THE WILD

THE WILD (Tsagaan Uul, Khovsgod, Northern Mongolia)

For three months, we trudged eastwards, deeper and deeper into the wilderness.
We long ago left paved roads behind, then trails written in dust and rocks, until even the trails had thinned to a single track, barely etched in the furrowed earth by the hooves of horses, until we reached the end of the world we knew.

From where we stood was the beginning of time itself, where the world had remained unchanged, untouched, protected by its own inaccessibility behind a rampart of mountains, a harsh and mystical world of prairies, forests and hundreds of scattered glacial lakes. Before us lay a wall of mountains behind which lay a maze of peaks and valleys: the Darkhad Depression is the ancient site of a glacial lake formed during the world’s first land formations, millions of years ago. It spreads over 100 000sq km of true wilderness, with the nearest jeep trail almost a hundred kilometres away. It is a world that can only be reached into by horses or foot. So that one crisp autumn morning we strapped our bedrolls onto the back of our saddles and set off towards the rolling hills.

As we forded the first river, our shoeless horses belly-deep in the icy whirlpool, carefully threading over slippery boulders and here and there carried several metres downstream by the current, it downed to us that this was the very point we had sought from the beginning of the voyage. For the past two years, and for some of us over half a lifetime, we had journeyed toward this very moment. We had dwelled deeper and deeper into the last few places miraculously overlooked by the rest of the world.
It was a long process, an initiation, as if the moment we had timidly stepped into this tumultuous river of life that is our endless journeying was the only time we had in fact acted deliberately. Then the current had carried us away, stripping us little by little of all that remained of our previous lives, of our past, of our attachments, of whatever knowledge we thought we had, until even our words left us before this world which beauty can never be fully described, which harsh environment quickly stripped us of thousands of years of evolution and turned us back into primeval beings climbing pines for food and rubbing muddy rocks on wasps bites, our faces cacked in dirt and horses’ sweat. We rode on and on, pelted by rain and sleet, galloping across high plateaux before storm clouds bruised green with hail. We struggled across mosquitos-ridden swamps, our horses wild with fear as they sank to their knees in the swallowing black mud. We slowly inched up to the 3035m Uuren Uul, climbing on cold-numbed feet over rocks and fallen trees, pulling our panting horses behind us. Round us the Ulaan Taiga wore the colours that gave her her name, ablaze with crimson larch and yellow pines. Violet cowbells specked the golden grass, or indigo forget-me-nots which here flower well after the first snows. Tiny streams trickled in the rich earth. Here and there the mountain exploded in granite blocks split in mock smiles by the pressure of ice, spilling mouthfuls of semi-crystallised snow quartz blinding white in the sunlight. Squeezed between the high peaks, the sky seemed a fight between sun and clouds, washing one mountain flank in slanted black rain and the other in molten light. At sundown, we dismounted in soggy clearings and set about making camp on stiff legs, laughing at each other’s gait. Water was abundant, and moss made a soft bed. Soon a fire blazed, and steam rose off our clothes, while in our blackened pot our dinner simmered and our stomachs rumbled in anticipation.
We nursed our frozen feet on warm stones and hanged our socks on sticks to dry them over the flames. By the end of the third day none of us had a single piece of clothing that wasn’t cacked in mud, a sleeping bag that wasn’t damp, or a pair of socks that hadn’t at least partially burnt. Our hands were covered in sticky black sap from climbing pines in search of nuts. We were covered in raw spots by the gruelling ride. Our noses dripped from the cold and water froze in the jerry can.
We ate together from our single pot, and never had bland rice or noodles tasted so good. We rationed our meagre supply of tea to one tea-bag per saucepan and drank it out of empty cans, for our plastic cups had been shattered by a bucking horse.
Never had we been so happy. We looked at each other grinning over the fire, joking at the events of the day. Ramsay had almost fallen off his horse when the latter trotted under a branch high enough for him but not for poor Ramsay who got flattened backward over the horse’s rump, almost toppling over in a roll spectacular enough for a circus clown-act. Ramsay’s pack horse had lost his load twice in the midst of a hail-storm right up the top of a pass and in full wind, while the rest of us galloped madly ahead, hooting with joy, unaware of Ramsay’s battle with his own horse, the pack horse, and the struggle to tie everything back on in the midst of the storm. Or Ramsay’s horse had jumped over a ditch, taking Ramsay by surprise, which landed him halfway off the back of his saddle right onto the metal piece used to tie bedrolls to, seriously denting poor Ramsay’s bottom and leaving him with bloodstains on his pants for days afterward. Or Ramsay had boldly stepped into a stream, assured that his ‘Robocop’ looking Mongolian boots were impermeable, only to discover that off course there weren’t, a mistake that he paid for dearly. Not only his feet froze to death and he burnt his socks one by one over the fire trying to dry them over the next few days, but for almost the entire rest of the trip his approach was heralded by the squashed frogs sound his feet made, which invariably sent us into gales of laughter.
Does it seem that most misadventures happened to Ramsay? Well yes, for the greatest part, which made them even the funnier. But if this sound cruel it can here be mentioned that those who laughed the loudest were not left unscathed. Mark’s cocci-bone was also bleeding by the end of the trip (somehow Mongolian saddles do not conform with European men’s bottom shape) and for my part I was attacked by marsh-flies and bitten on the lip, which thanks to some allergic reaction quickly turned my face into a gruesome lump, making me resemble elephant-man for days afterwards. There is a democracy in the right to laugh at each other’s misadventures. We are all equal in suffering, except perhaps for lucky Inge who somehow remained unscathed. So we forbade her the right to laugh, although we did make fun of her for spreading torn bin-liners over her legs when it rained in an attempt to stay dry, which we found hilarious. But she had no bruises and a perfect horse, so we had a debt to settle.

