Every day Galsan took us to visit Tuvan and Kazakh families in the valley. Each had prepared a spread, mostly of meat and dairy products, but also of fried dough and sweets, and each offered us salted, buttery milk-tea and—since it was the foaling season—both fermented and distilled mare’s milk. In one yurt, a whole wether had been slaughtered for the occasion. These were celebrations, but they clearly were also opportunities Galsan Tschinag created to braid together the Tuvan and Kazakh families who have to share the sparse resources of the land. He was always given the seat of honor at the North end of the yurt, and while the guests were offered delicacies such as the fatty tail of a sheep, he inquired—in Tuvan, Kazakh, or Mongolian—about the well-being of each family and their animals. As a result of four catastrophic winters and unusually dry summers, the nomads in the Altai had lost two-thirds of their herds in the previous decade. Galsan Tschinag’s visits and the European visitors he has brought into the Altai for the last fifteen summers have created employment and income opportunities. We never left a yurt without him handing over a substantial stack of tugrik bills, but we also watched him engaging with every adult in the family; introducing the children to us; stroking, massaging, and caressing the sick and aged; praising (and translating into German) outstanding events and achievements; and making everybody feel encouraged and important.

In the process, we heard people’s stories. We learned how mothers on horseback carry their baby’s wooden cradle when the family moves: on a leather strap around the neck. More importantly, we learned how a family’s history can be read from the second, thinner yak leather strap stretched across the cradle. It allows visitors to avoid asking painful questions and instead find gentle and empathetic words. For every birth of a boy, a sheep’s right ankle bone is tied to the strap, for every girl, a left one. For every child that has died, the bone is removed, but the knot remains.

Bones connect life and death, the material and the spiritual. They were read by our host, by the shaman who provided guidance and support, and who taught us to read in the book of nature. A rock face, so forbidding from a distance, shows fracture lines from close up: nothing is forever, everything changes. Birds that breed their young at a lake near the foot of Haarakan’s glacier grieve when one of the couple dies. The shaman translated: love is the key to life, and the cause of suffering. Do as the birds.