Or three days with Kabardian horse shepherds.

 

This article is written based on my notes made during several trips to Kabardino-Balkar Republic and many days spent in the mountains with horses. I hope this gives our readers some ideas about how Kabardian horses are bred nowadays and how people live there.

About 30 km from Elbrus area crowded with tourists there is a bit forgotten but beautiful Tyzyl Gorge, starting from Balkarian village Gundelen. The Tyzyl river which starts from springs close to the Elbrus slopes then enters gigantic gate between Western Kenjal (Zapadni Kenjal) and Inal mountains.

The place was popular among tourists twenty years ago. They even had a special mountain hotel called Turbaza Tyzyl but in 90's number of tourists fallen down by a magnitude and the nature started to take back what once belonged to it. Electric wires were stolen, several bridges were destroyed by the river and the road also started to disappear bit by bit with spring floods. Now the turbaza is completely abandoned and to get there you have to walk for more than 2 km on a narrow path led on the valley slopes, hundred meters above the road destroyed by river.

The Tyzyl Gorge walls are several hundreds meters high at this point. If you look well, somewhere among the trees on steep valley slope you can find a narrow path climbing up to Dgarashly-Tala plateau with interesting, pink limestone caves. Still higher from them you can see a distant peak of 2990 m high Inal mountain.

Horse farm at 2500 meters high?

Brothers Arkadi and Ibragim Yaganov, national Kabardians, have chosen Inal mountain as summer pastures for their herds. In mountains in Kabarda you can find thousands of hectars of excellent, alpine pastures at heights above 2000 meters. Up to 3000 meters the grass is green and full of herbs, though not very tall. There are almost no flies, no ticks, air is fresh and temperature is just accurate even in the plains it's as high as 35 Centigrade degrees.

Each year in early spring several groups of horses, usually more than 150 heads in total, start their long walk from a farm in Nartan, village close to Nalchik, to the Inal plateau. The trip is about 120 km long and takes minium two days. Even foals walk this way, with the help of shepherds who assist the moving herd, and under careful eye of their mothers.

When the first signs of winter come  the breeders start moving the herds from the mountains back to the farms in valleys. This operation is usually performed in October.

After entering mountain area the herd starts climbing the Tyzyl Gorge to the point where steep ascend to the Inal mountain starts. From there horses climb one by one on the narrow and stony path, eventually rising to the summer pastures which are located at around 2500 m over the sea level.

In 2002 our friend, French journalist Catherine Michelet made a great documentary film from the the trip and from the mountains. With her permission we have published the movie and you can download  it from Multimedia section (Chevals sans Frontieres in Kabarda).

Equine families

In the mountains horses live naturally in social groups - herds, called tabun in Russian. There are different types of herds, depending of whom they consist of. Typical family herd consisting of one stallion and 5-30 mares-mothers is called kasyak.

Another type of herd called molodnyak consists only of young stallions (up to 1-2 years old) and geldings. Here you can find mostly youngsters and horses in different ages who were sent for holidays for different reasons. For example, working horses who have some kinds of temporary health problems (saddle rubs or from various accidents) are usually sent for "rehabilitation" and live free with molodnyak for some time or for whole season.

Watching horses in mountains is amazing. Horses in their natural environment and with no limitations of their movement are perfectly relaxed and you can see all forms of their social life. At this point you realize how limited it is "down there" in our stables and small paddocks!

Movement

Because the mountain pastures on Inal are naturally limited by several hundred meter high cliffs, there's no need to make fences and limit horses movement. For us, people from the West, where a paddock of 100 square meters is called "relatively big", the freedom of horses in Caucasus is shocking. Even really large horse farms in Europe have something like 500 hectars of pastures. Here, on Inal mountain, horses can graze on more than 70'000 hectars.

With three separate equine families (kasyaks) and one youngsters gang (molodnyak) important questions is whether there are no conflicts? Surprisingly, no. The leader stallions always choose direction which will not collide with other herd's movement. In the beginning of season each herd chooses one area, naturally bounded by valleys, streams and other natural barriers and generally keeps to this area.

In the Inal area there are three main ridges, each several kilometers long, all starting from large plains under the top of Inal mountain and softly going down to the cliffs of Tyzyl Gorge. Usually each stallion naturally chooses one ridge for his herd and they keep this "gentleman agreement". When on herd comes closer to the place where all ridges meet, the other goes to the other end. This way there's no envy, no stealing of ladies, no scandals and no fight.

Usually the herds are living completely uncontrolled. But this doesn't mean they live with no supervision. Each day a shephard has to count them remotely using binocles to make sure no-one is missing. If the weather is foggy he has to use a work horse, search for the herds on each of the ridges and count them from closer distance. Usually this takes several hours. If you think it's long - it's not that easy to find a herd of horses on a ridge which is itself as big as a small mountain and full of small valleys, hills and gorges.

 

In the next part I describe how horses cope with natural dangers, how they fight with wolves and other stories from the mountains.