The diary drones on in purple felt-tip letters:
3 May
I don’t know if I’ve told you, but for the last couple of weeks I’ve been wanting a bunny but mummy doesn’t like change, insists that bunnies aren’t good pets. . . . She keeps on saying, “But what do bunnies do? They hop around and shiver.” And I say, “Well what do hamsters do?” and she said, “Sit on their hind legs and look sweet and climb and play.” But that’s just because she had one when she was little.
The next day we went to the Fish Bowl pet shop but all the rabbits had red eyes which I didn’t like. Then some days later we went to the Hurlingham pet shop and they have a nice bunny, but it didn’t have floppy ears so I didn’t buy it, although they said they were getting new ones in next week, so I’ll go back.
I never mention humans, which gives the sense that I was friendless, although I did think I had friends at the time.
The day I read this diary through, I hollered to Harold, my brother next door. “Why d’you think I was so keen on animals, when you never were?”
“Er, I dunno, because you relate to them?”
There was a pause between our bedrooms. This was my curly-haired younger brother, the one who used to perform with his vacuum cleaner for the crowds outside my school, back in the years when I was shy. I had witnessed his shows, peeping out from Mum’s green coat.
He picks up the pause. “Because you want to be an animal.”
14 May
Went to Pets at Home. Here’s my long list in order of all my pet ideas in the past weeks: monkey, penguin, hamster breeding, parrot, piglet, donkey, giraffe, zebra, rabbit, house rabbit. And after an hour at Pets at Home, I finally came to a decision. A dog. A golden cocker spaniel, or black.
I never did get a dog, but in the years when the wrath of teachers washed weekly through my system, horses and hamsters were my anti-authoritarian medicine. I’d even subconsciously adopted some of their behaviors. I snorted to clear my throat, ate from the ground, licked my plate, and massaged my back on lampposts in the same manner a horse will dig her bottom into a fence. For breakfast I liked SUCCEED Digestive Conditioning, an oily oat paste that came in syringe form (“Insert into your horse’s mouth”), of which Aunt Lucinda kept me in high supply.
I tell myself that if I had my way, I’d be living in an unassembled valley, just a stream, me, and the green. But I can’t decide if I will like it in practice. I keep trying it out halfheartedly, which makes for impure results. Things suck me back into the network—my stomach wails, for instance, and I trudge out of the idyll to a Tesco supermarket. Where else can a wild huntress find her food in February?
The Christmas after the race, my father gave me a picture of a galloping leopard. He said it reminded him of me. Yet he was the one who didn’t want me spending too much time with horses, for the horse neither answers back nor pays the bills. Then again, animals were our first teachers. Thousands of years ago, our dances, languages, and rituals passed from their behavior into ours. The frogs taught us jumping and the plants taught us patience and who taught me to flee? To feel tentatively confident and always free?
We humans seem to have put a lot of energy into separating ourselves from nature. In films we create fantasy characters who can talk to animals even though we all used to know how to do so, and the animals have been talking to us all along. I think we forget that they see us back. To the zoos we shuffle in search of their kingdoms, but we find them there suppressed in cages. They barely look at us; they’re barely animals. The race reclaims me as an animal—my original form, my rawest self, my favorite way to be.
XIX
I rise on day 3 to find my legs are lead. Outside, a weak sunlight washes the valley. Breakfast does not appear. It’s not a meal they eat here, says Richard in his morning face, his hair a little startled by the gravity change. Only airag at this hour, he continues, and I continue in my mind, Airag at six in the morning? I’d rather no breakfast.
Airag is fermented horse milk. It’s the national drink. The herder in charge of start camp said some men drink up to twenty liters a day in the summer. Apparently it’s very healthy, a sort of cleansing agent. It has a sour taste.
Richard pops up on the lighter side of the ger to photograph me brushing my teeth. Is this worthy material? Maybe the sawing action of my arm on my teeth reflects some inner struggle. Small things seem to give Richard energy. I’ve seen him photographing blades of grass just as intently as he does the humans upon them.
