by Tim Cope
There were many connections that I had learned of between the modern-day cultures of the steppe, yet I had never dreamed that among them was something I had carried with me from day one. To me, this simple knot not only tied together immense stretches of steppe but symbolized the relationship between human and the horse that underpinned nomadic life.
At sunrise I joined Peter as he saw off his herd of long-haired Hungarian sheep and gray cattle. A bandy-legged shepherd who wore a wide black hat slowly moved them out with the crack of a whip and a chorus of whistles and shouts. Then we opened the gates of the horse yard and watched as Peter’s herd thundered off, leaving a cloud of dust suspended in the morning light.
By 9:00 A.M. everything had settled, and the sun brought such stifling heat it had quashed the spirits of the most exuberant young horses.
“It’s too hot to step outside,” said Peter mischievously. “In fact, it is so hot the only reason to step outside today is to see the takhi.”
Unbeknown to me, Peter had arranged a visit to a rare reserve where herds of Przewalskii horses (known in Mongolian as takhi) live with minimal human interference. As the only surviving wild horse of Eurasia, the takhi may closely resemble the equines that were first domesticated by hunter-gatherers. Access to the takhi reserve was ordinarily restricted to scientists, but Peter had been able to get permission for me through his connections.
After we had followed hoofprints for half an hour or so, the crest of a slight rise fell away to a series of reedy waterholes and marshes. There, mingling by the water, were around sixty or seventy takhi, all of which displayed distinctive zebra-striped legs, short manes, and dun-colored coats.
Peter pointed to a commotion on the far side of the water hole. A stallion had set upon a younger competitor, which now galloped off. At first the younger horse darted right and left before plunging headlong into the water. The pursuing stallion crashed in behind, nipping at the fleeing competitor. On our side of the water hole the pursuit continued. The stallions shot past a mare that was leading her foals along the water’s edge, and careened out into the steppe. My attention returned to the water hole, where there had been a collective decision to move on. The water’s surface was shattered by a frenzy of hooves as the herd pulsated through the water, then out onto hard ground.
It was the first time I’d laid eyes on takhi, and it struck me that before us was a scene that could at once have been something taken from prehistory, but also still be seen in any given valley in Mongolia on a hot summer’s day.
The takhi’s barrel-like chests and trunk-thick necks were a feature of the constitution of my own horses, Taskonir and Ogonyok, reflective of the endurance and hardiness that had carried me safely to Hungary. The speed of the stallions was a reminder of the equine’s unparalleled ability to take flight and reach as much as 70 kph in seconds—a trait that had developed as the horse evolved over millions of years and which eventually opened up a new era of communication, travel, trade, and warfare for humans.8 Even the way the takhi opportunistically took bites at reeds on the move was reminiscent of the greedy Ogonyok. At heart, horses were nomadic, and their ability to travel long distances enabled them to roam far and wide for feed and water, eating on the move.
I could not help but reflect that the very qualities of the takhi I was bearing witness to had facilitated the creation of some of the world’s greatest empires, from those of the distant past, such the Scythian, Roman, and Mongol, through to the making of the New World. Although nomadic life could not be sustained far beyond the Danube, the horse and a nomadic style of light horsemanship had been adopted by Europeans and taken to the Americas, Australia, and Africa, where men had conquered from the saddle with same advantage that earlier nomads had once used to great effect in Eurasia.9 For better or worse, the horse, together with humans, had been on a journey through time that had not just contributed to the world but helped define society in every inhabited continent.
After the excursion to see the takhi I returned to Peter’s place for several more days. When finally I saddled up to leave, he plucked hair from each of my horses, gifted me with a Mongolian sweat stick, and told me: “I am so happy to have met you, and I hope we have strong connections in future. In your mind, your head, you think and act like a nomad even though you are from Australia.”
