Tim & Tigon, page 15
Then the large man poked the coals and looked at me. ‘You know, us Cossacks, like you, we used to always pack up and leave when we needed. In old times, like for nomads, the steppe gave us all that was necessary to live – horses, wild game and fish.’ He cast his eyes over my gear and the horses that were lit up on the edge of my camp. ‘I consider that Genghis Khan was a Cossack by definition. Although we did not live in yurts, we adopted the nomad’s horses and horsemanship. We have a saying: “Only a bullet can catch a Cossack rider.”’
There was a look of sadness in his eyes.
‘The Russians turned our land into fields, took away our horses. Brave men became wheat farmers and tractor drivers! Now we’re not even allowed to fish without permission.’
In the twentieth century, Cossacks had endured particularly cruel treatment, in part because they happened to live on the most fertile land in Russia. In the 1930s hundreds of thousands of Cossacks were either executed, exiled to Siberia, or sent to forced labour camps. Perhaps just as heartbreaking for these free-living horseback people, private ownership of horses was declared illegal, and their lands were ploughed.
Another of the men spoke up. ‘Have you seen the wild dogs yet? You should be carrying a gun – they are even more dangerous than wolves.’
The man didn’t seem frightened by the idea of wild dogs, but rather, proud of them. It excited me, too, to think that somewhere in this land there was a wild spirit that carried on even if the wolf was long gone.
I continued along the Kalaly River until it began to curve north, then cut across to another watercourse that flowed west towards the sea. Here I began to travel through khutors – villages strung out along the rivers of the Kuban in single rows of timber and mud-brick houses.
Life in the khutors seemed to belong to a bygone era. Babushkas worked the earth, bent permanently at the hip, and old men rowed leaky flat-bottomed fishing boats into sleepy waters. The clop and rattle of a horse and cart sometimes rose and faded along the unsealed streets.
I had hoped I could slip in and out of these settlements inconspicuously, but even the dead would have been woken by the wave of barking dogs and squawking geese that preceded me. Tigon, who was out in front pulling hard on the lead, was alleviating his boredom by scaring every living thing that crossed his path. Sometimes he would be calm right till the last moment, when he would leap up, front legs wide apart, and hackles high. At other times he would simply stop and crouch down, and wait for the curious onlookers to come to him, at which point he would suddenly leap to his feet and bark. It was just for a bit of fun of course, though the poor geese didn’t think so.
There was one other skill that Tigon had been honing recently. Along with his practice at ‘marking’ out his route, he was getting more and more industrious with his scratching afterwards. Typically, after cocking his leg, he would stretch his paws out, and with powerful swipes rip up the earth, sending sand, soil and grass shooting like missiles into the air. Out on the steppe this might have been okay, but when it was hard-won vegetable plants that went flying, local people looked on in horror.
‘Tigon!’ I would scowl.
Privately, of course, I was proud of what seemed to be an expression of his rebellious spirit.
The longest khutor I travelled through was 15 kilometres but had a population of less than 1000. The kerfuffle of our arrival also gave people time to ready themselves. They greeted me with jars of homemade vodka and preserved cucumbers, peppers, tomatoes, jams, honey, juice, pears, and sala (pork fat). The key to getting past was having at least one shot of vodka, although this often became three. On one occasion I was told that if I wanted to become a genuine Cossack, I would have to drink a giant bottle of home-brewed vodka, known as horilka, and then ‘jump over a fence’.
Within two days I had accumulated so much heavy produce that the offerings had become a serious danger to the packhorses. When I explained this, the gift bearers always glared back indignantly. More than once I was told, ‘If I have given it to you, you must take it! You know the saying: “When they give, take. When they kill, run.”’
The freshness of spring began to wear off. My body began to ache, and an accumulated lack of sleep took its toll. At the first sign of hunger my mood would crumble. The horses felt heavy themselves, and during breaks they kept their heads down. Even Tigon was exhausted. He had learnt that the most important thing while on the lead was keeping well out of reach of Taskonir, who would take a nip at Tigon’s hind legs whenever he caught up, to remind him who was boss. The worst torment was when the front horse happened to step on Tigon’s lead at a trot. It nearly strangled poor Tigon, who, pinned down and trampled by the caravan, was spat out the end in somersaults. How he came out of these scrapes without serious injury was beyond me.
