Settled Herds, Wandering Diseases | Notes from the Ordos Grasslands

But just before I reached Jirimutu’s home, the old, underpowered car bogged down in the sand and refused to budge.

The edge of the Mu Us Desert encroaches on the south-eastern reaches of S Banner’s grasslands. Between the small stands of poplar planted by herders over a dozen years and more, patches of stark white “bare sand dunes” can still be seen. Come spring, the sand drifts with the wind, piling into mounds along the lee of the fixed dunes, leaving inexperienced new drivers utterly helpless. I had no choice but to phone Jirimutu for help. Later, the herders taught me how to punch through a sand drift: grip the steering wheel tight and build up speed well before you hit it, powering straight through.

I sat on a dune that looked entirely free of debris, waiting for rescue. The fierce sun climbed steadily higher, scorching the earth, yet there was nowhere nearby to find a patch of shade — only scattered clumps of willow-leafed mugwort and sand wormwood, tender green new shoots wrapping around their yellowed stems.

After nearly an hour, Jirimutu arrived. On the remaining stretch of less than eight kilometres to our destination, we climbed in and out of the vehicle fourteen times — each one an exercise in opening and closing a wire-fence gate.

II.

In 1983, the Inner Mongolia Party Committee convened a region-wide meeting of banner secretaries, which resolved that, building on existing arrangements, herds should be gradually placed under a responsibility system whereby livestock would be “priced and assigned to households, repaid in instalments, privately owned and privately reared.”

After the “livestock-to-household” contracting system had been running for a while, the Autonomous Region Grassland Management Regulations were revised and promulgated to reform grassland ownership, stipulating that “the right to use grasslands, together with their management, protection, utilisation and development, shall be contracted under a responsibility system to grassroots production units or individual operators, so that the grassland responsibility system is linked with the livestock rearing and management responsibility system.” On the basis of these Grassland Management Regulations, boundaries were drawn around the grasslands, grassland use rights were assigned to households or groups, suitable carrying capacities were determined, and livestock numbers were set according to the grass available — this was the “dual grassland-and-livestock contracting” system.

Wire-mesh fencing gradually “covered” the grasslands as the dual grassland-and-livestock contracting took hold. The fencing was made up of thin wire and short, low posts: at each post, five or six wires were bound in parallel at set intervals. How far apart the posts stood, how many wires ran side by side, what the posts were made of — rough-hewn wood or concrete pillars — all depended on what a household could afford. And so, in the early days after the grasslands were contracted out, wire-mesh fencing also marked the gap between rich and poor among herding households.

Nowadays, wire-mesh fencing marks the boundary line of every grassland plot, and the gates on rural roads that must be opened and shut time and again are the only means of passing from one household’s grassland to another’s. During my time on the Ordos grasslands I often felt a sense of being hemmed in and cramped; the rare stretches of flat lowland glimpsed between the dunes were carved up into small parcels by dense wire-mesh fencing and gate after gate.

This sense of confinement moved a local poet-herder to write “Forty-Four Fulls”:

Qashuulun — grasslands sealed behind wire-mesh fencing — fill the open fields, haze shrouds the towns;

Debts crush the herders, gold and silver brim their pockets;

Wells speckle the lowlands, roads blanket the pasture;

Ghosts crowd the buildings, wire fences ring the grasslands;

Gates line every road, wool snags every caragana;

…

By midday we had finally reached Jirimutu’s home. Over lunch, I asked him how the flock of his neighbour and cousin Dalai was faring.

On a spring day thick with wind and blowing sand, Dalai had phoned Station Chief De at the K Sumu Animal Quarantine Station. One of Dalai’s ewes had been listless for a full day — not eating, not drinking. It was the height of the busy spring immunisation period, but Station Chief De found a window to drive out with his colleague and fellow veterinarian Chingele to see the sick animal. Upon reaching Dalai’s place, Station Chief De and Chingele went straight to the pen where the ailing ewe stood.

Station Chief De retrieved the metal detector from the back seat of the Great Wall–brand pickup truck that the station had been issued. The handheld scanner he held was identical to the ones used at railway stations, airports and underground stations to screen passengers. Veterinarians typically use it to detect metal objects inside the bodies of cattle and sheep. But if the ingested metal has passed deeper into the digestive tract and into the viscera beyond, the detector will fail to register it. Station Chief De swept the scanner over the sick ewe from head to tail twice; it gave no reading at all. It was a two-year-old ewe with rather short legs, lying with its head hung low on dark, brownish-black sand strewn with the herd’s droppings. Having quickly ruled out accidental metal ingestion, the vets turned to the possibility that the ewe had swallowed plastic.

Accidental plastic ingestion could not be entirely ruled out, nor entirely confirmed, so Station Chief De advised Dalai to drench the ailing ewe with a bottle of castor oil. Dalai picked up a green beer bottle wedged in a gap in the pen fence and set off towards his baixing (Mongolian; a term everyone locally uses for one’s dwelling) to fetch the oil.

After the castor oil had been given, the small group waited about half an hour outside the pen. The ewe showed no urge to defecate, but it rose to its feet and seemed to be looking for something to eat. This eased the grave look on everyone’s faces. If it could eat, the worst was over.

Dalai invited us inside for tea. Once we had finished, Dalai climbed into Station Chief De’s truck and headed back to the sumu with us to buy some anti-inflammatory oral medication at the veterinary pharmacy.

 

IV.

