Tim & Tigon, page 9
It was the stroke of luck I’d been waiting for.
For the first day out of Tasaral the temperature hovered around –25°C. A headwind whipped up clouds of serrating snow, making it almost unbearable to look straight ahead. My ski goggles were forever icing up, and even with thick mittens, my fingers quickly grew numb. Tigon delighted in chasing foxes and hares, but when he stopped his paws swiftly became painfully cold and he would look up at me, eyes narrowed, as if asking why the weather was offending him so badly.
My emotions undulated like the land. When I was moving forward, I felt like I was floating, gunning towards the empty horizon as if in a dream. The snow cover gave me the freedom to travel wherever I wanted. But when I was unsure about how to read the landscape, or a saddle loosened and I needed to stop and refit, I felt the shadow of danger on my heels. In the darkness the following morning while I was preparing the horses, Taskonir took a bite of my hand. The skin between the first and second knuckles came off like a sheath, leaving it raw and bloody. I stared back at Taskonir in bewilderment, struggling not to cry. It was too much.
In the days to come, the cold and dark spiralled, and the journey felt like a game of survival. The inner tent was forever laden with hoarfrost, and ordinarily simple tasks, such as pulling stakes and tent pegs out of the frozen earth, became epic struggles.
It was –28°C the day that I caught my last glimpses of Lake Balkhash. The ice had turned black, strangled in a web of frost. Ahead to the west stretched the Betpak Dala. Renowned as a desert of extremes, it was empty even by Kazakh standards – a reminder of the origin of its namesake, as the Starving Steppe. My aim was to trek 300 kilometres across its southeast corner to a village on the Chu River called Ulanbel.
As I climbed up a snow-encrusted slope to look over the land I could feel the cold and remoteness go up a notch. The wind died, and in the intense stillness, sparkling ice crystals fluttered to the ground like dead butterflies snap-frozen in flight. Ice rings had formed around the horses’ nostrils, and clouds of frozen breath blew back onto their necks and flanks, spraying them white. Even my eyelashes gathered frost.
Soon there were no sounds, no trails, and no people. Over the sea of pearly white, I watched the sun creep into the empty sky. I had begun to think that Tigon wanted to see where the sun disappeared to each day. When it rose in the mornings he was desperate to know where it had been and what stories it had to tell. Yet try as he might, the faster and harder he ran the longer the sun seemed to disappear at night, and the further it was from reach.
There was little time for my mind to drift. One slip could mean trouble. My greatest fear was falling off, or having a horse slip over and crush me. In these conditions having a broken leg, and being abandoned by the horses would almost certainly be a death sentence.
I carried on until sunlight had nearly vanished, then raced to make camp.
The cold pressed harder on the earth. My first priority was Tigon, who was whimpering inconsolably. I wrapped him in a spare horse blanket and zipped him inside my canvas duffle bag. Later, when the tent was up and dinner was on the boil, the bag began hopping towards the stove. I opened the bag a little way and dangled a piece of salted pig fat over it. Tigon swiftly snapped up the offering before drawing back inside his cocoon of warmth.
The horses meanwhile stood tired and still like statues, their fur standing on end. They had a look of great knowing, and seemed accepting of this cold. The one exception to their sense of composure was at feeding time. The mere rustle of a grain bag brought whickering from all three as they raced to the end of their tethers, demanding food.
By the time I finished feeding the horses my feet were numb. I leapt inside the tent, where Tigon had been warming my sleeping bag, and took off my boots. To prevent moisture freezing in them, I wore large plastic bags over my outer socks, and a smaller bag between them and my thermal socks. As I took the bags off and shook them out, the pooled sweat instantly turned to ice.
Inside the tent it wasn’t much warmer than out. Tigon was covered in frost, his whiskers were tentacles of ice, and his breath rose in clouds of vapour. I tried running my hand down his bony spine: he growled angrily. Although I had come to love Tigon, I had hardly had a chance to show him warmth or affection, and no doubt he had picked up on my lack of love in earlier times. Now, just when I needed it myself, he had learnt to get by without me. How could I have alienated the one little creature who had stuck loyally with me all this time? Before I pulled the drawstring of my sleeping bag tight I doused his paws in vodka to help prevent frostbite and let him snuggle inside my down jacket.
