NOTE #6 SAINTSEGSEG AND HER REINDEER

For a long time, shaman Saintsegseg knew nothing about her eldest sister, who had been left behind in the Soviet Union as a child. Back in the 1950s, when a handful of Dhuka reindeer nomad families ventured a night-time escape across the snow-covered mountains to Mongolia to save their reindeer from forced collectivisation and thus their future as a nomadic people. One more child in the Soviet orphanage system, slowly forgetting her nomadic roots and language. It was not until 60 years later that Saintsegseg met her sister. A far too brief encounter between two strangers.

Saintsegseg was born deep in the forests of the Mongolian taiga, near the border with Siberia. She was a frail, delicate child who was somehow different from the start, yet for a long time knew nothing of her destiny. Like all her siblings, she led the reindeer to the snow-covered clearings of the taiga in the morning and brought them back to the protective vicinity of their tipis in the evening. For at night, the wolves took command. Their howling is still the lullaby of the Dhuka, for whom the wolf is the border crosser between the realm of the living and the dead.

In late autumn, I flew from Vienna via Moscow to Ulan Bator, spent fourteen hours wedged in an intercity bus travelling northwest through the treeless Mongolian steppe in a snowstorm, drove for two days at walking pace in a desolate off-road vehicle across country to the Siberian border, spent the night in the yaks' herders' yurts at an altitude of three thousand metres, and, completely frozen and exhausted, covered the last stretch through the taiga forests on the back of a reindeer. I reached the dhuka shortly before dark, just before the wolves took over.

Then I stood in front of Saintsegseg and everything else was forgotten. A tiny, elderly woman with a Russian headscarf and a lined Mongolian coat, who smiled shyly at me and spoke to me very gently in her Dhuka language, as if I could understand her. I was lucky, because her small nomadic tribe had just moved from their distant autumn camp to their lower-lying winter camp, otherwise I might never have found her. And I was doubly lucky, because I met Saintsegseg on the very day when the moon, sun and stars formed a constellation sacred to the Dhuka, enabling them to make contact with their ancestors.
 
When I arrived, it was snowing. Thick flakes swirled through the pine trees in the wind. I didn't know that the Dhuka had been waiting for this snow for weeks. Snow that is becoming increasingly rare and falling in far too small quantities due to climate change. However, the survival of the reindeer depends on snow, and the Dhuka sense that their days are numbered. Every day, they pour reindeer milk into the wind in vain to appease Mother Earth.

I only stayed with Saintsegseg for two nights. On the second night, she danced and sang to summon the spirits, dressed in her fringed shaman costume, her drum in her hand. She asked me to present my personal request, but I had none. I am at peace with my life, have three healthy children and an uncanny happiness that accompanies me constantly. Saintsegseg nevertheless predicted a happy future for me and told me to stop eating such spicy food. I secretly cursed the Mongolian spirits and decided to follow the advice anyway, because if I wanted to believe in my happy future, I had to believe in everything else too. Shortly before my departure, Saintsegseg introduced me to her ‘sacred reindeer’. A sublime grey-white animal that only the spirits were allowed to ride. As I said goodbye, I asked Saintsegseg wistfully whether I would return. She looked at me for a while and then said: in the next three years. I am now clinging to this glimmer of hope as I slowly leave the Siberian taiga and the Mongolian steppe dotted with hills behind me. A tiny part of my soul remained with Saintsegseg. I will bring it home someday.