Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  Before and after and during dinner, we drank toasts to the ordinary American taxpayer, to free speech, to a free market economy, to the Mongolian National Democratic party, to the American Republican party, which was advising the MNDP on grassroots organizing, and to the new Mongolia altogether, a country finally free to consume more vegetables. The vodka was Mongolian, a popular new brand called Genghis Khan.

  • • •

  The next day, we flew from Ulan Bator to a town called Uliastai on a Mongolian Airlines jet. At the airport there, one of seven in the country with a paved runway, a young Mongolian fellow walked toward me, dropped a shoulder into my chest, knocked me back a step or two, and kept right on going. Five paces later, he turned smartly and started back. It was going to be a series of slow-motion assaults.

  “He thinks you’re Russian,” Bayaraa explained.

  “Hey,” I said sharply, “Mee Mer-ee-koon.”

  “Ahh!” The young man stopped and smiled. “Saim bainuu?” he asked politely. How are you?

  “Saing,” I said. Fine. “Saim bainuu?”

  And then there was a lot of Mongolian-style handshaking, in which you grab each other’s elbows, both of them, and nod and smile a lot. The guy ended up helping us load our luggage into a dilapidated slick-tired bus. He was glad to help. We weren’t Russians. We were Mer-ee-koons.

  Presently, the bus was bashing its way into the mountains along a narrow, rutted dirt road. We made our way through herds of sheep; and goats; and yaks, which looked to me like fringed Herefords. There are twenty-five million head of livestock grazing in Mongolia, about ten times the human population, and according to my Mongolian-language tapes, the third thing a polite person says to another—after “How are you?” and “How’s your family?”—is Tania mal saim bainuu? How’s your livestock?

  In the pasturelands rising up on the other side of the road, men on horseback worked the yaks very much the way Montana ranchers deal with cattle. But instead of ropes, the Mongolian herdsmen used rawhide loops set on the end of long poles. The poles, Bayaraa told me, serve a double purpose. Stick one upright in the ground, and no one will approach. In this treeless grassland, it was one way for a man and woman to ensure themselves a little privacy. It was also a symbol of virility.

  Above, hawks and falcons and huge griffons drifted in great circles, silhouetted against Tengri, the sacred sky, which was a brilliant shrieking blue filled with billowing white clouds. A herd of horses galloped across a nearby ridge, their long manes flying in the wind.

  Baggie said he approved of my hairstyling mission and had always thought that Mongolian people, his ancient ancestors, may have been the first Americans. It is a theory strongly promoted by the Museum of Natural History in Ulan Bator.

  Fifty miles east of Uliastai, the cruel joke of a road ended in what was an attempt at a hot springs resort, a series of whacked-together wooden buildings originally built for Communist party bigwigs. The place looked embarrassed, like a man in a tux at a beer party. All the other habitations in the countryside, without exception, were round felt tents, basically unchanged since the time Genghis declared himself “ruler of all those who live in felt tents.” They looked like white puffball mushrooms and were called gers. Don’t say yurt. Russians say yurt.

  At the end of the road, wranglers, hired for the trip, watched as we set up our American tents. The men thought our gers were flimsy, but they liked the portability. It took, they said, several hours to take down a Mongolian ger. The wranglers seemed shy, and they smiled constantly, nervously.

  In the saddle, though, these same men laughed and sang unselfconsciously, utterly at home on horseback. In Montana, we’d call them can-do cowboys.

  Our head wrangler, Lhagra, a lean unflappable man in his fifties, took it upon himself to coach me in matters Mongolian. The wraparound jackets all the men wore were called dels. The sleeves could be rolled down to warm the hands in cold weather, and the sash that held the garment together was a handy place to stash a knife. The oversize boots with turned-up toes were called gutuls. For the past seventy years, children had been taught in school that gutuls were a symbol of Mongolian subservience to religion. You can drop to your knees so much easier in boots with turned-up toes. Actually, Lhagra explained, the boots are designed to slip easily into the stirrup, and to show respect for the earth: Turned-up toes don’t tear into the ground.