When I woke the next morning my body was tense, and for some reason I couldn’t get warm. It was cold – around –40°C as it turned out – but something else was amiss. I realised my sweat had formed frozen clumps in the down feathers of my sleeping bag. I had no way to dry out my bag in these conditions, so I shivered into my jacket and decided to get moving.
I had learnt some methods that helped me to stay calm in situations like this. Mostly it was about focusing on the challenges one step at a time. For example, I would concentrate on getting to lunch, and then camp, and so on. It was better not to look at the bigger picture sometimes.
But this morning I felt increasingly spooked. I discovered that my GPS had frozen, and all the coordinates had been wiped. The tent also seemed particularly fragile, and I hated to think what might happen if a windstorm blew in. Above all though, it was the twenty-third of December, just a couple of days before Christmas. The thought of being alone and freezing on the Starving Steppe on a day when my family was celebrating together was too much.
I panicked. I fished out my maps to see if there was anything remotely closer than Ulanbel. On my large tour map of Kazakhstan there was one dot on the Starving Steppe marked ‘Akbakai’. I didn’t care who lived there, or what this place was, I just knew that I had to get there.
It was a relief to get moving. The sky was clear and the air eerily calm. Just after lunch, when the pale sun was limping towards the horizon, I found myself in the shadows of a narrow gorge. Ogonyok’s load had come loose, and I leapt off to reload.
All day I had tried to keep thoughts about wolves at bay, but now they came rushing forward. I’d been told by Kazakh herders that wolves would follow me unseen, possibly for days, before choosing their moment to attack – a moment like this, no doubt. Midwinter was the time when they were at their hungriest. I had long known that wolves could take down fully-grown camels, yaks and horses, but it was the stories I’d heard about attacks on humans that worried me most now. One of the most common wolf stories I had heard in Kazakhstan was of an attack on a woman and her daughter who had been waiting at a bus stop on a lonely road in winter. The woman had saved her daughter by lifting her onto the roof of the bus stop. All that was found of the mother were her valenki, still filled with the lower part of her legs. It was hard to know if this tale was rumour or truth, but out here it was a terrifying thought either way.
I regained some composure once I had climbed out of the gorge, and calmed myself with the thought of a saying that Russians had told me long ago:
‘If you never know where you are, then you can never be lost.’
My interpretation was that as long as I had food, water, and I was healthy, then it didn’t matter if I couldn’t place myself on a map. And vice versa: one could know precisely where one was, but be very unsafe.
I knew all this, yet as the sun began to dip, my heart once again raced. I began to believe that my life depended on getting to Akbakai by Christmas.
The shadows grew longer and longer, until night had fallen. I took several wrong turns up narrow, winding ravines and had to backtrack to the main valley. On I pressed, willing the horses into a trot. My hands became numb, and so again and again I removed my mittens and slid my bare hands into the warm sweaty hair under Taskonir’s saddle blanket until life returned to my fingers.
Tigon was exhausted. At one stage when I took a short break to check my map he must have curled up under a grass tussock in the snow, thinking we had stopped for camp. I carried on without realising he had been left behind – that is, until I heard a desperate whimper ring out through the frozen night air. He was sprinting to catch up.
By the time I made camp the temperature had fallen further and the snow glowed an ethereal blue. I struggled to hammer the tent pegs in, and the tent poles broke through the fabric sleeves. My camping stove refused to ignite, and I had to pull it apart and clean it – a task involving bare, and already freezing fingers.
A voice inside my head reminded me that as long as I took care and didn’t rush, everything would be okay. Stupid decisions such as these – making camp long after dark and trotting blindly over snowy terrain – could prove disastrous. Yet I couldn’t break my obsession with getting to Akbakai. I imagined sitting around a table, bathed with the golden light of a fireplace, telling stories about my travels.
