We stayed with the Tsaatan for five days, sharing food, laughter, and a few words. Visiting the Tsaatan is a humbling experience, as it always is when faced with poverty without squalor, and accepting a famous hospitality that keeps you as warm, comfortable, and well-fed as you could ever hope to be in your own living room.
If you spooned the broth off a savoury seafood chowder and added to that a generous amount of cream, that is what reindeer milk tastes like. It’s eaten hot, with a chunk of spongy sourdough for dipping. Delicious!
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It is really difficult to milk a reindeer. I can milk a cow or a goat with something approximating efficiency, but a reindeer is perfectly beyond me.
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As the sun sinks behind the surrounding mountains, reindeer fawns released from their pegs fly headlong across the lichens calling hubba! hubba! hubba! I’ve never seen creatures so bad at mothering up.
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| I don't think all of these belong to you |
The farther you travel, the more familiarity there is to find. You could journey to the edge of the earth, and I expect the relationships between mother and toddler, big sister and younger, a boy and his dog, would be utterly familiar. Throw yourself into the most exotic and incomprehensible culture this world has to offer, and you’d still be able to spot a temper tantrum a mile off in a two-year-old.
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| a rare smile out of this guy |
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| baking flat bread in the ortz |
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| snacking on peanuts in the tent |
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| this blind grandmother, with the patience of Job, taught us to count to one hundred in Mongolian. She also allowed this funny little goat kid with neurological deficits to hang out inside the ortz and nibble on things |
The reindeer diet in the taiga is salt-deficient, and part of Dr. Nansalma’s work has been encouraging families to keep salt blocks. However, the reindeer are still driven to get into everything.
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| Dayle: "Don't eat the tent! The tent has enough issues as it is! I'm going to touch you antlers! Ha! You don't like that do you? That's right, walk away. |
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| trying to have a pee without being bowled over by reindeer |
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| salt-deficient goats licking the horses |
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| reindeer kisses |
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| wheee! |
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| Whaaah! |
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| trying to keep cool, panting on the snow |
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| I believe this was my dream-stallion as a six-year-old |
Western Tsaatan families move to their summer camp around June, and stay until August winds drive them to autumn pastures. When we arrived, there were only five ortz in camp. Small boys dug in hitching posts for reindeer, stepping stones were rolled into place through brooks, a basketball hoop was erected. A sixth ortz soon joined us, and as we left camp on the fifth day, reindeer were dragging poles for the construction of a seventh.
Riding out of the taiga, we passed additional families, all traveling to the camp we had left. Old silver-haired ladies in pink kerchiefs rode their reindeer along the river, trotting weaving ribbons of deer behind them, possessions strapped high on their narrow backs. Fathers up on windy horseback rolled cigarettes out of newspaper, or better yet the delicate pages of foreign language bibles brought to them by tirelessly misguided missionaries. Little boys whipping their ponies continuously (and without obvious purpose) herded bulls laden with satellite dishes through a mountain pass. And behind them, two pre-teen girls in shiny black bomber jackets, trotting white reindeer over the rocks.
Short-term camps revealed themselves intermittently as we left the mountains; it didn’t feel so much like riding through wilderness as riding from one family’s backyard to the next. Four or five hours between homes does not feel so far in the taiga, where time is a more relaxed concept, and deadlines are seasonal. Our guide stopped us for tea at each orts that we passed. At one camp, we were met on horseback by a teenage girl in lipstick, suede platform high-heels, and a red pleather bomber, the lost Asian Spice Girl, gone wild.
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| bulls carrying households |