I rode on with my sails filled. With my mind lingering on thoughts of the takhi and the experience of sleeping out in the Hortobágy in Peter’s yurt, the complexities I’d encountered in recent months and years seemed to melt away, and I found myself reunited with the basic ingredients of the land from which I had begun.
For seven days straight my caravan traveled south along the Tisza River, covering as much as 50 km from one host to the next. Tigon was a rod of muscle and could sustain long sprints at over 40 kph. A quick dip in any number of oases along the way—river, trough, drain, or puddle—and it was as if he had been recharged. At night the horses were spoiled with hay and grain, and in the mornings they routinely broke into frolic. Taskonir, who had once been so desperately thin that some people had said he would not make it to the Russian border alive, now pig rooted, thrashed his head about, and nipped at his juniors with mighty aggression. In the evenings, I took Taskonir out without so much as a saddle or even a halter. It had taken me a year on the road to feel confident enough to gallop, and another year before we reached the kind of fattening grass where I was tempted to try. Here, though, the issues of water, grass, and distance had fallen behind us. Holding on to Taskonir’s mane, with my bare toes tucked into the fur on his belly, I took him for long, exhilarating gallops. As he leaned forward and the earth began to rush beneath, I was overcome by an uncanny sensation that time was slowing down. Details of the environment passed through my field of vision with lucidity. I sat straight and still, legs wrapped around Taskonir’s chest, my rear not lifting a centimetre from his spine. These same animals that I had been terrified of in the beginning had transformed me. I could not imagine life without them.
The momentum of the ride from Peter’s farm carried me to the village of Tószeg, from where I was escorted straight west for two days by a party of horsemen whom János had described as “cowboys.” He was not exaggerating. Riding American quarter horses, they turned up with their lassos, long leather chaps, spurs, bulging belt buckles, and broad cowboy hats. Leading them was a man they called “Sheriff’—a wealthy software programmer who admitted to having watched too many John Wayne movies as a child. En route with them, I stayed in the unique Hungarian institution of a horse-friendly hotel. While the horses overnighted in stables, I slept with Tigon in the luxury of my own chandelier-hung room.
It was only as I rode on unescorted from Sheriff’s ranch that my buoyancy began to wane. Immersed in the rush of movement and with my time filled daily with new characters, I had barely taken note of how rapidly I was crossing the country. It was hard to believe, but it was already September, and I was now just two days’ ride from the Danube.
So often during the earlier part of the journey, when Hungary had seemed impossibly beyond reach, I had dreamed about a time like this, when I was nearing the end. Mostly I imagined the day my horses would no longer have the burden of carrying me. After all they had done, I wanted desperately to offer them a land where there would be certainty of pasture. There had been many times when it seemed that my ambition to give my horses a deserving retirement would remain just that—and some horses hadn’t made it. I was still haunted by the gray horse, Kok, whom I had left behind with an infected hoof more than a year ago in Kalmykia. I hadn’t had the nerve to call to find out what his fate had been. Somehow, though, I’d brought the rest of my team through. Ogonyok and Taskonir had been with me for almost three years—a prospect that had seemed improbable when the old man in Pugachevo from whom I had bought Taskonir asked me to send him a photo from the Danube. Yet now that I was in this place of relative richness, it felt all too soon, too quick.
After a gentle ride west from Sheriff’s
farm through undulating sand hills and forest, I craved setting up camp in the open steppe to take stock, but it was not to be. My last night before the Danube was to be spent at another Western-style stud farm, the Bronco Ranch. My arrival happened to coincide with a Saturday and a gathering of Western horseman. Instead of pulling into camp, I rode in among a throng of suburbanites and loudspeakers that alternately played country-western music and rang out with commentary. There was barrel racing, sliding, and a beer-swilling crowd adorned in the same outfits as Sheriff’s cowboys.