Then came the rains. The lanes and tracks turned to sticky black mud – a telling sign that I was riding through chernozem, or ‘black soil’ – the fertile soils that stretch from the Kuban across the southern steppe of the Ukraine.
As mud, however, this precious soil balled up under the horses’ hooves until they slipped and fell. I resolved to walk, but within minutes the build-up on my boots turned them into heavy clogs. I walked the better part of three days, descending into a quagmire of filth. The horses were still losing their winter coats, and the shed hair combined with the mud stuck fast to my clothes, my skin and my sleeping bag.
One night, while I was setting up camp in the pouring rain, a local drunk stumbled upon my muddy patch of earth and twisted the knife. ‘How dare you camp here on the Kuban, you foreigner! If I tell my friends about it, they will come in the night, take your horses to the meat factory, and drown you in the river for the crayfish to eat!’ I swore at him darkly and he stumbled away. But the look in his eye meant that I slept the night in my filthy riding clothes and with my axe by my side.
Out of grain and low on food, the following night I was forced to camp on a narrow strip of grass next to freshly ploughed earth. Despite tying the horses on short tethers, they managed to get out and roll in the earth, and by morning they were all plastered in black grime.
As I sat there with my porridge, which was thick with horsehair, I realised I’d become the picture of a down-and-out, homeless wanderer that many mistakenly associate with the word nomad.
Beyond the town of Dyad’kovskaya, the rain came down in sheets. I slipped behind a row of trees and headed down a narrow track into some deserted wheat fields. Protected by the hood of my jacket, I kept my head bowed and considered my circumstances.
I was now only 250 kilometres from the Azov and Black Seas, where I planned to cross into the Crimea in Ukraine. But before leaving Russia I needed to find a replacement for Utebai and get all the papers required to take horses across the border. To do either of these would require a miracle. Horses were a scarcity on the Kuban, and no one would ever agree to trade for a wimp like Utebai. And in my filthy, dishevelled state, I would struggle to convince a shopkeeper to sell me a loaf of bread, let alone a border guard to give me entry into another country.
But when I lifted my eyes, it seemed my prayers had been answered.
The unruly beard of the man before me was what first caught my eye, then his tall velvet hat and long black robes. He lifted a small broom from a bucket of water, flicking drops from high above his head into the field. Then he turned to me.
‘We’ve come here to bless the wheat fields with holy water! Where are you going?’
He was the priest of Dyad’kovskaya, and it was the role of the Orthodox Church to bless every wheat field of the parish in the spring. As I went on my way, he showered my caravan with holy water.
Just a few minutes later, proof of his friends in higher places materialised. Accustomed to noisy Russian jeeps and Ladas – boxy little cars that had been the workhorse of Soviet times – I’d failed to notice the purr of a new four-wheel-drive Range Rover until it drew up alongside me. Tigon took a sniff, then retreated. As a tinted window slid down silently, a man grinned out at me from the leather interior.
‘So, fellow traveller, partisan, Kazakh, Cossack – how can I help you?’
I wiped mud and rain from my eyes and peered down as he stepped out and swaggered up to me. Standing only a little taller than he was wide, he was adorned with flawlessly buffed shoes, a black jacket, sunglasses and a silky tie. There was no doubting it: this man was no priest.
‘My friend! You do not know me, but soon, I think, we will be friends. I am Nikolai Vladimorivich Luti: ataman – Cossack leader – of this region, owner of ten thousand hectares of crops, and employer of eight hundred workers.’
I stammered out my story. Luti, as he liked to be called, looked at me thoughtfully. Finally he said, ‘Thirty kilometres away at my friend’s farm you will have all the services you need. Go there tonight, and tomorrow we will consider your problem. If we can find a new horse for you, we will.’