  I learned a Mongolian saddle song about a young camel in the Gobi Desert, just starting off on his first caravan. It is late in the day, and the shadows fall long across the sands. The camel is leaving his mother for the first time. Here the song breaks into a lot of mournful ululation, which is fairly easy to do given the jouncing gait of the horse. The singer then expresses a similar love for his own mother. Mongolian songs never concern death, divorce, or unrequited love. Life is hard enough.

  We were circumnavigating Otgontenger (Young Sky) Mountain, which was, at 12,982 feet, the highest point in Mongolia’s central Hangay range. The peak itself was hidden behind other, smaller, mountains and we got our first clear glimpse of it when we topped out on a pass at 10,300 feet. A millennium of tradition required that we stop and pay our respects to the mountain at an elaborate ovoo, a construction of sticks and poles, piled tepeelike on an altar of stones. Tattered blue prayer flags tied to the poles snapped in the wind. There were cigarettes and banknotes and pieces of hard cheese piled on the stones. We walked three times around the ovoo, tied hairs from our horses’ manes to the poles, and left our offerings.

  As we led our horses down the steep slope on the other side of the pass, a cloud passed over the sun, the temperature dropped thirty degrees, and the wind drove a sudden snowfall directly into our faces. It was August, but it felt like winter. Then, maybe half an hour later, the sky cleared and the sun seemed to boom down on us. It wasn’t hot, but there was a harsh, unfiltered quality to the light. I could feel my face burning.

  We mounted up and rode down into an enormous river valley. There were wind-sculpted boulders on the ridges of the hills that framed the valley, and these ornate rock formations looked like Oriental dragons. It was impossible to estimate distance or to figure the size of the river below, because there were no trees or gers or livestock to measure against the immensity of the land. Lhagra said he saw riders moving along the riverbank. I couldn’t even see them with my pocket telescope.

  The riders, two men in their early twenties, joined us for a short time, which in Mongolian terms meant two days. We named them for their looks: the Movie Star, and Bad Hair Day, who had about a dozen swirling cowlicks on his head. The strange style made him look perpetually startled.

  The men were out marmot hunting, and would sell the skins for a good price at a market in Uliastai. The Movie Star carried a Russian. 22 rifle and a bipod strapped to his back. He wore a white sheet over his del, and a kind of white doo-rag hat topped with ludicrous rodent ears. Marmots, I was given to understand, stay close to their burrows and disappear into them at the slightest hint of danger. They were, however, curious, and might stand still for a moment when faced with the eerie specter of a man dressed like the marmot angel of death.

  Hunting these bucktoothed rodents was a serious business. An animal that was too easy to shoot—one that was slow or stupid—could kill you and your family. The marmot disease was a bad way to go: ten days of delirium, swollen glands, fever, and screaming pain. In the West, the same misery is called bubonic, or black, plague. In the fourteenth century it killed a third of the population of Europe: twenty-five million people.

  The theory is that ship-borne rats brought the plague to Europe. But Tim Severin, in his book In Search of Genghis Khan, notes that the first European reports of the plague came in 1347, when it broke out among the troops of the Kipchak Khan, who was besieging the Black Sea port of Kaffa. The Khan, in what must be the first instance of biological warfare in history, catapulted infected corpses over the city walls. There were Italian trading vessels in the port, and they returned to Genoa. Carryi
ng plague.

  In a book of Mongolian folktales, I found this cautionary narrative:

  A hungry wolf comes upon a horse mired in the mud. The wolf prepares for a feast, but the horse asks him if he shouldn’t pull his meal out of the mud first. So the wolf performs this chore and prepares, once again, to eat. The horse resorts to sanitary arguments. Shouldn’t the wolf clean his food before he eats it? The wolf acknowledges that this might be a good idea, and licks the mud off the horse. Finally the wolf is ready to eat, but the horse says, “Hey, there’s some writing on the hoof of my hind leg. Before you eat me, read that please.” The curious wolf walks around the horse, who lifts up his hind leg and bashes in the wolf’s skull with a single kick.

  The wolf, alone and dying in the mud, howls to himself (and I quote directly from the book here): “I was a blockhead … Am I owner that I should have pulled the horse from the mud? Am I the mother who should have licked and cleaned the horse’s body? When did I learn to read and write? I’m stupid and now I am dying.”