Later today, I’ll find out that a neck injury forced Richard to retire from professional jockeying, after which he trekked to the North and South Poles, struggling to settle after a life of leaping. Lately he has found photography and travels to capture horse sport in all its incarnations—in the UK, Ireland, Sudan, Afghanistan, and here in Mongolia. Last night he revealed he had once swapped sports with Aunt Lucinda for a charitable cause—she jockeying, he eventing. “Your aunt ended up with a bloody nose,” he chuckled, seeming so calm now, in his late forties.
I’m anxious to ride out of the urtuu at exactly 0700 hours, sounding just like that, in the official oh-seven-hundred voice. Kirsten and Georgie are drifting about under their backpacks, the latter gradual, the former scuttling, neither seeming ready. I hear each of them asking about breakfast like I did.
I click the satellite tracker to “on” and walk down the horse line, tuning into the ponies’ eyes. I notice Richard’s camera stalking my concentration face and erupt with laughter.
Each time I visit a pony’s head I feel as though I’m waking him from winter hibernation. The first pony falls back to sleep after browsing me. Richard says I should take the bare-ribbed chestnut at the end of the line, but when we walk up to him we find he has a bleeding mouth. I can’t pull at a mouth like that, have it hurting and staining the grass red. We hold hands with a horse through its mouth, as we tinker the bit this way and that. When Aunt Lucinda was eight she had a pony who refused to move if she so much as touched his mouth through the reins. His tactic taught her to soften her hands.
After her Bloody hell, no response on pony-picking advice, she sent a follow-up email. “Heaven knows what you look for—but small and tough with a never-say-die look in its eye.”
Since neither Georgie nor Kirsten has appeared, I ask the tall man of the Enkhtaivan family if he can suggest another wild one. “Khurdan?” I say, since “fast” is the closest word to “wild” I know in Mongolian. The man seems to want a good horse for me. He plucks out a platinum-blond, almost dog-sized, and lets it scamper a circle on the rope.
Two boys are drafted in to help saddle up the pony. They lean their arms on his shoulders while he kicks limbs in all directions. Clearly he’s a catapult, and I don’t want to be the first thing he slings. Might someone like to get on before me? A man who has been leaning against his white truck volunteers and swings a leg aboard. The catapult—who I’ll soon name Barbie for his blond mane—spirals and bucks with his left eye flickering white, tail flying like a snake. Just before he might be thrown, the man jumps to the ground.
With Kirsten and Georgie mounted, I must get on. I place my foot in the stirrup and leap, knowing the lengthened endurance stirrups won’t anchor me to his buck. He swerves and propels his head into the herder, who rams into him, demanding control.
We go sideways up the hill. The creature’s back is tense, the creature’s back will fling. My focus is split between the body beneath me and the majestic steps of the tall man leading us, his burgundy cloak currying the ground. He hands me the rope at the ridge. Before my smile is complete, the cow-colored pony charges me into the morning. And upward, ever upward, the wild horses held their way.
0713. Departed. I’m hyperaware of the minutes lost waiting for Kirsten and Georgie. All those times I left tapping feet waiting, all those afternoons we rigged the wooden classrooms into disorder—they make no sense in comparison, because why wait until now to get on with things?
Well, what use are questions to the
past?
Three hours ahead were the riders in second and third. I was so surprised to be roughly fifth, having been last for the first leg of the race, that my focus was not on catching up with those ahead as much as it was on keeping in front of the riders behind me. I was worried I’d fall back again.
My mother worries a lot too. But she loves it. She lives in a worry. It colors her dreams. Her whole existence is worrisome, partly I think because when her worries come true she feels a sense of victory, and when they don’t, she feels her worrying has paid off because it has ordered the future into compliance.
Barbie was small. My torso was long enough to tip us off course. When I look at the photo now, I suppress my urge to ring the RSPCA. The head structure and bone size of Mongolian ponies classify them, in genetic terms, as horses. Besides, size isn’t presumed to determine performance in Mongolia. Wrestlers are never categorized by weight, and smaller ponies aren’t necessarily slower or weaker. This tiny creature was the strongest I’d ridden so far.
