The Year of the Yellow Cow was coming to its end. Like all years before and quite a few after, it consisted of four parts that were called seasons and followed one another. They appeared to crash into each other like the yurt’s folding lattice walls, probably because the events making up the nomadic life differed so harshly from one season to the next.

It was still during the Yellow Cow that we moved to Ulug Gyschtag, our big winter camp. It lay a ridge and two passes farther into the mountains, which meant getting even farther away from people, but closer to whatever was left of the pastures. And the latter was important not least because of the pregnant animals that were trudging wearily beneath the burden of their swelling fruit, and becoming noticeably skinnier.

Arsylang

ARSYLANG

The Cow was followed by the Tiger. Secretly we were afraid of the Tiger, but we didn’t forget to look for something to comfort us: This Tiger was white. It was as if the White Tiger came creeping on soft paws, for it was silent before and after. The New Year was not as it used to be. Rumor had it that bleeding dysentery was on its way. Nobody from outside came to visit, and there seemed to be no end to the meat and the deep-fried bread the Yellow Cow had prepared and left for the White Tiger. And even though the New Year and with it the first month of spring had arrived, it was bitterly cold. Snow fell on the ninth and again on the seventeenth. The second snowfall had been forecast by Father and therefore expected by everybody.

“How much worse will it be on the twenty-second?” everybody wondered. People were on their guard and went about their days with quiet mindfulness. It snowed during the night of the twenty-first. The heavy snowfall did not stop until the following noon and was followed by a storm. The snow already on the ground started to move again, and sky and earth collapsed into each other. The dshut had arrived. We took the big flock to where the small one normally grazed. The hendshe stayed where it had spent the night and later in the day was fed the way young lambs are fed in their first year: we hung bundles of hay on a line drawn tight above their heads. But when we went to do the same the next day, we had to let the animals off because we did not have enough hay. Mountain and steppe lay in glaring black and white as if shattered in a sea of shards. It tired the eye. And a howling and hissing wind sawed and cut, stung and tugged at everything in its path. The hendshe burst into noise when it stepped into this wind.