  It seemed to me that much of the etiquette I was learning had to do with never having to tell yourself “I’m stupid and now I’m dying.” The Mongolian handshake, for instance, the grabbing of elbows, assured each party that neither was carrying a concealed weapon. In a ger, a man took his knife out of his sash and let it hang on a long cord, so it was not within arm’s reach. Snuff bottles were accepted in the right hand, while the left hand was placed on the right elbow.

  And then there was the matter of the dogs. There were always several around any ger, snarling and snapping at the horses’ hooves. These dogs, called Brown Eyes, for the golden eyebrows most of them have, were big German shepherd-shaped animals, with enormous heads, deep chests, and tails that curved up over their backs. When approaching a ger, it is polite to yell “Tie up your dogs!”

  A government pamphlet said that this courtesy gives people time to prepare for a visit. Tim Severin thought it had to do with plague: If the people in a ger are infected, they will not answer. That silence, Severin thought, is a signal to ride the hell on out of there. In point of fact, the dogs all wore collars, with a short length of rope attached, and the owners always came out and tied them up. These were not the cringing dogs of Ulan Bator. They were well fed, powerful, and protective: dogs that guarded live-stock and sometimes fought off wolves. A couple of them could easily kill a man. It was stupid not to yell “Tie up your dogs.”

  Our friend Bad Hair Day, it turned out, had been mauled by a dog when he was younger. I felt a little bad about the name we’d assigned him when he let me examine his scalp, which was a mass of angry scar tissue.

  Mongolia is one of the most sparsely populated countries on earth, and we sometimes rode days between gers. The ones we did see were usually clustered in groups of four to eight. There was always a single wooden pole out front, a hitching post brought in from somewhere else where trees grew. A saddled horse was tethered to every pole I saw: the Mongolian equivalent of leaving the car running. Often, handmade ox carts with wooden wheels were parked beside the ger, and sometimes they were piled high with the dry dung of sheep or horses or yaks, which is burned as fuel.

  Bayaraa and Baggie, mindful of what they’d learned from representatives of the U.S. Republican party, stopped at each of the gers and talked about the Mongolian National Democratic party. They used the term grassroots organizing, which seemed particularly appropriate.

  The gers had no windows and a single low door, always facing south. About eighteen feet in diameter, the tents were supported by a latticework wood frame that folded up like an accordion. Woven rugs, always red, covered the floor, and each ger was arranged in precisely the same manner. The man keeps his saddle and tack to the right of the door. To the left are cooking utensils and children’s things. The entire family sleeps in the bed against the left wall, children at their parents’ feet. The bed on the right is for guests. Against the wall opposite the door are two low chests of drawers, painted orange. On the chests are framed black-and-white photos: the children at school; the man in his army uniform; the family posing stiffly in Sukhbattor Square.

  A tin stove stands in the center of the ger, under a flap at the top of the tent that can be opened or closed. A rope drops down from the upper framework of the ger. It can be fastened to a small boulder beside the hearth, to keep the ger from blowing away in the wind.

  People we met said they moved their gers two or three times a year. Families tend to winter a couple thousand feet above their summer pastures. Cold air settles in the valleys and it’s always warmer higher up.

  We tried to observe the household rules—don’t lean against the wall; don’t point your feet at the hearth—but Lhagra had reason to critique one aspect of American manners. We were always saying “bayarala,” thank you, and it was unnecessary. Almost insulting. Every Mongolian has been forced to take refuge in someone else’s ger at one time or another. The tradition, then, is one of unthinking generosity. Guests are fed and feted as a matter of course, and there were numerous small niceties in the rituals. The tea, for instance, had to be made in the guests’ sight. It contained mare’s milk and salt. An acquired taste. The yogurt, on the other hand, was sweet and delicious, the best I’ve ever tasted. It was thin enough to drink from a bowl.

