The Best Travel Writing 2009 - True Stories from Around the World

In a Place of Wind

by Erika Connor

She found a path that has no name.

I come up through the pass of giant wind-formed rocks and blue light. The elevation is an illusion. Only two thousand meters up and I am walking in the sky. Blue, not a cloud, a wind-filled sphere. Always the wind, like food, a drug. I am never tired.

Fifty-thousand hectares of mountain steppe and somewhere the ancient horses the Mongolians call takhi or spirit, are threading their way. I have been here a week. Already my prints are overlaid with theirs.

Far behind is the Mölt camp where we spent our day off. The other eco-volunteers have gone in the van. I cross over into birch groves, little white trees snaking towards the light, but honed and stunted by the blasts of wind, nothing like the trees of home. The biologists have said these forests are dying. Global warming. Fallen trunks and branches lie ghostly in the thick grasses among blue irises.

Light shimmering across another valley, another mountain, the high whistles of a hawk. I am not sure where I am, climbing the rocks above the trees and woven nests. The wind is rumbling at my back, makes me turn to see a dark cloud front moving in fast. A cuckoo’s soft “hu-hu, hu-hu,” and everything stills. Ahead the land drops and rises in waves on an endless sea to the far-off specks of white of the tourist camp.

I begin my descent, legs shaking, rocks scattering. Winds flood the channels; clouds are blowing in like night. Nowhere to hide, nothing but open. How can you tell if the world is ending? End of time? My time? As a child I used to run in storms through the forests of home, like those shamans pulling in the whirls of energy, letting the hairs rise on my arms, at the back of my neck. Grasses blowing like seas before a boat, the rain rushing and I can no longer see. Now lightning opens the sky, searing threads burn into earth and up again. The sky collapses, shuddering in the bones. The entire thing came out of the blue. I am running, uttering desperate prayers.

***

The ger attendant, Toma, has brought a candle, and commended the fire I lit in the stove with kindling and sheep dung old as turf. She throws in another mound and the fire sparks at her hands. My clothes steam from the ceiling poles. Rumbling sonic sounds like airplanes careening out of control mix with the high-pierced whinnying of horses. Rain and hail rattle through the broken panes of the skylight. We run out to yank at the horsehair ropes, pulling the felt flap over. I can see the camp horses at the tethering post, hanging their heads, and beyond the rush of wind and white where I came out. Was I released or blessed? Born again?

I lie back in my little white tent round as the moon, with a giant black vulture feather stuck into the ceiling above my bed, and the perfect lower jaw of a horse skull on the table, a knucklebone, shinbone, hoof. In the warmth of my sleeping bag I can feel the storm blowing everything to submission, ravaging the heart, stirring up every emotion, every sensing string with painful precision, firelight flickering on the tent wall on my left side, like light on water. I am home.

Gruff old Haska drives us from the research center, far along the sand tracks at dawn. Five volunteers: elder Maggie, sailor and botanist from Devon; young moody Pierre, amateur photographer from France; cool eighteen-year-old traveler Marika; Liv, mother and veterinarian from Holland; and me, wandering writer.

We are searching for those elusive sand-colored horses with black dorsal stripes, brush manes, zebra-striped legs, the ancestors, the ones painted twenty thousand years ago in ochre and charcoal on cave walls.

The radio crackles and hisses, “Haska-Haska-Haska.”

“Té!” Haska yells. “Amar bakhuu? Hangaï bakhuu?”

The rangers are calling in on horseback from somewhere out on the land, the harems’ personal bodyguards. They sleep under the stars, keep guns in their packs, ready for the wolves, camouflage cloth sewn onto their saddle seats. They always know where the horses are.

We are let off one by one along the land with only glimpses of our assigned harems in the distance. We walk out, trying to keep a straight line in the wind, the bumbling volunteers, with our packed lunches, our observation sheets and tools, keepers of the coordinates, wind velocity, weather patterns, pathways of wild horses.

Blowing morning up in the clouds. Hangaï harem has found a wall of bushes to lean into, warm and sleepy, all turned towards me, shrouded in the fog coming through the pass. They disappear and appear again while I crouch behind a few spindly bushes on the bare slope, shaking with cold. One of the little white foals stands bravely with his back to the wind.

They’ve forgotten me. When I raise my head they think I’m some kind of wolf, dressed in green rain cape, with strange hanging things around her neck, binoculars, GPS, anemometer. They escape through the bushes and up over the rocks. But I know them now. They’re on the southern slope. The sun has come out. I nestle in among the rocks on the warm black turf, above a glowing birch forest and a cliff grotto where a flock of red-beaked crows come dancing, playing on the ledges, and two kites, light glancing off their wings. The horses doze in a line down the rocks, all twenty of them, hazy blue valleys below, foals lying like white cloths at their mothers’ feet, ears flopped back, eyes half-closed.

