlike in many parts of Muslim Central Asia, Kazakh women did not wear the veil, and the Koran was used selectively to support the role women play, as evidenced by a common saying taught to children: “To mother, to mother, to mother, and then to father.” But collectivization meant not only that a sense of ownership was erased as herders became employees of the state, but also that farming was run divorced from the family unit.

  The evening slid into night with the slosh of vodka and tea. The conversation meandered through quiet troughs of spiritual and political issues, boisterous highs of vulgar jokes, and chatter about horses. I marveled at the setting of our celebration—it was the first time since an evening with a chaban in the Altai that I was not dining at a conventional table with chairs. Just as Kazakhs had always done in the yurt, we sat on cushions on the floor around a low table called a dastarkhan. What I couldn’t have known was that during my travels along Lake Balkhash I had crossed an invisible line, beyond which the influence of Russian ways had always been weaker. Although the dastarkhan had been an exception until now, I would barely see another set of table and chairs for the remainder of my journey in Kazakhstan.

  From Kuat’s farm the horses carried me swiftly across a landscape of frost-encrusted sand and ak-shi. We skirted the city of Balkhash to the north, then began following the arc of the lake as it turned to the southwest. My plan was to carry on along the shoreline for two weeks until I reached the lake’s westernmost point, at which stage I would head west into the Betpak Dala.

  Owing to the fresh waters of this end of Lake Balkhash and the scattered auls on its shores, I had speculated that the way ahead would pose no problems in terms of water supply. As we began to head southward, however, the conditions conspired to create new challenges.

  A cold freeze fell on the land without any of the earlier ambiguity, and the sheets of ice that had been timidly creeping out from the shore now rapidly grew into vast expanses. At times when the sky was clear and the wind stopped it was an exquisite sight—a polished turquoise slab of ice meeting a distant glinting silver sea. Mostly, though, I was aware that as this sealing over progressed, the moderating effect of the open water waned, and the daytime temperature plummeted.

  As always, Tigon’s behavior was somewhat of a bellwether for these changing conditions, especially when it came to getting up in the morning. He would rise from my sleeping bag when I had finished cooking breakfast, and after wolfing down his porridge he would return to the tent and pretend to lie dead. To get him out, I would first roll him off the horse blankets, and he would lie on his back on the floor of the tent like a sack of bones, his neck bent at a right angle and his long legs crisscrossed in a tangle. After everything else had been packed up and it came to pulling down the tent, he would spring to life in fierce resistance. He refused to move of his own accord, so I would have to throw him out one end of the tent, only to have him sprint around to the other and leap back inside. Often the only solution was lifting the tent up and shaking him out, at which point he would go off and curl up in a ball until we were ready to go.

  A day south of the city of Balkhash, I was confronted with more serious problems. While the water near the shore was frozen all the way to the bottom, there was still no snow on the ground. The only way to collect water for the horses was by tethering them to stakes onshore, walking out onto the ice, breaking a hole with my hand axe, and returning with pails. This process used much valuable daylight and was fraught with dangers. One day my thirsty horses broke free and went scuttling onto the ice. By now the metal studs on their shoes had worn down to nothing, and all tied up to one another, they skated uncontrollably out onto thinner ice, threatening to topple over.

  Water issues came to a head one afternoon after the horses had gone thirsty for twenty-four hours. I detoured to an aul called Gulshat, where I found a well just as it was becoming dark. Zhamba was the first to drink, and by the time the third horse had finished he was shaking uncontrollably. You could see by his widening, despondent eyes that he was going into hypothermic shock, and soon Taskonir and Ogonyok started to rattle on their feet in the same way.

  By nomad custom, it was sacrilege to water a horse in the cold immediately after a long ride—Kazakhs everywhere had taught me to restrain them for at least two hours before letting them eat or drink—but I felt there had been no option. I leaped back on Zhamba and took them off at a trot, continuing beyond darkness until they had recovered. If I had stopped and made camp any earlier, the horses could have been dead within hours.

  As I rode onward, it was sad in a way to realize that the charm of Lake
Balkhash was withering. This companion of mine that had offered a reprieve from winter would be sorely missed. At the same time, my window of opportunity to develop as a horseman in more forgiving conditions was fast passing. The snows of winter—the thinnest layer of which would make it possible for me to take the horses away from the lake, with no worries about water supply—could now not come quick enough.