As we edged along a flood plain—lumps of rock hanging off the slopes rising at our sides—small talk occasionally reared its ugly head. Sometimes we chattered to the ponies. Mostly we dribbled through silence. I’d no idea what any of us was thinking. Kirsten pointed out the little mice in the ground, which looked like the hamsters I once doted on. Now they were hazard-digging enemies along with the marmots.
As the hours passed, the hamsters seemed the only real things. They sat grooming themselves above the ground before whipping down holes when our hooves neared. Who knows what happened when they accidentally descended the hole of a cousin they disliked. There must have been thousands of hamster squabbles going on in the earth.
Our race was strung-out and placid in comparison. The only thing we had to hole-punch the drawl of the leg was an ovoo. We circled it thrice and walked on against the sun. All morning she beat us along and laid us bare.
When Georgie dropped behind and shrank into a dot, Kirsten and I looked at each other, not speaking the words. There was no wood to touch in the race; I hadn’t seen a tree since the city. So we waited. To avoid existential combustion while waiting, I focused on the yaks grazing their way up the riverbed. Maybe they were full of advice I was unable to access. I turned my head away from them, then back again, shedding laughter for the need to release something into the air.
It was some time before the dot in the distance enlarged into Georgie. She said she had a stomach bug, I caught her on camera describing it. Assured she was fine, we left her behind again, not wanting her slow pony to congeal our progress. I began flinging questions at Kirsten as we hurried away.
“Have you ever done endurance riding before, back in Perth?”
“Me? Yeah, I done tons of the stuff.”
Until now I’ve let the ponies canter or trot as they like. Kirsten says that in endurance, horses canter in rhythm for lengthy periods to level their heart rates. Is this how Devan has disappeared so far into the lead? I don’t know why the other endurance riders aren’t keeping up with her.
Kirsten is teaching me. We’re supposedly competing in this moment, but it’s hopeless to jostle in the pale of 1,000 kilometers. The kind of solemn seriousness you would aim for in a marathon runner is made a fool of by the fourteen-hour days.
Later in the leg, a yellow rapeseed field erupts from the steppe’s muted color palette. It’s a travel writer’s habit to compare her surroundings to where she has come from, and I can only think of the agricultural fields of England, those ones we sail by in our cars, combed and contained, broad and immovable. Things look so different through windows. Fields appear cake-like. Warm, perfect.
As we drift up the side of this plot, Richard’s jeep rumbles into sight. I light up at the thought of him. He’ll be wearing that wry expression, the look of knowing what’s beyond us.
“Have you fallen off yet?” he asked me last night for the second time.
“Oh, you will,” he muttered with a knowing look. “Everyone does.”
I nearly walked out the tent.
I’m not scared of the falls. I worry more about slow, subtle destruction: my stirrup leathers blistering my calves, for instance. Or my mind losing its way.
Kirsten is talking about some kind of shortcut, but I refuse to leave the tracks. We split up. Blond-maned Barbie and I go it alone on the sandy footing. His name has stuck for two hours now, not too bad. Just as I’m loosening into Barbie’s scrappy canter, he stumbles on a hidden marmot hole. His legs buckle, he somersaults, and over his head I ping. The day slams to a halt.
I crouch and watch him try to stand. His foreleg is trapped in the girth strap. He cannot run away. “Horses do not return like dogs,” I whisper in the voice of David Attenborough. No whistling, no finger-clicking.
When I step towards him, he hops away like the kitchen mouse who used to ignite our late nights in London. There’s a strangeness, for a horse, to losing a rider—the centaur vanishes, his partner becomes a predator at his side. He can feel unsettlingly light and flighty. The strap around Barbie’s leg looks as though it’s about to break, which will let him bolt over the boglands while I hum my way after him.
I prowl shyly with my eyes on the ground. I don’t want him thinking he’s my target. Each second feels the size of the steppe.
