The night before (and every night afterward) we had to “hobble” the horses. This means binding three of the horses legs together so that they can roam around looking for vegetation to graze, yet not roam away too far. This is because vegetation is scarce. The horses do not get supplemental feed. They cannot be corralled and must be able to roam somewhat to search for good grazing area.
Mongolian “Chodur” or Horse Hobble.
So this morning started off tracking down the horses. It took us between 1.5and 2.0 hours to locate the horses.
Trekking around the surrounding hills was exhausting. Durukh was using a pair of binoculars, but we finally just happened to walk right up to the 2 horses. It turned out that one of the hobbles had come undone (or maybe a better bet was that I hadn’t put it on properly the previous night). Thus the horses were able to roam further than usual.
Durukh, took off to to do the morning herding. Later, other nomads came to visit. It turned out they were at the camp to help with the goat shearing. As winter came to an end, the goats had grown thick hair/wool that needed to be “harvested” or sheared and sold.
Manual tools/rakes for goat shearing
This work is rather exhausting. It requires some effort to pull the hair/wool from the goat, but ALSO the posture of bent back while on knees is very tiring. I think I probably did about 50-60% of the work that the nomads did, at a much lower efficiency as well!
As you can see the even the nomads are tired! We did this for ~6 hours with a few breaks for water and cigarettes (nomads only).
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