At dawn we were up again and rose to a plateau where the fragile calm was broken by raking winds. A great, hazy, white emptiness flowed down from all sides. There were no features, shadows, or depth to give any scale at all. Usually this emptiness instilled a sense of freedom, but now it brought dread. Even if Akbakai was somewhere out there, my compass bearing only had to be marginally off and I could pass it without knowing.
Just as the sun was gliding into my line of vision I caught sight of something that gave me hope – a tower. The horses were tired, struggling to lift their hooves. I egged them on with the promise of hay and shelter.
At times I was sure Akbakai was just a derelict ghost town; other times I thought I could see a tendril of smoke. I could make out strange buildings, which made me think it might be an abandoned Soviet military base.
When Ogonyok’s load came loose after dark, I lost my cool and let out a string of curses. The intoxicating vision of hot tea and company possessed me.
*
As we limped through some twisted scrap metal on the deserted outskirts I began to stir. Wind filled my ears, and Tigon’s whimpering rose in pitch. We had made it to Akbakai, but I’d forgotten that no one was waiting for us. No one here, for that matter, even knew we existed.
10
The Land that God Forgot
The only sign of life was the shadowy figure of a man hunched over a pile of firewood. After much pleading, Maksim – who suspected that I was either a lost Russian geologist or an escaped prisoner – reluctantly led me to a half-built mud-brick shack. I tied the horses to one end, then, together with Tigon, climbed into a small adjoining room. Inside, the flickering of a coal stove revealed two old spring beds, mattresses, and cardboard-matted floor. Vitka and Grisha, the Russian labourers living here, were too drunk to speak, but details didn’t matter. I was out of the wind, I was warm, and I was not alone.
Christmas morning brought a more sobering reality. Woken by a couple of puppies licking my face, I peeled open my eyes to take in a panorama of dog poo, piles of empty vodka bottles, and a frying pan filled with congealed fat. Vitka and Grisha were dead to the world but alive with the stench of body odour, tobacco and alcohol. They were truck drivers from southern Kazakhstan who had been stranded in Akbakai since losing their licences two years earlier.
Eventually they were stirred by their own snoring. When they learnt who I was, they cried: ‘Australian! We understand that today is your Christmas. By all means we will have a celebration tonight. A treat!’
Akbakai was not the community I had hoped for. The streets were littered with frozen clumps of rubbish, and lined with rubble and mangled machinery wreckage. To the west and south heavy trucks laboured through dirty, blackened snow. Akbakai was a gold-mining town with no natural water supplies. Food and water were both precious resources shipped in from far away.
After hours of searching, a local hunting inspector let me climb up his ice-encrusted water tank to fill pails for my horses. He also agreed to sell me hay to last twenty-four hours – but no more than that.
I returned to the mud hut in the evening hungry and stiff. Grisha and Vitka had caught a couple of street pigeons earlier that day and had boiled them up for dinner.
‘Everything will be fine! Sit down, lie back, have a vodka, a cup of tea, we will find you a wife . . . and you can use your horses as a bride-price!’ they chanted.
I watched as Grisha and Vitka argued, stumbled, and fought into the early hours. When they passed out I lay awake listening to the wind, unable to sleep. I clung to visions of home and being close to my siblings, mother and father.
I had sought refuge in Akbakai, picturing a family and a barn full of hay, but come the early hours of 26 December, that vision was in tatters. And things were about to get a lot harder.
When I woke to pack, Taskonir was holding his back left leg in the air. An infection had formed an abscess in his hoof – most likely the result of a stone bruise suffered during our rushed ride to Akbakai. It would be many days, or even weeks, before I could expect it to heal. The nearest village, Ulanbel, was another five days across wild steppe. Carrying on was not an option, but there was no feed for the horses here.
The abscess was to be the first of many hold-ups and failed attempts at leaving Akbakai. It would, in fact, be three and a half months before I managed to depart.
