From the hindquarters of the goat that kneels in the cold shade a black liquid sac slips onto the shit & dirt where the goat licks it & it drains like bile like anger to reveal itself as a dim squirming thing with tiny bright white hooves & bleating. Still being licked it crawls off gimping on its four broken bird’s legs uphill from the wet steaming spot as if from shame while from the fur above another black sac drops.

A long wide snowy valley ringed by mountains sharp & low, like the great open jaws of a dead god. Inga is our imperturbable guide/cook & Tascar is our driver, steering the Range Rover though the snowdrifts & endless swirling non-roads with loose precision. We stay overnight with a nomadic goatherd family whose lovely ger (yurt) glows at sundown like a little white circus tent. The mother & father wear the traditional long robes (deel) & golden sashes (bus). Their toddler girl chases down newborn sheep & goats & hauls them around with round-faced glee.

Cold springtime! Severed goat hooves in the dirt. Vertebrae & horns & all variety of animal bits are scattered about among discarded Sprite bottles & new-age waste. A few cows & horses lie frozen & arched, half-covered by duvets of snow.

Days blend. On the road there’s nobody for hours. Now & then a hawk seated beside the road. We veer around two monks sitting cross-legged on the asphalt. A man speeds past in the snow on a low-powered motorcycle, fur gloves fixed to the handlebars, in his deel & bus & ornate hat as if he’d just buzzed out of the 12th century. On the Ogii Lake, ragged snowdrifts like the bleached & smashed mandibles of goats. Ice fishermen in the distance. Blue Buddhist ribbons wrapped around frigid trees. The ice creaks wetly, bleerk, bleerk, blaark. I am worn out. My knee is twisted & swollen. I lost my favorite ring.

Inside a ger, women feed the stove with dung. On a solar-powered black & white TV, the famous Mongolian sumo wrestler Asashōryū Akinori—ancient, unsmiling, like a late Marlon Brando—has returned from Japan & holds forth to reporters in an eloquent whisper. We are spectres under the oculus, in smoky blue-grey dusk. Inga, after speaking to her boyfriend who’s in Korea, sits by herself in the starry dark in her fur hat, singing softly. All night the goats cry like baby humans.

Hills of frozen animals along the road attest to the coldest winter in fifty years. On the vast grey plains, under mountains that will never unthaw, a cow wearing a leather blanket grazes beside the corpses of her dead ancestors. Starlings crisscross like whims. Ravens, mock-khaans of this bright inferno, prance atop a pile of horses trussed in a motionless gallop, as if straining to haul themselves out of this white sea of death.

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