Over the next six weeks my problems were all solved. I was put up in a hotel for the first night in Luti’s hometown, and then given a place to stay at an industrial machinery yard that he owned. While I worked on border permits – with the help of his workers – my horses were cared for by a Gypsy horseman who not only dedicated himself to bringing them back to full weight, but even shampooed their coats and cleaned their manes.
Luti helped me find a replacement packhorse for Utebai. ‘Sokol’ was a young golden palomino stallion, with an inquisitive nature. Although he was untamed and had never been ridden, I liked him at once. I renamed him ‘Kok’ in memory of my poor fallen horse in Kalmykia. After several weeks of training – with many close calls with kicking, flying hooves – he was calm enough to accept a packsaddle. On Luti’s advice I gave Utebai away as a gift to a local riding school for children.
During my stay Tigon and I regularly visited Luti in his office. He would sit in an executive chair, smoking imperiously. ‘Tim,’ he would say at last, pulling a rolled-up $100 bill from his top pocket, ‘take some pocket money and go and buy yourself some cigarettes or something!’
When I finally set off, I was fresh, clean and organised, and the horses were positively gleaming. Just two weeks of riding later I approached the border post.
Immigration and veterinary control waved me straight through, and just one obstacle remained: customs. I’d been warned many times that I might be pulled in to pay a bribe for one thing or another. But I was in luck here, too.
Just as I pulled into customs inspection Ogonyok disgorged a gigantic turd. The junior officers laughed, but their superior did not see the humour. ‘You are not leaving Russia until you clean that crap up!’ he yelled.
‘Okay, okay. But I’m not going to shift it with my bare hands. You’ll have to find me a shovel,’ I replied.
While he sent some officers off in search of a shovel, most of the customs officers came out to see the spectacle. Meanwhile, I went inside to be processed and breezed straight through the unmanned screening post to have my passport stamped. Back outside, nobody had found a shovel, and the boat to Crimea was due to leave. Within minutes I was casting off into the Kerch Strait, leaving behind the cluster of officials still gathered around Ogonyok’s parting present.
15
Crimea: Riding the Double-edged Sword
From the saddle I watched Tigon’s tail and ears cut through the tall swaying grass. His body bristled with the muscly physique of a grown and confident adult, yet his teeth were still impeccably white, betraying his youth. Pollen and white flower debris caught in his eyebrows like snow petals. It wasn’t long before he reached the top of a rise and stopped, ears bent forward, the sleek shaft of his snout fishing for scents on the breeze.
I, too, was soaking in the view. From a foreground of waist-high grass, red poppies and white chamomile, the steppe dropped away in a sea of green. Directly below, a narrow sandy neck of land cut a straight line between the sea and a series of pinkish salt lakes.
By the time we’d descended to the beach, the wind had eased and the sun was setting the western sky on fire. As I shifted my gaze to the sea, a dark shadow shattered its glassy surface. A school of dolphins rose and dipped effortlessly as they cruised along the shore.
Tigon, still new to salt water, rushed into the lapping waves, lay on his side and took sweeping bites until he coughed it up with a look of surprise. I dismounted, stripped down, and ran in, feeling the water tingle across every cell of my sweaty skin. I even took the horses in, one by one. Once back on the beach, they dropped to their knees and rolled onto their backs on the sand, legs flailing wildly in the air. Tigon copied them, twisting this way and that, jaws wide open in a smile.
By nightfall banks of dark cloud hung heavily over the sea. I pegged the horses out and watched as they buried their heads in the grass, feeding like a pack of hungry lions. Over dinner the sky faded from peach to deep blue, then black. I lay out in the grass with Tigon’s sleepy head slumped on my chest.
I meant to write in my diary, but I woke at midnight with rain falling on my face. I’d managed to pen one line: We’re in horse heaven.
In the morning I woke to a sky flooded with stormy grey. Tigon lay next to me, wound up in a ball with his nose hidden under his bushy tail. It was a technique he had long mastered when the morning weather wasn’t kind – pretending to be asleep in the hope that the sunrise might go unnoticed and we would therefore have a sleep-in. On this occasion I was more than happy to join him and relish the time to think, write and reflect.
