A Wandering Family: How To Shear a T Sheep

So we still have some pictures left from our time out at the ranch and I figured I'd share them with you rather than more pictures of what we're up to since we got back (which is mostly pretty boring). The one group of pictures I didn't post last time were from the sheep shearing, which is a major operation when you don't have electric shears and you have 200 sheep to shear.

You start by telling your 5 year old to go and catch you a sheep "to get a haircut." He of course starts by herding all the sheep into the corner of the pen:

Then you have to convince him to grab one of them, which is tricky since the one-year old sheep are almost as big as he is. Eventually he snags one (one of the ones that still needs his haircut, of course), and drags it over:

Then you pick up your shears, which are basically a primitive scissors, all rusted from their time sitting around since last year. They're called "khachy."

Then you have tie the sheep's legs up and have your kids hold down the head, and proceed to start slicing off the wool, bit by bit. The process, for the two or three people in the world who care, is called "kyrgar."

(Out of curiosity, is this what you had, David? Or is it "kyrgaar"? One person swore that you "kyrgyp turar," while someone else told us you "kyrgap turar." Do you remember which one you had in your notebook?)

It's a pretty laborious process, but a T person who knows what they're doing can do a pretty good job in about 20 minutes. It took me about 40, once I got the hang of it, because at first I was trying to keep up with them and gave one of the sheep a nice slice on the leg. Better to go slow, I decided.

Here you can see a sheared sheep standing next to some non-sheared sheep for contrast. Apparently the main motivator behind the shearing is not selling the wool, which is next to worthless here (our hosts sell theirs for 30 cents a kilo).

It's to make sure that the sheep doesn't sweat off a lot of the fat he's supposed to be building during the summer grazing. A wooly sheep is a sweaty sheep, I guess, and a sweaty sheep is a skinny sheep, and that's obviously no good.

Another daily task was the cleaning of the sheep and cow pens after their overnight stay. This involved hardy brooms (for the sheep pens) and shovels (for the cow pens), and usually we ended up with about 6 or 7 wheelbarrow loads of poop to dump.

In the winter the animals obviously don't go out to forage (too much snow and too cold), so they stay in the pens all day. No sweeping/shoveling.

That means that you can later go and dig out all the compacted dung, which is a very important thing, as it serves as "firewood" to keep you warm the next winter. Here Steven stands next to the pile of cut dung, which we used to heat the yurt on cold nights.

So, then, what did we do all day while the folks were out with the animals and we were home alone? A lot of this:

And this (Matthew is of course modeling the very latest in "yurt fashion": rubber boots, underwear, and a baseball cap):

Sometimes the kyrgan achai would come home for lunch, and once he gave the boys a little ride around the yard, which they thought was the greatest thing ever. At some point we might try to buy a horse for them/for us to get into the culture even more.