  Sometimes we drank a liquor of distilled mare’s milk, and ate salty rock-hard cheese formed into medallions about the size of silver dollars. I was never able to leave a ger without accumulating gifts amounting to several pocketfuls of the stuff. In return, we gave our hosts what gifts we could: extra flashlights, batteries for the short-wave radio, T-shirts, bandannas, a few spoons of powdered aspirin. We were down to essentials, almost completely out of gifts, but by God we had enough cheese. I could hear the pieces clacking together in my jacket and saddle kit when I rode. It was noisy cheese.

  Every single day, without fail, we consumed two massive meals of boiled mutton.

  I can say this: The mutton was always fresh. We’d ride into a ring of gers, buy a sheep, and watch the Mongolians slaughter it. The animal is flipped onto its back, and held down. A slit is made in the belly. The butcher inserts his hand, punctures the diaphragm, and finds the vena cava leading out of the heart. Hooks the finger around the vein and yanks. This was said to be the Buddhist way, the most humane way to kill, and indeed, the sheep was generally dead within thirty seconds.

  When Genghis Khan unified the Mongol nation, he established a system of laws, some of which involved penalties for rustling. If a man steals another’s livestock, Genghis ruled, he must return the animals, or similar animals, one for one. If he could not, or would not, his “heart” would be “squeezed” until he died.

  So the method had the force of tradition behind it.

  Mongolians eat every part of the sheep. They crack the bones for the marrow. They boil the head, and make blood sausage from the intestines. The fat, our wranglers said, is the best part. A sin to waste it. Once, when the American contingent cooked dinner, we cut away the fat. The Mongolian herdsmen gathered up the white-and-yellow mess, put it in a pot with water, boiled it, and drank the results down like a thick tea.

  Kent had had the foresight to buy several sacks of potatoes imported from Russia, but most of the Mongolian wranglers said they tasted “like dirt.” There was an enormous prejudice against vegetables of any kind. The whole idea of farming was disgusting to a herdsman. Being tied to a single plot of land was no life for a man. In any case, the growing season where these men lived, at about eight thousand feet, was about two months long. And much of the ground was permanently frozen a few feet below the surface anyway.

  A government pamphlet tried to put the best light on this situation. “Mongolia,” it said, “is totally self-sufficient in vegetable production.”

  Some people, it seemed, thrived on the diet. Herdsmen and their wives lead hard, active lives and we met plenty of folks in their eighties. Still, life expectancy in Mongolia is below the world average: 64.6 years for men; 66.5 for wome
n. Which is why the newly formed Mongolian National Democratic party platform has a plank that essentially reads “Eat your vegetables.”

  There were ovoos everywhere, at every pass or narrow canyon a rider might care to traverse, and I was leaving huge handfuls of hard cheese medallions as offerings. It was a losing proposition. By my calculation, we were still carrying over fifty pounds of noisy cheese, and we sounded like castanets on horseback.

  Michael Abbot, our fly-fishing aficionado, was getting grumpy about angling opportunities. There were grayling in the waters above eight thousand feet, and lennick—a four-to-ten-pound ugly brown trout-looking fish—lower down. Wherever we stopped, however, there was usually some religious prohibition about fishing that stretch of the river: A famous lama had once walked the banks, and we don’t fish there out of respect. Or, the river provides water for cooking and washing and drinking so we don’t fish as a way of showing our gratitude.

  In point of fact, we never saw anyone from the gers fishing, anywhere. Mongolians don’t enjoy fishing as a sport, and they don’t eat fish. They eat boiled mutton and yogurt and noisy cheese. Michael Abbot thought the sacred fishing regulations were a fairly low rent form of religious sacrifice, like giving up Limburger for Lent.

  He had good luck fishing on the banks of remote rivers, in unsanctified places. But even then, miles from the nearest habitation, there were sometimes restrictive rules. On the back side of Otgontenger, for instance, at about eight thousand feet, we camped at a lake called Doot Nur. It was set in a grassy basin and surrounded by hills rising to ten thousand feet, which hid the mountain ranges beyond. Above nine thousand feet, the hills had accumulated a dusting of snow. Michael Abbot stood watching the evening hatch and muttering about Limburger. Doot Nur, the Lake of the Voices, was off-limits to fishing. In the spring, people gathered around the lake and listened to the ice break up. Sounds echoed in the basin, and sometimes you could hear voices, often the voices of your ancestors.