Little Bo Peep and Other Lies

Ten hours into the twelve hour car trip from Moron to Erdenet, the driver of our Russian van noticed an animal running across a hillside.  The low sun stretched the figure‘s shadow, and we started to argue: Wolf! Dog! Wolf? Dog!  The animal looked too small to be a wolf, and we continued along the dirt road until our sharp-eyed driver noticed a herd of sheep and goats swell, tighten, and then flee the encroaching shadow.  Wolf! We tumbled out of the van to get a better look through camera lenses, and against the dried grasses covering the hillside a wolf crouched over a freshly killed sheep.

Sheep and goats in Mongolia are indispensable to herding life.  They provide herders with wool, cashmere, leather, and food, and I have to admit this: I hate them.  The endearing stories of Little Bo Peep’s little lambs and Billy the Goat are lies.  These dirty creatures complain constantly, bleating late into the night, and they emphasize their complaints with gaseous intestinal tracts that seemed to mock me every time I had to herd them back towards the ger.  After putting up with the challenges of these animals, I thought that I would enjoy eating them out of spite, just to prove that I had the ultimate upper hand.

I began to question that upper hand the moment I started helping my family butcher a goat.  My family would butcher their goats on the floor of their ger- peeling off the animal’s hide, separating organs, severing the head- without spilling a single drop of blood.  I helped my mom and sister clean the organs.  This means I ladled water down and through lengths and lengths of intestines, cleaning out any grass that was not “fully processed” and held the stomach (turned inside out) so my sister could scrape off its weird, papery membrane with a knife.
My upper hand grew weaker when I saw exactly what parts of the goat I had to eat.  Stomach lining, liver, heart, kidney, intestines, intestines stuffed with other organs, other organs wrapped with intestines all jumbled together in a large bowl.  Thankfully, it was dark.  I sat eating, nibbling on some liver here, some stomach there, occasionally stumbling over a treasured piece of actual meat, and morbidly, I imagined the animal I was eating.  I was already intimately acquainted with it, inside and out, and I remembered poop clumps that had dried into the fur that would have been processed into a cashmere sweater.  I thought of the pitiful bleats and constant farting that I could hear as I tried to fall asleep, and slowly (very slowly) the gerdis (what I was eating) started to taste a little less awful.  Spite works in mysterious ways.
However, the smell had soaked into me, and everything I smelled or tasted had slight hints of goat.  This pervasive smell was only compounded after I spent four hours wrestling, dragging, and throwing sheep and goats into a muddy, de-tick and de-flea wash.  In some ways, it was beautiful; the sun sank below the horizon and after a nearby pond reflected the sky’s fiery array of colors, the stars began to sparkle against the night.  But, as with everything in Mongolia, those beautiful moments were contrasted by the less beautiful as each animal had to be individually dunked in this concrete canal which they all actively resisted by kicking, bleating, and running away.  And, as if the memories alone were not sweet enough, I will carry the scent of goat with me everywhere, as the smell has soaked through my boots.
Whenever we drive through a grazing herd of goats and sheep, I don’t see a hint of Bo Peep or Billy.  Instead, I glare at the weak crook of the sheeps’ necks and their weird, floppy tails, and I grimace at the sound of bleating.  I remember stray hind legs landing and hoof shaped bruises, ribbons of intestines and bowls of blood.  Sheep and goats are not warm cotton balls that will lull you to sleep; they are beasts to be sheared, herded, and eaten with a small side of accomplishment. And needless to say, when I watched the herd flee from the wolf and saw the wolf’s fluffy, woolen victory, I cheered for the wolf.