Very early the next morning I arrived at the Animal Quarantine Station to meet Station Chief De. The moment he had taken Dalai’s phone call, a deep crease appeared between his brows. We made brief preparations and drove straight back to Dalai’s place. The ewe that had stood up the previous day and begun eating on its own was now far weaker. Lying beside the short-legged ewe was another sheep showing precisely the same symptoms. Station Chief De went over, turned back the sick ewe’s eyelid, palpated its belly and listened to its heart; the crease between his brows never smoothed. The diagnosis made two days earlier — swallowed plastic — was likely wrong. Station Chief De redirected his suspicion back to “swallowed wire.” Wire that had been ingested was very likely already beyond the reach of a simple metal detector, carried by peristalsis deeper into the gut.

This time Station Chief De advised Dalai to perform a necropsy on one of the sheep to confirm the cause. Dalai hesitated. The two sick ewes were young, at their prime for breeding. He decided to wait one more day, to try some anti-inflammatory “clearing the heat” medicine (the “heat” referred to by Mongolian veterinarians is not the same as the Chinese concept of shanghuo; it denotes a feverish condition), and to pin his hopes on the curative power of the veterinary drugs. After the consultation, we did not go inside for tea but climbed into the vehicle and drove off directly.

On the third day, I went to the pharmacy run by Dayang — a veterinary assistant and fellow vet at the Animal Quarantine Station — and his wife, looking for Station Chief De. When I arrived, Dalai was already there, waiting for him as well. That day I did not accompany the Station Chief on any house calls. When I returned to the Animal Quarantine Station after his day’s work was done, he told me that Dalai had finally agreed to the necropsy.

The necropsy confirmed Station Chief De’s second judgement: the ewes had swallowed wire.

As the wire works its way through the sheep’s various stomach compartments, it abrades and can even perforate the gastric wall; and because of the honeycomb-like folds within the stomach, it is prone to becoming lodged there, causing peritonitis as well as lesions and debilitation in other organs. Affected sheep commonly lose their appetite, go limp in the limbs, ruminate sluggishly and pass little dung. These symptoms spread from the first two ewes to the entire flock. Most of the affected animals were pregnant.

5

Clearly, wire is now found everywhere on the grasslands. Every year, in late summer and early autumn, repairing and rebuilding wire-mesh fences becomes a major task of pastoral life. After enduring the spring winds and blowing sand, the blazing summer sun, and the rains and snows of autumn and winter, fine wires no thicker than a few millimetres easily weather, fatigue and snap. Discarded and aged lengths of wire drift on the wind into every corner.

At least until the 1950s, and continuing through the People’s Commune period that followed, the herders of S Banner practised migratory herding. Spring work was arduous; although the weather was broadly trending towards warmth, cold spells still struck. Moreover, after a hard winter the herds were at their weakest in terms of Tarigu (Mongolian: body condition — the fat and flesh on their backs). A herd’s Tarigu governed their Taimir (Mongolian: vitality — life force and vital pulse). Taimir determined their strength and their immunity.

At that juncture, the pasture lay in the gap between last season’s growth spent and new growth not yet come. The winter silage was nearly used up, while the spring grasslands needed timely warm-season rains before they would green again. Ordos herders would set aside, not far from the winter pasture, an ungrazed stretch of grassland offering shade as their spring pasture. A plot thick with early-sprouting willow-leafed mugwort, white wormwood, feather grass, alkali grass and sheep grass was all the better.

By this season the herders began using the pens on the spring pasture, freeing themselves from the winter shelters and the Shiig (Mongolian: the compacted, dung-mixed soil long trampled hard beneath livestock in a pen). This choice also made it easier for herders to haul water from the settlement out to the spring grasslands.

Once wire-mesh fencing went up, the radius of rotational grazing shrank, and migratory herding was gradually replaced by a strategy of settling without truly grazing. The grassland area contracted to each household could not support dividing it into separate seasonal pastures. The better grassland had to be saved for summer and autumn, when the herd needed to build up its condition.

The settlement was no longer used only in winter but had become a dwelling occupied in all four seasons. Along the tide of sedentarisation, herders built shelters ever warmer, ever more windproof and rainproof. The herds could only move within their owners’ qashuulun, never reaching the different plant species on grasslands further afield.

In year after year of drought and ever-denser sandstorms, the herds trod track after track along the wire-mesh fencing. Their underfed bellies were “filled” or “supplemented” with modern compound feed, dried forage, and cultivated fodder crops. Sturdy iron feed troughs, filled each day at a fixed hour with compound feed and dry hay, are the perfect hiding place for wire segments tumbling on the wind.

A young veterinarian told me, “Every year, whether it is cattle or sheep, there are an extremely high number of wire-induced gastric perforation cases — especially in spring.” In cattle, gastric perforation can usually be repaired by surgery in most cases, and further, placing a magnet in the rumen can prevent wire and other metal objects from migrating within the body. But for sheep, with their far smaller frames, the trauma of a laparotomy to extract wire outweighs the illness itself.

Most of the ewes in Dalai’s flock showed only mild traumatic symptoms. Beyond trying to save the severely affected few, there was nothing left but to rely on the rest of the flock’s Taimir to pull them through. Fortunately, Jirimutu said, Dalai lost only a handful of sheep; things did not turn graver than that, and they came through the spring more frightened than hurt.

Author Profile

Urihan

From Tongliao, Inner Mongolia; PhD in anthropology.