It had only been two weeks since I had sailed away from Russia, but already I felt that a new chapter had begun.
In the port city of Kerch, as we’d navigated from the ferry port out of the town, we had passed a mother and child. The child, no more than four or five years old, had been fixated on his ice cream – that is, until Tigon loped up alongside. The ice cream was, of course, conveniently at head height for Tigon, who with one graceful movement happily accepted the boy’s offering. The world, it seemed, was Tigon’s ice cream.
The legendary Crimea was a peninsula of rocky, forested mountains, endless sandy beaches, and grasslands. Nowadays part of Ukraine, it had been the jewel in the crown of nomadic empires for thousands of years – and judging by the abundance of grass, I could understand why.
When the Mongols reached here almost 800 years ago, the sense of revelry and celebration must have been particularly special. It was their first foray into Europe, and they had trounced all enemies that stood in their way. I couldn’t quite relate to their war victory celebrations – which included slowly crushing the enemy’s royal leaders to death beneath the platform on which they had their celebratory feast – but I did feel that the challenges Tigon and I had overcome to get this far gave us a feeling that we were unstoppable.
When I set off from Mongolia almost two years earlier I had been worried about unknown strangers that lay ahead on our path, but all I could imagine now were the many friends that I was yet to meet. And where once I might have had the illusion that I was Tigon’s master, it was now clear that he was fearlessly guiding me across the steppe.
Yet before we launched eagerly forward, I wanted to reflect too.
With my eyes closed and my hand stretched out from my sleeping bag, I found Tigon. He withdrew his head from under his tail and stretched out with a sigh. I took my hand across his damp, cool nose and along his long, narrow snout. I felt the sleep in the corners of his eyes, and his soft eyelids. How many scents had that nose inhaled? How many sights had these eyes seen since those early days in Kazakhstan?
I reached his ears, my hands rising to the tips, then stroking down to that nook behind on his skull for a scratch. Tigon pushed into my hand, and extended his neck and front legs. Those ears had long been a kind of antennae, a weather vane for me and for him. When the tips were frosted over, I’d known to take shelter and rug up, and in the summer when they were piping hot to touch, it was essential to seek shade. At first, Tigon’s ears had been enormous, and unwieldy, so much bigger than his head, but now his body had grown to match both his ears and his giant spirit.
I let my fingers slip down around his neck, arriving at his chest. I’d watched that chest grow from a skinny finger-wide gap between his matchstick legs to a proud, wiry ball of muscle, pulsating with a heart that had taken his body wherever his eyes could see. It was a heart full of courage and love, a heart that had found its way into mine, and through the doors of hundreds of homes. And now down the legs to those paws – paws that hung limp and humble, but had carried him across sand, snow, rock and water. Paws and legs that, perhaps unknown to him, had even carried my spirit when I was tired, down and scared.
As I took my hand to the centre of his spiny back, an unexpected reflection filled my heart and rippled out, tears spilling from my eyes.
I recalled those early times, when Tigon was but a runty puppy, all eyes and ears, with nothing more than his will and spirit to see him forwards. I had told Aset that I didn’t want Tigon – how would I look after him? How would I pay for his food?
And yet this masked the truth.
I had known deep inside that when Tigon chose me, he was willing to take the risk that I might abandon him, that I might not even love him. What’s more, he knew that there was no turning back – there was no way for him to get home.
What really scared me in those early days wasn’t the responsibility of looking after him. It was the fear of being a disappointment. What if I didn’t turn out to be as good a person, an owner, as he thought I was? Would Tigon regret his decision to choose me? Could I really promise to be his lifelong friend?
I couldn’t remember the first time it happened, but we were in a village somewhere. I had been feeling down, and Tigon came running to me. I crouched down, reached out and began to stroke him, from the head, across his neck, and all the way down to his tail. With each stroke Tigon’s chest pushed out prouder, and he raised his eyes and chin, his whiskers all aquiver. He craned his neck and looked around at the other people and dogs in the village. That look was unmistakable – pride. He wanted the whole world to see that I was his best friend. Tigon believed in me. And since that day, I had begun, little by little, to believe more in myself.
