“Grandma, can I pee in the water?”

“No, darling. Haven’t I told you that you must never soil a stretch of water?”

“Just this once, please?”

“No, you’d better not. If you do it once, you open the door to doing it more often. Our mother-river, Ak-Hem, will get angry.”

I climbed out of the water and skipped off. I wanted to show Grandma and the mother-river that I was a good child, and so I skipped farther and farther into the steppe until Grandma called after me: “That’s good enough, stay there.”

Sister Torlaa and Brother Galkaan were returning from gathering dung. They walked bent over and stumbled beneath the heavy full baskets.

“Run to your brother and sister, it will give them strength,” Grandma said.

As I ran toward them, I wondered how my joining them might give them strength.

“You’re a strong boy!” Sister praised me when I reached them.

“Watch for any dung falling off, will you?” Brother called out.

I squeezed myself between them and watched their baskets as we walked. That not a single piece fell off annoyed me somewhat, but I was captivated by their panting.

One of Father’s quirks was that he always wanted to have a big dung heap next to our yurt. No sooner had we taken the yurt parts off the pack animals’ backs after a move, and he would empty the baskets and send the children out for dung.

“We won’t get to finish the heap anyway, so why drive the children so hard?” Mother scolded him when again he rearmed us for yet another dung excursion. Father replied: “So what if some is left over? Others who move by will be pleased and grateful to whoever gathered it in the steppe, carried it by the sweat of his brow, and piled it up so lovingly. Why do you think we have the saying: A worthy man’s yurt leaves a pile of dung behind, but an unworthy man’s yurt, a pile of shit?”