The previous day’s riding was tough on the body. There’s no warm shower here to heat up the muscles in the morning. Well, this is what I asked for……
The morning was normally cold, slightly above freezing again (~34 F or ~2C). We did the routine rounding up of horses and goat sorting, This morning however, some of the newborns received their “brands”, which consisted of making 2 cuts in their ears with metal shears. I wasn’t expecting it, so I didn’t get any pictures of video. There was a little but of bleeding but not much. I believe this is how the nomads keep track of the young goats and sheep. Later, as the goat/sheep grow, the nomads will paint their horns with unique colors to identify/brand them.
This morning, while at the local well, the nomads were trying to “lasso” one horse in particular. Let’s take a look at the Mongolian lasso first:
I first saw the lasso used by Biyambai, my host’s wife. She used it to do some of the sheep sorting in the evening. After lassoing a particular sheep, the handle portion of the lasso is twisted or “twirled” so that the slack is wrapped around the animal’s head. The nomad will then climb up the handle “hand over hand” until it reaches the animal. Once the nomad has finished moving, branding, etc of the animal, letting it go is a simple matter of “untwisting/untwirling” the pole. As with most discoveries this came up unexpected and I didn’t get the process on video. However, here’s a look at the nomads trying to lasso the horse at the well:
That concluded the morning’s work. We’ll look at the afternoon/evening in the next post.
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