As we drove back to Galtai, I could hear the animal kicking and bucking in the trunk. “He’s a healthy young sheep,” Buyanto said. “It’s good to prepare a young sheep for guests.” In the backseat, Gary and I looked at each other. We’d been excited when Baldama Shagdanovna told us she’d found a farmer for us to profile—but we never expected this.
After a short drive, we arrived at the village, which was little more than a long dirt road lined with a couple dozen wooden houses. Buyanto’s wife Tsypelma opened their gate, and he eased the Volga into the yard. Their home was a sturdy wood structure with bright blue trim and lace curtains in the windows, but that wasn’t where we were heading. Buyanto hoisted the sheep out of the trunk, then carried it into a small room that stood apart from the main house. I hurried to follow, but not before noticing with dismay that the frightened animal had left pellets of feces in the trunk.
Buyanto laid the sheep on its back, with its forelegs stretched above its head and back legs still tied. His ten-year-old son, Beligto, held the forelegs tight while his father bent over the animal’s midsection with a large knife. With a few quick strokes, he cleared the wool from the sheep’s belly. I held my breath as Buyanto raised the knife again, but he stopped short, peering at it. He put the knife back down, then walked out of the room as the animal still lay stretched on the floor, its eyes wide open. When he returned, he was carrying a flint; the knife was, apparently, too dull for the task at hand.
Slowly, with precision, Buyanto scraped the flint a half dozen times along the blade. Then he bent once again over the sheep. As I watched, and Gary photographed, he cut a long vertical incision down the animal’s belly, then plunged his hand into the bloody opening, nearly up to his elbow. He fiddled around briefly inside the sheep’s body, then stopped, his hand still deep inside the body cavity. Both he and the sheep were completely still as the animal’s eyes turned glassy and its mouth slack; it died without a single kick or buck.
“This is how Genghis Khan taught us to kill sheep,” Buyanto said, at last withdrawing his bloody arm from the animal’s body. “By pinching shut the artery that runs along the spine.” He washed his hands, then dried them with a rag.
The sheep had barely breathed its last before the preparation of its carcass began. Buyanto first cut into the skin around its legs, then sliced upward toward its belly. Punching at fatty tissue with his fists and the knife, he began slowly to separate the animal’s skin from its body, exposing the still-twitching muscles of its thighs. Steam rose in the dimly lit room, and the air became thick with the dusky smell of mutton. Beligto and his eight-year-old sister Bayarma watched placidly as their father worked the sheepskin free.
“I was 15 years old when I killed my first sheep,” Buyanto said. “My father stood by me, telling me what I needed to do. I had seen him kill many sheep before that, and helped him like Beligto is helping me. We pass the tradition on,” he said, slicing at the fatty tissue with his knife. “It’s in the Buryat blood.”
Once the sheepskin was fully removed, Buyanto cut into the body cavity. He reached in and removed the stomach, intestines, liver, kidneys, and heart. Then he lifted out organs I didn’t recognize; looking closer, I saw that they weren’t organs at all, but enormous clots of congealed blood. Finally, with a ladle, he scooped liquid blood out of the cavity and poured it, thick and steaming, into a metal bowl. All of this would be cooked and served to the guests. The only internal parts of the sheep not eaten were the contents of the stomach and intestines, which Tsypelma was now squeezing out into a pail on the floor.
When it was time for the feast, Tsypelma brought out white china dishes loaded with boiled sheep parts. One dish held bones, mostly enormous flat ribs fringed with meat and chunks of gleaming white fat. Another held intestines, which had been emptied, cleaned, turned inside out, and wrapped tightly with narrower intestinal tubes. Others had been stuffed with gristle and fat, then sliced like roulettes. Buyanto poured everyone a shot of vodka, then raised his glass high.
“You came to us like thunder out of a clear blue sky,” he said. “Welcome.” We toasted, and he invited us to dig in. He offered us a taste of everything, remarking on the ribs, “You may be tempted to take the jawbone first,[1] but the ribs are more tasty. Clean them off as best you can. The Buryats have a saying: the cleaner the bones, the prettier your children will be.”
For the second course, Tsypelma brought out the sheep’s boiled stomach, swollen nearly to bursting with a mixture of blood and spices. Buyanto sliced it open, then passed it around so everyone could take spoonfuls of the congealed purplish-brown mixture inside. I reluctantly took my share, quickly stuffing it into my mouth and then washing it down with clear mutton bouillon. And the dishes kept coming: slices of tongue, of heart. I was simultaneously touched by Buyanto’s generosity and horrified at the volume and variety of guts I was eating.
Then, Buyanto’s elder brother remarked that in traditional Buryat culture, I would never even have been at this feast. “The women never sit at the same table with the men,” he said. “They come in only to serve the food, then they must back out of the room the way they came, so as never to turn their backsides to the men.” It was true—as hard as the Buryat women had worked to prepare the feast, I was the only woman who sat at the table that night.
With its rutted dirt roads and rustic wooden houses, Galtai seemed untouched by time. As they had for centuries, Buryat families tended small patches of land, growing cabbages, potatoes, onions, and beets in the dark earth. They milked their own cows, made butter and sour cream, and raised pigs and sheep for slaughter. The village had electricity, but there was no running water in any of the houses, so each had its own outhouse set apart from the main dwelling. Horses pulled carts down the uneven dirt roads and through the village’s single intersection.
The nearby Banner of Lenin collective farm (kolkhoz) had been the area’s main employer for decades, and Buyanto had worked there as an agronomist, organizing the planting and harvesting. He’d grown up in Galtai, one of eight brothers and two sisters, most of whom still lived nearby.
“Two and a half years ago, I had nothing,” Buyanto told me. “But when privatization of government lands began in the early 1990s, I had an opportunity to receive hundreds of hectares of land for free. Then in 1992, President Yeltsin signed a decree stating that start-up private farms could operate tax-free for a period of five years. So I decided to start my own farm. Now we have six hundred sixty-seven hectares of land, one hundred twenty cows, and three hundred sheep, and four of my brothers and their families also work on the farm.
“I am like the ‘gentleman farmers’ in English books,” he said with a laugh. His farm, which sold wheat, meat, and freshly baked bread, was already profitable, thanks in large part to Yeltsin’s tax break.
The land where Buyanto’s sheep and cattle grazed was typical of the countryside of Buryatia, with low, rolling hills and flat lands that seemed to stretch forever. In late September, Buyanto’s wheat fields were still tall with grain, even though the first snow had fallen. He and his brothers split the duties of the farm: one brother, a veterinarian, cared for the animals, another managed the wheat harvest, and another was in charge of building new structures on the farm, such as a banya (sauna) for the families and storage sheds for equipment. Buyanto managed the farm, researched the local markets, and handled all official business with the local government, which he said was very much opposed to private farming.