After being met by a man called Tibor, who was one of Sheriff’s trainers and caretakers, I unloaded and took Taskonir and Tigon on a ride. I trotted out of the ranch and into the forest, where I found a small, sandy meadow and lay with Taskonir’s rope lax in my hand. I tried to focus my concentration on the sunset and let the steppe soothe me as it had done so many hundreds of times before, but from one direction the constant hum of distant motorcycles and cars was unending, and from the other, music from the Bronco Ranch crept its way through the forest.
A legend I’d been told about the makings of Hungary gripped me. At the end of the Magyars’ epic voyage from the East in search of a new homeland, it is said, they offered a white horse to the existing rulers of the land in return for a bundle of grass and a jug of Danubian water. It was a deeply meaningful exchange: water and grass were the essential ingredients of life, and the Carpathian Basin offered the kind of quantity that any nomad would yearn for. In the end, that eternal search for pasture and water, which tied people to the rhythms of the land, was what defined nomads for me—not their dual capacity for devastating feats of war and empire building, which can be found among the history of many nations and cultures.
Explicit in the Hungarian legend, though, was a conundrum that I was only now beginning to grasp: the quest for better pasture had ultimately lured nomads—just as it had me—to this land on the border of Europe and the steppe that was not suited to a pure nomadic existence. By buying into a world of abundance, the Magyars were trading away their white horse, a symbol of their nomad way of life and the animals that they had sought to nourish in the first place. Like nomads who had come before them, their saddles would be replaced over time with wagons, plows, and scythes, their vast herds with cultivated fields, and the yurt with permanent homes. In a land of such riches, there was, after all, no driving impetus to keep moving.
I thought about it for some time—about what it meant for Hungary’s unique past, then what it spelled for my future. Hungary was the high-water mark of the steppe—a place of historical stalemate between those of the saddle and those of the plow. Even the Mongols, who had struck deep into settled lands and administered their rule, had not been able to sustain nomadic life beyond the great grasslands and deserts whence they had come.
And therein lay my dilemma. The journey had changed me, and I’d fulfilled my dream of riding from Mongolia to Europe, learning to see the world through nomad’s eyes. Yet if nomadism didn’t belong in temperate Europe, or indeed my home in Australia, then could I really carry what I had learned beyond the Danube?
I wasn’t at all sure, and it worried me that people back home might not be able to relate to who I had become. I found some cause for optimism in the example of Peter Kun, who seemed to have been able to embrace the advantages of the modern, settled world while also living according to his nomad heritage. But then again, I was Australian, with Anglo-European origins—wouldn’t it feel contrived to live as he did? Then it occurred to me that perhaps part of the answer lay in the raucous music drifting through the trees from the Bronco Ranch. The truth was that a part of the nomad legacy had never stopped radiating beyond the steppe. In the deserts of Mexico and the mountains and prairies of the United States, a sophisticated horse culture had developed, resting on the accumulated wisdom of untold people over untold centuries. It was strange, in a way, that Tibor, Sheriff, and others were reimporting a style of horsemanship in which the shadow of their own ancestors was inextricably woven. And yet it seemed to me proof that the virtues of freedom and independence for which the cowboy of the American West had become glorified—and which were at the core of steppe life—were universal. It was a thought that would at least provide some comfort as I moved on from here.
From Bronco to the village of Solt on the Danube was a mere 25 km. It was to be my last day of westward travel, and my last alone.
As I traveled roughly parallel with the M52 freeway, the steppe came in dribs and drabs. When there appeared open spaces I went into a trot, but then a ditch, a road, or a cornfield would stop us. In the evening I passed through Solt, disturbing a few dogs, a cyclist, and a pedestrian. From there it was a hop, skip, and jump to the flood embankment, from which we soon dropped down to lush green flats and arrived at the river. In front of me lay a wide swath of silty brown water stretching to the far bank. Not much beyond that lay the beginning of fences, walls, roads, and cities. From the south, a tourist ferry was chugging up against the current. I resisted the pull of Taskonir’s head at first, but then let the reins go and watched as all the horses drank. Even Tigon carefully walked his way in and lapped it up.
