The following article was originally published in Sidetracked Volume 19

Until the Cows Come Home: Life with the Pamiri Herders

Do we have medicine? It’s the first thing we are asked when we arrive, a question communicated through mimed coughing and an open hand. The man who asks is broad and ruddy – the grandfather of the camp. His face is netted with wrinkles, but I doubt he is much past sixty. The cough comes again, hacking, painful, and real this time. I give him a half-empty packet of ibuprofen, our last. I wish I’d bought more, not least for myself. Altitude sickness is crap. But we would have run out soon anyway. Better to bite the bullet now and be generous.

We are high in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan. Too high. Or too high too fast at any rate. We’ve both become zombies. Thumping headaches and tunnel vision. Stumbling past the scenery, which is a sin, because the scenery is achingly beautiful. This valley is more than 4,500m above sea level and the peaks that flank it are half that again. Snow is heaped deep on the summits, thick and smooth as icing. Dribbled on. But the valleys are beautiful too, for they each house a lake of brilliant blue. We see no fish jumping, but somehow, 1,000 miles from the ocean, there are seagulls. I learn later that these lakes can fill and drain in a week. Water behaves strangely here. The valleys are parched but the peaks hoard ice. In spring the snowpack melts and the meltwater forms torrents, but these are funnelled through steep valleys, and never slow to water the desiccated slopes they pass. Whitewater thundering through a desert.

We have arrived at the summer camp of a Pamiri herding family: a ring of enclosures and a home, square and squat, built of dry stone, crouched in the bare earth like a toad. There are no trees this high. The bleached branches used for beams must have been hauled up on donkey back. The roof is sealed with dung from the livestock. A hole has been punched through to let the smoke free, but the cold needs to be kept out, and so the hole is small and the home is smoky. The structure is a product of its surroundings and, as such, it blurs into the landscape. A light fall of snow would make it invisible, but an invisible shelter is pointless in a snowstorm, and so a nylon-sack flag flutters above on a dry broken branch. A rattling chain of tins is tied beneath the flag, so that when salvation cannot be seen it can be heard.

Tajikistan. A country I knew nothing about, and had thought nothing of, until a friend decided to do his PhD fieldwork in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region, where we now are. This region is the skeleton in Tajikistan’s closet. Skeletons rather, for its recent history is grim. Gorno-Badakhshan makes up almost half of Tajikistan’s land area, but is home to just three per cent of the population. That three per cent are Pamiris, and they have the bad luck to be distinct ethnically and religiously from the national majority. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Tajikistan became an independent nation. Civil war erupted and the Pamiris endured massacres. 

Now, nearly three decades on, it is teatime. Thin white china is laid out on a fat stone slab. The food is high calorie by necessity.  The butter is mixed with coarse sugar until no more can be added, and the resultant mixture is dolloped onto thick chunks of flatbread, eaten in endless helpings, and washed down with sweet hot tea. The butter is so strong that at first it tastes rancid to my supermarket palate, but I soon love it. A dog with the coat and build of a polar bear snores behind us. One fang sticks out from behind his lips in a snaggletooth smile. The Pamiri herd dogs have the look and reputation of fighters, but the few we’ve met have been soppy. I wonder if it will be a different story if we find one away from the settlements. We get to find out soon enough, when scrambling down a mountain path we meet the Hound of the Baskervilles heading up, a collar of nails and a face full of scars. Alone with the livestock, on guard against wolves and snow leopards. Shit. What to do? Running is suicide and there’s nothing to climb. But there is no need: the tail wags and a tongue protrudes from the grizzled face. A bouncing welcome greets us. Once again, appearance and reputation count for little. A lesson worth refreshing.

Aside from implements for cooking and eating, there are few industrially produced objects here. A toy boat made from a fish tin. A pair of binoculars for watching the herds on the slopes. This is a family not yet absorbed by the great global sprawl of capitalism. They inhabit an independent, insular system. Money is not a part of their daily life. If cash is acquired it will be stashed away for a rainy day or, if they are optimists, a special occasion. The buck literally stops here. Much the same can be said of the country as a whole, for Tajikistan has a near-dead-end economy. It is the poorest country in Central Asia. The national economy depends on cotton growing and aluminium production; the first a relic of Soviet planning, the second controlled by the president’s immediate family. But this is only the surface. The export of heroin – smuggled from neighbouring Afghanistan – may comprise as much as a third of the Tajik economy. Some estimates say half. Either way, jobs – both legal and illegal – are scarce. Many households depend solely on funds sent home by relatives working in Russia. This relationship with Russia has produced a rarity in that none of our hosts speak English. Pamiri is spoken by all, Tajik by some. The young and ambitious learn Russian. We have seemingly passed beyond Western influence.

The sky is still and bright, but indigo shadows drift up the slopes around us. Night rises to the mountain tops as the goats are brought home, shepherded by brothers and dogs. A short while later, and with no accompanying shepherds, the cows return. Until the cows come home. The old saying suddenly seems wonderful. The cows are not led home; they come home. The cows decide the time. Our ancestors measured their evenings by the rhythms of clockwork cows. As we do now, retreating indoors from the cold. Dried dung is thrust into the stove. A candle stub is lit beside the doorway. Soon the heat is stifling.

In the morning, the cows are gone, and the children have gone with them. Butter is being churned and bread has been baked. The grandfather is still coughing at breakfast. I suspect he is dying. There is nowhere to hide from death up here; no hospitals, no village healer. I doubt he even has religion. The family seems too isolated, and religion needs numbers. But they must have stories. I would love to hear them. I wonder if the grandfather can recall a time when the valley was buried beneath its attendant glacier. But this is a question too complex for gestures.

The fresh bread is delicious. The dough was mixed with yogurt. It has given the bread a shine and a sharp tang. I am instructed that I must never turn my bread upside down, because it is bad luck: a good thing to know, because we have a long way to go and need luck. The world is still big here. No roads, no cars, no phones, no news, no advertisements, no money, and, of course, no medicine. Perhaps all these things will reach here one day, but it is more likely that the last herders will go to them. It is a hard life. Harder still once you know how the rest of the world lives. The city already beckons, and the granddaughters and grandsons will go. I hope they grow up clever and lucky, because the city will be hard too.

It is time for us to leave. The pass ahead won’t get any easier. In a few more weeks we will leave this wide world, narrowing our horizons until nothing is left but an arm's reach to a computer screen. Back to work. Back to money and medicine.