Sarah Konoski

Look, I think it's one of the ways that they bond with the horse, but they just take such incredible pride in the horse and the horse's appearance and their own as well.

There was always time.

you know, for Sagana to, he carried a comb in his top pocket and, you know, underneath that baseball hat, you know, he had immaculate combed hair, even at, you know, in the most ridiculous storm and at minus 50, very well presented.

And the horses too, they just looked after.

They had a great sort of pride in their herd, which they were tasked by their community to protect over five months.

And so they would ride them.

They had their favourites and they would ride them like a bat out of hell.

Yeah, I mean, we didn't realise at the time, but it was Mongolia's harshest winter on record with 7.4 million deaths of cattle, you know, horses and sheep and cows, yaks, etc.

And many herders displaced.

We were so remote and we didn't have our finger on the news at all.

But it makes sense when you look at what our herders were dealing with on a day-to-day basis.

A horse died nearly every day because of the wild swings in weather from hot to cold.

Well, when I say hot, it's like minus 10, let's say, but then minus 50s.

You would have the snow melting and then hardening, melting a little bit, then hardening.

And that would create a very hard ice that the horses couldn't penetrate.

And so they would spend too much energy trying to get through to that bit of pasture and often keel over or eventually starve.

And cold and things like that, the wind, wind chill, that they could usually maybe with the right level of fodder survive, it just made them very vulnerable.

They wanted us to keep filming, but there were several moments, particularly with Sagana, where he just wanted audio.

You know, I think there was a feeling of shame or, you know, they had some... Sagana, I know, felt a responsibility to look after these horses and felt like he'd let them down.

Of course there's nothing...