It was springtime, two years ago, and having just finished a book about horses I had gone riding in northeastern Mongolia—the heartland of horse cultures—with my son Geoff and a young lad named Gohe from one of the nomad families. They had moved from the winter shelter of the mountains to the open prairie a month or two before and were settling in for the summer season of calving and lambing and foaling and caring for the health of their herds. A Mongolian herder’s life is hard and dangerous, easy to exoticize but difficult to describe with adequate respect for the knowledge it requires, and for the way in which it transcends material and spiritual categories. Mongolian nomads are both dreamers and down to earth. They drink mare’s milk and eat horsemeat, but like our ancient ancestors—who hunted horses and then painted them on the walls of caves forty or fifty thousand years ago—horses are also their covenant in wonder with the world, embodying contradictions that are at the...
J. Edward Chamberlin has retired from the University of Toronto, where he was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. His books include If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories and Hore: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations, both published by Vintage in 2004 and 2007 respectively.
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