A Hunger Turns On in Their Blood

We come around a bend and the landscape opens up. Down on the dusty plain hundreds of people are already gathered, a large rectangular area marked off and the spectators clustered around the edges. People coming from all over Bayan-Olgii Province, from as far north as the Siberian border, from places a two-day drive away or even a week on foot. This is their chance to show off their birds and to gather tips and pointers, to see friends old and new. On Chala’s arm her eagle unfolds its wings and gives a shriek as if to announce its arrival.

We ride into the thick of things. I can feel the eaglers eyeing each other. Despite the fact that almost two hundred square kilometers are represented, most of the challengers know one another. Chala’s older brother Kirill rides beside Uncle, filling him in on the details of each competitor. He points out a man resplendent in regalia lined with the silver fur of a wolf, the man sparkling in the sunlight. Kirill mentions that the man wins last year’s competition and is favored to win this year as well. I can see that the hood his bird wears contains coral and silver embedded in the black leather. It makes the bird look like a warrior, like something out of the age of warlords and Khaans.

Kirill says there is grumbling among the eaglers about the way the man in the silver fur treats his bird. Though no one can say for sure, allegedly the bird the man flies is with him for more than ten years, some saying as many as fifteen. Tradition dictates that when a man partners with a bird for ten years, he must kill a sheep and lay the carcass on a mountainside as an offering of thanks. Then he must untie the strings attached to the eagle’s feet, unhood the creature one last time, and let her go. Each eagle must be given the chance to live her own life, start her own family. Because the birds are often taken as fledglings, at ten years of age the females, which are the ones trained due to their larger size, begin to grow restless. A hunger turns on in their blood. Despite this call of nature, Kirill says there are stories of eagles returning to their handlers after being released. One famous story says that during one winter’s killing zud, which left half the area’s livestock dead, as one family teeters on the brink of starvation, from time to time they wake to find a dead rabbit or fox outside their door, each body with the telltale talon marks at the back of the neck.

The fact that this man in the silver fur hunts with the same eagle for so many years gives him an unfair advantage, says Kirill. Raising a new bird is time consuming. As we ride by, Aibek shoots the man a look of such disdain, as if the man is his inferior, that for a moment I imagine Aibek riding in a palanquin through the streets of Lhasa, a regent on his way to see his king.

Karim runs her fingers through the fur of her son’s coat, smoothing the hair. It’s hot, and standing in the sun in a landscape with few trees, I don’t envy him. He holds still and lets his mother fawn over him. At one point she licks a finger and wipes his face, though I cannot see any dirt. Chala doesn’t wear any of the traditional clothes of the eagle hunter. All she wears is the special leather glove. Despite its thickness, the bird can still crush her wrist, exerting almost three thousand kilopascals with its talons.