The morning we started our two-day trip back to Ölgiy, people gathered to say farewell. Each was blessed by Galsan Tschinag, the shaman, with the traditional sprinkling of milk. And because my husband and I were the first North Americans to come to the Tuvan land in the High Altai, we were given special gifts to take home. The Cold War is ending, people had repeatedly said to us in the days before. When we laid our customary three stones on the ovoo, we had reason to be grateful indeed.

Like the birds Galsan Tschinag had referred to, I had embarked on my own journey to the top of the world. I returned with the shaman’s blessings to complete the translation of his important first novel into English. I want to thank Galsan Tschinag and his people for generously receiving us into their lives, and Galsan himself for discussing his text and my translation with me. I am also very grateful to Hiro Boga and Ron Smith from Oolichan Books, and to Daniel Slager from Milkweed Editions, for their careful and insightful editorial suggestions; to Malaspina University-College for supporting my work; and to my husband Jonathan for having shared my journey half way round the world to bring the project to completion.

Before I left, Galsan made one final observation: “I am convinced that our corner could quickly turn into a Karabakh or Kosovo, if in a country such as ours, with a colorful mix of peoples and a leadership that glorifi s violence and war, the Tuvan people were to glorify their own and denigrate their neighbors’ cultures.” Bridges have to be built from both sides of a river, though. While Galsan Tschinag promotes foreign-language learning among the Tuvans, he also gives one manuscript a year for publication, royalty-free, to a Mongolian publisher, hoping to sow the seeds of respect for Tuvan culture among his fellow Mongolians. His stories, he says about all his books, are not his stories alone: they are the stories of his people.

And they are stories for the world.

—KATHARINA ROUT
ERRINGTON, BRITISH COLUMBIA, 2006

The Blue Sky

The ream

THE DREAM

This story may have begun in a dream. Was it a preparation for things to come, a warning perhaps? For it was a bad dream—a nightmare.

Don’t ever tell anybody about your bad dreams, people said. Tell your dreams to a hole in the ground and spit three times. They said similar things about good dreams. Don’t share them with anybody. Keep them to yourself. So, I wondered, were the only dreams you ever heard the dreams that were neither good nor bad?

We usually started the day in our yurt by telling each other what we had dreamed the night before. Oddly enough, it made everybody both happy and worried at the same time, which you could tell from watching the listeners.