Leap. I catch his reins. Breath pours out of me. He fidgets as I untangle him, peeling back the whites of his eyes. “Stand still, woah.” Every time I try to mount, he pirouettes away from me. At the urtuus, herders have held the horses for me. Alone, over and over again, I prove useless. Scrapping safety, I lean inwards and climb as he shunts into canter. Covered in dust, we’re one again.
Other than some pain in my thumb, I am fine, and so seems Barbie. Without a god to thank, I lose myself wondering where the luck came from.
Richard reappears just as we’re sprinting away from the accident. I shoot wary glances for hamster cities ahead while I scream to him how we fell, jotting the drama into the passing air with one hand. I’m not sure if he replies. All I can see is his camera-nose peeking out of the jeep’s sunroof, striking from afar. He must feel victorious. Eleven a.m. and already his prophecy from last night fulfilled.
Honestly, I think I loved the fall—I’d had enough of meandering. Quick shock, full time, very real. Splat.
XX
At the sixth urtuu, Kirsten circles on foot like a seagull plotting at the harbor. I promise a quick changeover and she says she’ll wait. None of us wants to ride alone. We’ve imagined a thousand possibilities by now, not least falling horses and time-worn loneliness. I skip the meal. The interpreter at the station holds her long glossy hair above her shoulders. Her jeans and ironed jacket make me think she has come from the city. Spending days on the steppe may be almost as new to her as it is to me. “I don’t know how horses work,” a city person I met in Ulaanbaatar told me.
“Lara, I am so pleased you are in fifth.”
I hitch my face in a grin. The ranking, the compliment unexpected, and the idea of what she might say next.
“You are one of the three girls I want to win!”
I’m keen to know who the other two girls are, and this desire to know leaves me unsure of myself. Am I involved in something deeply serious or am I just a piece in a board game?
Maybe such thinking is a symptom of my tiredness, or of my outlook as a surface-skating youth who hasn’t yet decided how much to invest in the world. In endless tweets, bored race organizers in Ulaanbaatar contemplate whether anyone will catch Devan Horn. “What an absolute Viking she is,” one of them says. They note she takes half the time of other riders to change horses.
None of us is much in comparison to the Mongol Empire’s postal system. Thanks to the horses, messages strapped to riders’ backs could travel 450 kilometers in twenty-four hours. Yesterday my total was a measly 120, Devan’s 140. Then again, it did take 60,000 empire soldiers an entire year to advance 1,000 kilometers against opposing forces, and this, at the time, was apparently
seen as record speed.
Alone we’re faster than an army, yet we make progress only in the name of sport. I’ve heard it said that sport is war in disguise, but hopefully sporting events have meaning beyond victory versus loss. How else was the Netherlands football team so internationally loved in the 1960s despite blowing the matches that mattered? The winning moments dominate the news, but people who make up sports teams and armies must live lives of continual flux—95 percent ordinariness, 5 percent brilliance. Maybe I saw a preview of life in this world before I got here and, as the brilliant parts rushed before me, thought, Yeah, I’ll go to that place, and signed on, not thinking of the in-between parts.
Kirsten helps me choose my next pony.
“Not that one—he’s got bad feet.”
I’d never have noticed.
In a beige lunchtime light, we pootle off the hill of the sixth urtuu. Over the spread of hills behind us is a former capital of the Mongol Empire, Kharkhorum, once filled with monasteries, mosques, and churches, all flattened now.
The Mongols were dreaded in Europe and dreaded in Japan, yet their so-called barbaric empire tolerated all religions, and still today Ulaanbaatar is home to temples, Baha’i places of worship, churches and mosques. Chinggis Khan himself was religiously open, according to the chroniclers, in the hope that at least one of the gods would show appreciation for his life’s work.
I understand his armies could be devastating (and those of his descendants—his grandson Kubilai Khan conquered China, while another grandson, Batu Khan, took Baghdad), but perhaps it’s refreshing that he had no pretentious crusader ambitions for his conquests, no attempt to assert the force of some god. His desire for power was more honest. More like Devan’s.
Rough Magic Page 9