Mongolia: Adventures in You-Cut Hairstyling

Tim Cahill

A popular archaeological theory is that the Mongolian people may have been the first Americans. A dedicated "Mer-ee-koon" sets out, and encounters the yogurt riders.

THERE WERE A DOZEN OF US, riding the immense central Asian grassland on sturdy Mongolian horses. When I glanced back for a view of the glacier and the sacred mountain we had just visited, I saw two tiny specks inching down the steep windswept hillside, moving in our direction. I turned on my horse, and glassed the hill with a little four power Russian monocle. The pursuing riders were coming towards us at a stiff trot. They were at least two miles back and about 1000 feet above us. Each man held something in his right hand. I could plainly see the glint of metal.

"They carrying," one of the Americans asked.

"Yeah," I said, "both of them."

Bayarra Sanjaasuren, our translator, conveyed the information to the Mongolian wranglers. This was serious: We had yogurt riders on our tail. Again.

"Tchoo," half a dozen men shouted at once.

Tchoo is the Mongolian equivalent of "giddiup." Mongolian horses respond smartly to tchoo, no matter who says it. Guy next to you says "tchoo," you're off at a gallop. We were riding a dozen men abreast because Mongolians do not ride in single file. A defeated army, they say, rides single file. And now, with the dreaded yogurt riders in pursuit, our little party sounded like the whole first grade trying to imitate a locomotive.

"Tchoo, tchoo ...

"Tchoo, tchoo, tchoo ..."

Significantly, there is no Mongolian word that corresponds to "whoa."

We'd been riding eight to twelve hours a day, every day, for a week, and I was fairly comfortable in the old Russian cavalry saddle I'd been given. It was a pair of metal hoops on a wooden frame, covered over in peeling leather stuffed with horse hair. The stirrups were metal hoops connected to the frame with rawhide straps. The Mongolians in our party rode ornate handcarved wooden saddles, the best of them festooned with beaten silver medallions.

"Tchoo," I said, and stood up a bit in the saddle so my horse could stretch into his long gallop.

The ground we were approaching, however, was humped up in the marshy tussocks characteristic of soil that is permanently frozen a few feet below the surface. We were only at about 48 degrees north — about the latitude of Seattle — but cold fronts originating in Siberia, to our north, seem to flow down the great Yenisey River, Northern Asia's Amazon, and funnel into Mongolia. Nowhere else