The blue research center howls with wind. A swallow is caught in the upper library. Teabags lie on spoons on the kitchen table to be reused, the stove ticks, a cauldron of savory mutton and noodles is bubbling away. I watch the young Mongolian biologists, wrapped in sweaters at their computers, deep in grasses, water, wolves, winter, evolution, in this great experiment: keeping the last of the wild horses alive. They were hunted, collected, lost in European zoos, inbred, on the brink of extinction, and saved by Dutch and Mongolian foundations. Eighty-four were flown home in the 1990s. Now, they are hovering at 180, in eighteen harems.

I imagine the winter, solitary on horseback, continuing the work, tracking in drifts. What is it like to live in a place of wind? I have been an observer all my life, but what if I had been a biologist instead, protecting the wild things? The wildlife biologist, Uskuu, sees me gazing out the windows.

“I think your silence is expensive,” he smiles.

He thinks I’m in love with someone. But it’s the place.

Gale winds yank the little painted door out of my hands, making me hit my head on the low door frame as I am thrown out of my ger.

“Force eight winds,” cries Maggie, thinking of the sea.

The volunteers have paid to be here. The Mongolians think maybe we are glorified tourists, based at the tourist camp, among charter buses and day-trippers. But where we go they can never follow. We take what we need. Maggie discovers her youth, reading the clouds, finding flowers. Transient Marika sniffles with a bout of malaria and reads novels in far-flung meadows, the horses listening to the tick of her alarm clock. Pierre is the lovable fool, who takes pictures of stallions mounting mares and loses his yellow GPS in the yellow grasses. Liv has lost her mother to dementia and turns to her sketchbook, considers a change of career. I have left a man, left my heart in so many places, my words on pages speckled with rain, dust, sweat, and insects.

There is a ceremony on Ikh Ovoo, highest peak in the reserve. Red deer are running. A ranger’s two little boys run with their hands above their heads, gestures of antlers. We see three takhi in the distance. Ravens float above. The women must stay behind on the summit with the vans and motorcycles; even the horses go up with the rangers. The men are carrying a cooked sheep on a board, bags of yogurt, thermoses of salty tea, soft and hard cheeses, candies, up the last path through the bushes to the rock peak and the ovoo, sacred altar, tattered blue banners loose around its spires. All that comes down to us are fragments of voices caught on the wind, the lamas chanting, blessing the land and the horses, and praying for rain.

***

The horses are retracing an ancient memory, remembering how to be free. I have blown from place to place with the same need. How to be free and still be held?

Amar harem is shimmering in heat waves, coming off the peninsulas of hills to the open grass sea of the Tuul River valley. There is the foal with the gash in its hindquarters, attacked by wolves last week. The biologists chose to intervene with glucose and antibiotics. There is the newborn foal, tender-footed, spidery legs and twitching tail. A ranger has come galloping on a chestnut horse. He swings off and while his horse grazes he squats down, a foot on the long leather rein. He looks through one eye of his binoculars, holding them vertical, checking on the foals. He sits back, yawns, regards me, not a word. In a moment he is gone. Beyond the horses I can see the river valley and specks of gers, the rangers’ homes.

***

On the sunlit pass above the Jargallant valley, a little white foal is standing in the center of our ring of rangers, biology and scholarship students, Nanda, the volunteer coordinator, and me. The rangers found it this morning, after a commotion they saw on the cliffs. No one was sure what happened. Maybe the foal had been stuck in the rocks. The mare turned back for him but the stallion kept herding her away, so she left and joined the herd.

They bring us down the valley on motorbikes, with the foal across Nanda’s lap, and leave us at the streambed: one lost foal, a Canadian writer, and Nanda, who happens to be doing her thesis on the behavior of foals.

The beauty of the foal, days old, little speckled nose on our skin, breathing our smells. He follows us, nickering, tiny hooves stepping on our heels. We dowse him gently in the stream and feed him sugar water from a baby bottle. He makes us laugh, nudging at our shirts looking to suckle, lying down to sleep at our sides, lifting his head to make sure we’re still there. He lays his head on my foot. I look into the large dark eye with pale lashes. It is a gift to touch a wild thing, like touching the wind, some of it comes off on you. The sun burns across the sky. We cover our faces and sleep.

At evening we make our escape, creeping away from the sleeping bundle and up the hill to hide behind rocks. We can see him through the binoculars, still sleeping. His harem will be coming through soon, stopping at the stream. The ranger, somewhere to the south, calls in on the radio. They’re on their way. The biologist and the scholarship student are up on the mountain behind us. Burning sun, the sweat streaming down our faces, the crackle of Nanda’s radio. Now, in the south, the shapes come running across the slopes. Amar harem. It seems to take forever for them to arrive, but they do, dipping hooves into the streambed, tossing their heads, bending to drink, not thirty feet from the foal.

“Come on, wake up,” we whisper.

The foal lies sleeping. The mare is grazing near the stream.

“Wake up.”