  10

  WIFE STEALING AND OTHER LEGENDS OF TASARAL

  It was December 17, and after more than 600 km and a month of riding along Lake Balkhash, I was three days’ ride from its westernmost tip. The waters were now frozen as far as the eye could see, but the land was dark and empty—still no snow had fallen. If it did not come soon, then branching westward into the “starving steppe”—where there were no people or operating wells—was unthinkable.

  Prolonged cold and dry conditions were known in Mongolian as harin zud, or “black zud,” and were feared by nomads even more than deep snow cover and ice. Without snow or access to substantial underground water—which was rare on the arid steppe zones of Eurasia—livestock faced dehydration, then starvation in the early spring, when lack of snowmelt meant lean pastures.

  My circumstances, of course, weren’t that dire. I had just three horses and a dog, and in recent days had adjusted to the conditions by peeling off the scabs of ice that formed on my tent to melt for my own water supply. Public wells in the few auls scattered along the shoreline had sufficed for the horses. If it didn’t snow, the worst scenario meant finding somewhere with a well to hole up for a while. By contrast, nomad graziers traditionally had thousands of animals to care for, and most did not have the luxury of a freshwater lake. The difficulties they faced—as did the Mongol armies and their tens of thousands of horses as they crossed these steppes—were beyond imagination.

  Not long after breakfast I approached an aul called Tasaral, a gaggle of cigar-brown, blue, and white mud-brick homes barnacled onto the stony shoreline. Where the steely blue waters might have afforded a playground in summer, pressure ridges of ice were forming like frozen waves. Nearby, rusty old fishing boats rested at angles on their keels, their navigators retired to the indoors, where fires would now be chugging 24/7 until spring.

  From the outside, where I sat hunched in the cold, this settled way of life beckoned with the immediate respite it offered from the rigors of nomad life. If nomadic pastoral existence was an ongoing process of adapting to the moods of the natural ecology, then a part of the legacy of the Soviet era was that people could now live with a greater sense of security against the fickle and uncontrollable trends of the weather.

  From the interior of Tasaral, where I would stay for the next two nights, however, I was to discover a community that was, like me, precariously navigating through the midst of an awkward transition. Just as autumn had passed but winter hadn’t arrived with life-giving snow, the old nomad ways and the Soviet system were history, and ordinary people had not yet settled on a cultural identity or an economic model to follow.

  My host in Tasaral was an unmarried thirty-year-old man named Shashibek. He had approached me on the lakeside and offered to sell me grain, and when I arrived at his home he insisted I stay for the night. Since leaving Kopa, I had found good grazing to be scarce, and the horses had lost weight. I seized the opportunity.

  “I can only stay if you can promise my horses lots of hay, for they are hungry,” I said. And, leaving nothing to chance, I refused to unload the horses until Shashibek let me inspect his family’s barn. I was in luck. Shashibek was the son of the local akim, and their treasure trove of fodder included bundles of reeds—the primary winter fodder of the region, which was cut from the lakeshore in summer—and bales of hay that had been trucked in. Additionally, Shashibek promised that my horses would receive three meals a day of the grain of my choice. Before leaving the barn I was plotting to stay more than one night.

  It took only a cup of tea with Shashibek and his parents to learn of the unique geography and historic pattern of life in Tasaral. Tas meant “rock,” and aral meant “island”—a reference to a long, broad island rising in dramatic cliffs far offshore. For centuries, first nomads and then the settled Kazakhs of the aul had been herding livestock over to the island in the spring when the ice was still thick enough. The livestock would be left to graze there until there was adequate ice in autumn for them to be returned for winter.

  The community in Tasaral continued this tradition, but a quick stroll around the aul was enough to know that animal husbandry was no longer at the center of life. A slew of cheap tangled Chinese nets strung up at the back of homes bespoke of the thriving contraband fishing industry, which most people relied on. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, fishing Lake Balkhash’s waters had helped fill the vacuum of regional unemployment, and it was common knowledge that inspectors routinely took bribes to supplement their poor wages—a practice that had led to profits for all, but also to rampant overfishing. Shashibek’s father acknowledged that the current levels of fishing were unsustainable, but he explained that people had few other options, and in any case, Lake Balkhash was under other, more serious threats. The metallurgical plant in the city of Balkhash was known for its emissions of lead, zinc, and copper, which contaminated the lake, and the main tributary flowing into the lake, the Ili River, had long been dammed, with 89 percent of its flow diverted for agricultural irrigation and industry across the border in Xinjiang province, China. The lake’s water levels had been in decline for decades, risking the desertification of its immediate surroundings—as had happened to the Aral Sea. This, Shashibek and his family recognized, would bring an end to life in Tasaral.

