Sarah Konoski

They're farmers and they're trying to earn a living.

But yeah, the horses come together and they watch over them and then they go out and search for pasture and the horses will find pasture or they won't.

And sometimes, yeah, as winter progresses, as we observed, it got really hard to penetrate the hard ice and the horses really struggled.

We were at base camp for some time and it was necessary to send dead batteries and cards for media back to that base camp where there was a generator and things like this.

And so those things would be delivered to us every couple of days.

So we were with the herders, even much more remote than base camp.

but maybe another day on from base camp and base camp was already felt like the end of the world.

So yeah, if a storm came though and the weather was bad or there was a breakdown of one of the cars,

we went without cards or batteries and sometimes food as well.

And the herders observed this and they started giving us some of their food if they had enough.

And as horses began to die, actually, we ate horse meat, which was incredibly confronting and our bodies really didn't agree with it.

But, you know, it kept everyone alive.

And it certainly wasn't as though they were killing horses to eat them.

It was just this is possible sustenance from an animal that has died.

they just didn't seem to be self-conscious and I think it it felt like a lot of Mongolians we met were just so centered and sort of they knew themselves in some way even the boys in a way they had a confidence and the camera didn't didn't throw them but also I think just spending so many days and so many hundreds of hours with them they just get used to you and

And that was important.

But we would start the day in a little huddle, you know, nose to nose, forehead to forehead.

It was quite intimate.

And although we weren't speaking the same language, we learned to speak often without words and with gestures and smiles and cheeky twinkling eyes.

You know, there was a lot of communication that it felt as though we were talking.