For two days I scrounged for fodder and water, to little avail. When I approached Maksim, who owned the mud hut where Vitka and Grisha lodged, for help, he retorted angrily, ‘What makes you think anyone should help you? You are better off selling your horses for meat before they are too skinny!’
Like many others, Maksim had come here lured by the promise of work but found himself unemployed and stranded far from his hometown. He lived in a derelict apartment block where he had rigged up a woodstove in a room on the third floor. To support his wife and two children, he had turned the basement of the building into a makeshift workshop, where he made furniture out of scrap wood. Without a network of relatives or friends, it was hard to imagine what fallback he had if this venture failed.
Maksim’s scenario would have been unthinkable for nomads in old times. A tradition called ata-balasy, which means ‘the joining of grandfather’s sons into one tribe or family’, was the bedrock of nomadic life, and in many communities it is still only by banding together in wide circles of kin that it is possible to support those fallen on hard times. But here in Akbakai, a town built by the Soviets to extract gold, the traditional sense of community did not exist, and the people had been abandoned by the government and left to their own devices.
Three days after Christmas, Taskonir’s leg was worse, the wind had picked up to gale force, and clouds were marching in. Come what may, though, I had decided that anything was better than staying in Akbakai. After saddling up, I went inside the mud hut to say goodbye to Vitka and Grisha. They were sad to see me go and worried about what would become of me. In the throes of this farewell, my fortunes changed.
Stumbling into our hovel came a short, squat man wearing thick, crooked glasses that magnified his eyes and pinched his red nose. His voice was deep and husky, and as he spoke, his defrosting moustache wiggled.
Curiosity eventually got the better of him. ‘Who is he?’ he asked, pointing at me.
‘We have a guest from Australia,’ Grisha related. ‘He came here to us by horse . . . from Mongolia.’
The man stepped back, straightened his glasses, then leant forward. ‘Come to my home!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why freeze here? I’ll give you a sack of wheat to help you on your way!’
Grisha and Vitka were excited for me. According to them, Baitak, as the man was known, was a ‘millionaire’ and a ‘king’. I would surely be safe in his hands. Their description proved to be a bit of an exaggeration. His house was an underground one-room hut. He didn’t own a car, had no washing facilities, and the toilet was a long drop full to the brim with frozen poo and just a tarpaulin to protect one from the elements. His water supplies were trucked in, like everyone else’s, and the much talked-about cafe and bar he owned was a coal-heated hut within shouting distance of his house that backed onto a mountain of rubble.
At the time, though, to me everything about Baitak’s empire shone. I was presented with a series of fried eggs, and each one I finished was replaced with another. Tigon ate buckets of stale bread and milk, until his belly bulged out to twice its normal size and he sprawled out royally on the floor.
The true meaning of Baitak’s wealth became clear over the weeks to come. As one of the most established people in town – he had been in Akbakai since 1976 – he had unique authority and knowledge. Above all, though, I think Baitak’s status as a ‘king’ was a measure of his generous heart. Certainly that is what ultimately saved my life, and those of Tigon and my horses.
After our meal, Baitak inspected Taskonir and shook his head. He knew I was in trouble, but he also knew what to do. He co-owned a kstau six kilometres out of town, where cattle were kept. ‘You can ride there and stay until your horse heals and the weather improves. Tell the herder there, Madagol, that he can feed your horses with my hay.’
There were times in my journey when I felt like I was a captain, firmly in command, on a course of my choosing. There were other times, however, when I simply had to let go of the reins and accept that the journey – or, in this case, Baitak – would guide me.
*
To reach the kstau, which was hidden in a valley between two knobby ridges, took two hours, by which time Taskonir was reluctant to move at all. As I arrived I was greeted by Madagol – a gruff, wiry old fellow with tightly coiled greying hair and heavy, calloused hands. He invited me in with a fusillade of curses regarding the weather.
‘Wind is the worst thing in Akbakai! When it blows on the third day, you know it will blow for seven, and when it blows on the eighth day, it will blow for fourteen . . . after that it will blow for a month. It’s not like that where we come from!’