  For the middle-aged and elderly, the realities of the bare-knuckle era of capitalism represented a stark break with the past. For Shashibek, like all of the younger generation, however, it was a reality that had dominated his formative years. My experience in Tasaral was, above all, a fleeting opportunity to join him in his own personal journey through these times.

  The evening of my arrival in the aul coincided with the grand opening of the new village tavern. Shashibek and two of his childhood friends took me to a room in the back of a mud-brick grocery decorated with strings of colored lights and a makeshift bar. From a portable stereo a CD of contemporary Kazakh tunes played on repeat.

  Vodka was on the pour even as we stepped in, and it wasn’t long before my entourage moved on to Russian brandy. As the alcohol sank in, Shashibek’s fleshy cheeks turned red, his groomed mustache began to twitch, and the seniority he had exuded earlier receded. He and his friends broke out of their huddle and approached the only other group in the place—three or four girls on the dance floor—with rather imbecilic dance moves. One by one the girls, all of whom knew the men, rolled their eyes and slinked away. Sometimes Shashibek, giggling childishly, propelled me forward into the group of girls, but mostly I hung back, feeling a little embarrassed and out of place. I could see no signs of the evening finishing early, and so I kept throwing back the brandy handed to me. The party came to an end with my vomiting during the stumble home.

  In the mist of a collective hangover the next morning, the male bonding session continued with a duck hunting expedition. All four of us squeezed into a Moskvich, a small Soviet-era car, and set off onto the steppe with a rifle pointed out the window, stereo blaring. The three Kazakhs—one of whom was a hunting inspector—took turns taking pot shots as we covered our ears. After scaring away the ducks and moving on to gunning down flocks of sparrow-sized birds—which were to be fed to the dogs—the highlight was when the Moskvich fell through the frozen crust of a salt marsh. We spent an hour digging it out, eventually pushing it free to wild yahoos of delight.

  On the way back to the aul I sank back into the seat of the clattering car, cradling bleeding bird carcasses in my lap and watching the tangle of fishnets and boats grow on the horizon. Only a couple of generations ago, a hunt at this time of year—as still happens among Kazakhs in western Mongolia—would have be
en an event of significant prestige and celebration. In the late autumn, around the first winter snows, men of the community would have gathered on their horses, decked out in fox-fur hats, sheepskin coats, and ornate belts and whips, with a trained eagle at hand or perhaps a tazi dog by their side. It wouldn’t have been uncommon for a grandfather, father, and son to take part in the hunt together—it was an opportunity for skills to be shared across generations.

  Later Shashibek’s neighbor was proud to unveil evidence of this past—his great-grandfather’s saddle, which was more than a century old and had been hidden from the Bolsheviks at the height of the purges in the late 1920s. Covered with hundreds of intricate motifs engraved into a silver veneer, it was complete with stirrups carved from the antlers of an Argali sheep and silver-plated girth straps.

  Just like this uncouth style of hunting, however, the saddle hinted at how strangely alien the old ways had become. It had been plunked unceremoniously on the floor of the house, wiped of dust, then awkwardly held up by Shashibek’s neighbor with unaccustomed hands. It may have been testament to the deep sense of connection to the horse that its original owner had possessed, but this connection—unlike the saddle itself—had not survived to the present.

  Even as Shashibek tore up the dirt doing burnout turns on the outskirts of the aul, a part of me could not help but feel dismay at the behavior on show, particularly by the son of a family to whom the community looked for leadership. On the other hand, the tide of history Shashibek faced as he forged his path and identity as a young Kazakh man could not be understated.

  The forces eroding Kazakh culture had been multiple and complex. The seventy-year Soviet regime had not only dispossessed the Kazakhs materially and brought about the end to the traditional way of life but also cultivated an environment in which, in order to survive, let alone prosper, many Kazakhs had had little choice but to turn their backs on traditions and beliefs associated with nomadism and integrate into Soviet society.