Dukha child sleeping with a reindeer, Mongolia
As the pale light of dawn crept through the thick canopy of larch and pine, a thin plume of smoke curled gently from the top of the teepee. Inside, wrapped in layers of reindeer fur, lay a young Dukha child named Suren, barely eight winters old, fast asleep beside a resting reindeer calf. Its warm breath puffed gently against the child’s neck, a rhythmic rise and fall that matched Suren’s own slumbering breaths.
For the Dukha, this was not unusual. The bond between child and reindeer was forged not by choice, but by heritage. From the moment they could walk, Dukha children learned to tend to these majestic animals—feeding them lichen, guiding them through snow-laden forests, and riding them like kin rather than livestock. For Suren, her reindeer, Bayar, was more than a companion. He was family.
Suren’s mother, Erdene, unlatched the hide flap of the teepee and let in the crisp morning air. She moved with practiced silence, careful not to wake the child or disturb Bayar. Outside, the world was hushed in a blanket of snow. Reindeer stood among the trees like silent spirits, steam rising from their flanks. Her husband, Ganbaatar, was already awake, tending to the herd, brushing off the frost from antlers and checking their hooves for signs of strain.
The family was preparing for another migration. It had been a harsh season. The moss was growing thinner, and a cold wind from the north whispered of even deeper freeze. It was time to move southward—again. It would be their sixth migration this year.
But Suren didn’t want to leave. In the days prior, she had begun to recognize the trees around her. She had built a tiny shrine of twigs and bone beads by the riverside, where she would whisper to the forest spirits like her grandmother had taught her. The spirits, she believed, had begun to whisper back. And last night, in her dreams, they showed her a vision: of her riding Bayar through the forest, not southward with her family, but deeper into the mountains, where an old woman with silver braids waited by a fire that never died.
That morning, as the family packed their few belongings—fur bedding, wooden tools, dried meat, and herbal bundles—Suren hesitated. She clung to Bayar’s neck, whispering into his ear, “The fire is still burning, Bayar. We just need to find it.”
Ganbaatar noticed her delay and chuckled. “Even the youngest Tsaatan is starting to listen to the wind,” he said, ruffling her hair. But Erdene looked more closely at her daughter’s face. She had seen that gaze before—on her own mother, who had vanished into the forest during the Long Snow and never returned. Some said she was taken by wolves. Others whispered she had become one of the shaman spirits, a soul too wild for this world.
Erdene knelt beside her daughter. “The spirits speak, yes. But they also test us. The forest gives signs, but it is the family that gives strength.”
Suren nodded solemnly but held the vision in her heart.
As days turned into weeks, the Tsaatan caravan moved through the endless white, the trees growing sparser, the winds colder. But Suren’s heart remained tethered to the fire she saw in her dreams. At night, she would wrap herself in furs beside Bayar and stare into the stars, whispering the names of ancestors as her grandmother had taught her.
One night, under the full moon, Suren awoke to Bayar nudging her awake. The rest of the camp was silent, only the crackle of the dying fire and the distant howl of wolves in the air. Bayar stared into the trees, ears alert.
“Do you hear it too?” she whispered.
A strange sensation pulled her feet forward. She didn’t feel afraid—only called. Wrapping herself in her thickest furs, Suren slipped past the slumbering shapes of her family and into the forest. Bayar followed.
They walked for hours. The moonlight guided their path. Suddenly, through the larch trees, Suren saw it—a flickering orange glow. A fire, just as in her dream. And beside it, a figure: an old woman in robes made of antlers and fur, her long silver braids resting on her chest. She looked up, not surprised, as if she had been expecting her.
“You’ve come,” the woman said. “The forest told me you would.”
Her name was Ujin, a shamaness who had once walked among the Tsaatan before disappearing into the sacred valleys of the Altai-Sayan. She told Suren that the reindeer had chosen her—not just as a rider or herder—but as a seer. One who could listen to the old spirits of the taiga. They had been watching her, and now it was time to begin her journey.
But Suren hesitated. “My family… they need me.”
Ujin smiled gently. “One day, you will return. But the forest has secrets to show you. And the fire must never go out.”
Years passed.
The Tsaatan people, battered by climate change, modernization, and dwindling reindeer numbers, grew fewer. But they spoke in hushed reverence of a girl who had vanished into the mountains one winter night. Some said wolves took her. Others believed she had been chosen.
And then, one spring, she returned.
Suren was no longer a child. She was tall, wrapped in shamanic robes, with a crown of antler fragments on her head. Bayar—now fully grown—walked beside her like a guardian spirit. She came with chants that healed wounds, with herbs that calmed reindeer births, and visions that told of storms before they came.
Her people welcomed her back not as a lost child, but as a bridge between the old ways and the future.
And so, around her, under the larch trees and the moonlight, the Tsaatan lit their fires anew.
Not just to warm the body, but to remember who they were.