The mare lifts her head, catches something on the wind. The herd is moving off. If she doesn’t find him now, she will never accept him later. The foal lifts his head, trying to get up. He flops down again. The mare bolts, returns slowly, shaking her head, grunting. She knows his smell. Can she smell us? She goes up, circles him. Horses whinny in the distance.

“Come on. Come on!”

The foal staggers to his feet. The mare sweeps up to his side. He bobs alongside her, moving shakily to the stream and across and up the other side, as the herd moves off across the grass, golden in the long sun.

High on a rock fortress we are crouched in the blasts of wind, holding down our papers. The wolf biologist, in ruffling army jacket, is holding onto his hat while clenching the radio-tracking antennae, pointing it southeast. One collared wolf, male, W5 ID 1538035. The sonic beeping like a heartbeat, sometimes a double beat.

“He’s moving.”

The sun burning the earth at our feet, we remember the tawny shadow moving across the face of the open hill this morning. The rangers want the wolves dead. But this boy has never killed an animal. I saw him trying to catch butterflies to study at camp, the elusive white ones, tossing his shirt into the air. He had a hedgehog in a box from his girlfriend. And when we first met he came bareback on a red horse and held out his hand, a silver bracelet with Buddhist inscriptions sliding down his left wrist.

We are all sweating in the conference hall at the awards ceremony. The biologists in suits and gowns, the rangers, poised in their beautiful tunics, golden and copper, metallic earth-green, black with luminous blue embroidery, thick engraved leather belts, studded with silver medallions, cowboy hats soft as velvet or suede, and gleaming knee-high Russian boots. They were always among us, but rarely seen, a glimpse of a motorbike, a lone horseman, their voices coming through the radios, protecting our harems.

We are met at the dining room with a tray of vodka shots in little paper cups, cool to the touch, and a buffet of so many salads and meat plates, and the “hortog” specialty, dripping with grease. The three sheep had been tied to the fence days ago, eyeing us as we came in from observations. They were cut open and loaded with hot rocks and tied up again with rope and left to bake.

The audience sits on chairs in the grass. A DJ-magician walks on a bed of colored glass and swallows fire. A boy in silver suit sings the traditional “Long Song,” with the voice of a crooner. A bird flies into Marika’s hair beside me, and as she shakes it away it lands on my shoulder and touches my face with its wing. Traveler to traveler.

The Mongolians waltz the night away, young and old to the DJ’s synthesizer. Haska, Best Driver for thirty-five years, has a bottle of Red Label from someone, held to his chest, a trophy. Best Dancer, in tweed cap and dark suit, spins the women across the darkness. The volunteers are getting drunk, wind-weathered, forever altered. Somehow we have been left to our own devices. No one has asked us to dance.

Smell of burning in the air. Somewhere, hundreds of kilometers away, forests are on fire. In the dappled light of a birch grove at 1,700 meters Hangaï harem is nosing among the roots. Some are scratching against the trees. Once in a while a dead trunk comes crashing down and the horses dart like fish through the trees.

The brown mare lags behind and her little brown foal runs back and forth, nickering for her to hurry. I slip across the grasses, becoming trees and rocks. Sometimes they pass so close I could reach out my hand and skim their hides, the ribs, the tattered winter coats.

They take me right up, over Jargallant valley, Tuul River valley, all the valleys of silver-weaving threads, lit grasslands, blue veils, wind-shaped temples. It is not so much a place as a country, sanctuary for the last wild horses on earth.

The hours I spend with this harem. The others think maybe I’m being possessive. An observer should not get attached, but I am fond of them. They live on the farthest shore of the park. The stallion, Hangaï, never picks a fight and never loses his harem, even when he goes off to play with the roaming bachelors. I see the foals startled by marmots and picking at the grasses with delicate noses. I touch the stones they have worn down and shaped by the rub of skin. I have fallen asleep with them, scented my boots in their dung, caught the same thistles, been stung by the same bees and horseflies.

The horses are standing in the rock grotto, faces to the cool stone naves. I look down from above as if through a hole in the roof. I can see the marks on their skin, the dorsal stripes, burrs in their tattered tails. I hear stomachs gurgle. I can smell the grass on their breath.

I found the claw of a raptor and was afraid to take it because with this hand life was snatched from the earth, and it in turn was taken. The law of the land. I want to stay, but I must go. Will I pass unseen? Or will I return? I stand high on the rock formations, seeing the tourist camp two valleys and one mountain away. Distance seems so close and yet impossibly far, like you dream when you walk here and suddenly you are miles into the sky.

The winds keep me up at night, blowing heat across the earth, lighting up the fires, blowing through my mind, but I am moored to this earth by long horsehair ropes.

Erika Connor is a painter, writer, and art teacher from rural Quebec, Canada. She has a BFA in studio art and creative writing from Concordia University in Montreal, where she also won The Irving Layton Award for Fiction in 1991. She has traveled extensively in West Africa and Mongolia, and recently returned from Rajasthan, where she worked at an animal shelter.



« Return to The Best Travel Writing 2009


SOLAS Awards Banner

Book Cheap Flights