Valerian yearns for the past, when kencheeri grew well, the temperature changed gradually as fall moved to the deep cold winter, about 30 centimeters of snow fell in autumn and stayed on the ground, and the winter proceeded with no wind. “If the snow is less than that, they can’t work, and they go from place to place and get thin.” “Horses need 30 to 40 centimeters of snow to work and dig so they don’t freeze,” Valerian explained. Horses now seek shelter from the wind in the adjacent forest, where they stand hungry and cold, growing sickly. The risk of freezing has further intensified due to increasingly bitter and strong winds brought on by climate change. No kencheeri means horses need supplemental feeding earlier in the winter months.Īnother key to the horses’ survival is their constant movement: Digging and grazing across the fields generates the heat the horses need to withstand the winter. Now kencheeri rarely grows due to droughts or floods in late summer, both of which are further exacerbated by an elongated fall season characterized by freezes and thaws. Valerian explained that before climate change, kencheeri could be found all winter and provided horses their main nutrition.
Kencheeri stays green under the snow and is what horses dig for. One of the keys to survival for horses in this frigid environment is kencheeri (literally translated as “aftermath”), which is the grass that grows after the July hay harvest by Indigenous Sakha communities. Each meeting since then he has repeated the same mantra: “ Khaar sylgy jiete,” or “Snow is horses’ home.” It was not until 2005, when I began documenting the life history of Valerian Yegorovich Afanaseev, a sylgyhyt (professional horse breeder), that I learned the intimate connection horse breeding has to Sakha’s extreme ecosystem. Driving to the next village one day, I found myself transfixed by a group of horses in a wide field rhythmically digging under the snow. It was 1993, and I lived in Elgeeii on the banks of the Viliui River. One of the most distinct memories from my first winter in the Sakha Republic of northeastern Siberia, Russia, is how horses grazed in the minus 50-degree Celsius winter.
0 kommentar(er)