That night I camped for just the second time in Hungary. Deep into the early hours of morning I retraced in my mind every day of travel since I had set off three and a half years earlier. Give or take one or two campsites, I could remember every step of the way. It was not a journey as such, but had become my life. And yet there was no escaping the reality that it was already fading. The hoofmarks of my horses in Kazakhstan would have already long gone by now, the bushes I crushed rejuvenated, the grass my horses eaten regrown. Some of the people I had met had even passed away. Never again would the horses feel the packsaddle on their backs. Tigon would never again know the freedom of running day in and day out.
As I had felt when I was leaving my life in Australia behind and heading to Mongolia, I knew that a part of me was dying.
Just as it was hard to say precisely when the summer came to an end and when autumn fully took hold, my journey did not come to a close in one time in one place. There were, rather, many endings, and later many new beginnings.
Originally I had flirted with the idea of coming to a close in Budapest, but decided that finishing in a metropolis where the Mongols were still remembered almost singularly for their destruction was not fitting. The rather anonymous stretch of Danube near Solt offered a personal finish and symbolized the edge of the steppe. It was, however, a very solitary and rather anticlimactic ending.
The other significant ending was to be in Opusztaszer—just as János had planned. As the site where Arpád had founded the nation of nomadic Magyars in 896, it was symbolic of Hungary’s enduring role in the history of the Eurasian steppe. Perhaps just as important, it was a place where I could celebrate with others.
The day after reaching Solt and the Danube, I packed my things and made my way to Budapest’s international airport. There, stumbling a little disoriented out through immigration, was my brother Jon. During my journey there were times when he had wanted to join me but didn’t. In the wake of Dad’s death, he had been determined to come for at least the finish.
For the four days it took to ride from the Danube southeast to Opusztaszer, he traveled with me. On the first day, he went by foot, running this way and that, snapping photos, and taking in all the details—it was only his second time outside Australia, and his first in Europe. At dusk he approached me with a smile. “Look, there are so many frogs! I have one!” He opened his hands to reveal a squirming, mud-coated little specimen. Standing there at my side, with his daypack on and face full of wonderment, he was the spitting image of Dad—or at least the vision I had had of my father walking by my side, the day after he had died.
For the second day of riding János came to lead us on a trail more than 5 km long. We carried on well after darkness, and just as we approached an equine-friendly hotel for the night, there came a familiar voice.
“Tigon! It’s really
you!”
Ahead of us, Tigon was the first of our troupe to greet my mother. Also waiting there was Graeme Cook, a longtime family friend and neighbor who had been the first person to put me on a horse four years earlier. My childhood mate Mark Wallace was there, too, with his partner, Nadia.
The next two days were something of a dream. To ride with family and friends by my side, with my caravan of horses still intact, gave me a feeling of togetherness that I knew would never be repeated in exactly the same way.
My last camp was a mere 10 km from the finish line. A night of what I had hoped to be reflection became one of minor drama: Tigon had rolled in something dead earlier in the day, and I spent hours trying to wash him with shampoo and water.
For the finale at the national heritage park in Opusztaszer, the Kazakh and Mongolian embassies had sent representations, along with the deputy ambassador from the Australian mission in Budapest. Gordon Naysmith, a roguish old Scot who in his youth had ridden from south to north through Africa and into Europe, arrived as the representative of the Long Riders Guild. Then there were tens and tens of others—some were friends from Europe, including old friends Sandy and Rita Cooper from Scotland, but mostly they were Hungarians who had hosted me along the way.
As the remaining distance of my journey dwindled, I felt carried forward on a wave of emotion. The last few steps were made through a guard of honor formed by Hungarian horsemen in traditional regalia.
When the formal side of the ceremony was over, the celebration moved to a yurt camp nearby, where that night the smell of goulash, the splash of pálinka, and the neighing of horses mingled till morning.