As days passed we noticed that our minds became less and less cluttered. It seemed that the dirtier we became the happier we were and the more serene we grew. Our intellectual beings faded away, sucked back into some astral height of which we had suddenly been completely cast off. Instead our feet were growing more firmly planted in the earth, our minds fully but peacefully engaged in the next chore, such as shaping a slither of wood to brush dirt of a horse, where it would otherwise become a hard lump which would ultimately rub itself into a wound, or tightening or loosening a saddle strap depending on the time of the day, or making a lean-to to protect ourselves from the incessant rain and try to dry our clothes, or washing our faces into an icy stream without falling in head-first, (which happened a lot, unfortunately. Mark once fell twice in a row).
We had no books, no other distraction than each other’s funny idiosyncrasies, and all our energy was taken by our endeavour anyway, leaving us completely exhausted after a full day’s rough ride and the sorting out of camp and horses. We fell asleep the minute we lay down, unaware of the rain dripping into our damaged tent and soaking us further. We woke up every morning to a frosted blanket and another miracle of simply being in the mountain. We stretched our stiff muscles and marvelled at yet another perfect day. Before us the tight gorges were shrouded in mist, a nearby spring trickled in grass beds dressed in frosty crystals. Washing yourself gave you an instant ice-cream-headache, but then filled you with strange warmth. Not feeling your feet for days on end did not matter anymore, for soon lay the promise of a fire and the pleasure of warm stones underfoot.
The journey had taken us to where we wanted to be. Somewhere along this turbulent path we had lost everything but the clothes on our back, a soggy bedroll, a toothbrush and a bar of soap.
This was all we needed. The lighter we were, the happier we grew.

Beside we had something else to keep us feeling elated. Somewhere deep inside these virgin valleys lived one of the most mysterious and remote people of the world: the Tsataans.
These were the people that we had come from so far to meet, and would have gladly travelled twice this distance if necessary. Constantly moving from one valley to the next in search of the rare moss and red larch their reindeers need, they are very hard to find. So we rode on, scrutinizing the forest for signs of recent camp.
Somewhere, nestled in the narrow valleys of the Shishigt Gol or one of its tributary, we would find a few tippees and see with our own eyes these mythical, reindeer-riding men, so remote than one can only hope to reach them during three month of the year, after which the mountain closes over them, and only after days, or even weeks of riding so deep into the wilderness that memories of any other life has sometimes almost faded away.