Why this book

Her people are the Evenki — reindeer herders who for three centuries roamed the forests along the Argun River, in China's far northeast, worshipping fire and the shaman's drum. This is the elegy of the last clan to come down from those mountains.

The Story

I was born in a reindeer-skin tent beneath the stars, daughter of the hunter Linke and my mother Tamara. We followed the reindeer as they searched for moss and lichen, and because the herd never stopped moving, neither did we.

My father's brother, Nidu, was our shaman and keeper of the sacred drum. But Nidu loved my mother in silence, therefore a bitterness sat between the two brothers that I felt long before I understood it, while my elder sister Lena and I only played among the reindeer calves.

One killing winter the game vanished and we went hungry, therefore little Lena weakened and fell into a fever that would not break. Nidu beat his drum through the night and begged the spirits to take a reindeer fawn in her place — and by dawn the fawn lay dead, but Lena opened her eyes.

Yet the spirits only lend a life; they do not give it. Years later Lena rode half-asleep through the cold and slipped from her reindeer into the snow. We found her frozen where she fell, therefore my first lesson was that the forest gives and the forest takes.

My father Linke was proud and strong, but the sky itself claimed him: caught on a high ridge in a summer storm, he was struck by lightning and died. Therefore Nidu, still grieving and still longing, at last took my widowed mother Tamara as his wife.

But my mother's heart never turned to Nidu. One night, dressed again in the wedding robe she had worn for Linke, Tamara danced alone beside the fire until she fell, and she did not rise again. Therefore I learned that grief, too, can be a kind of hunting.

When I became a woman, a hunter named Lajide came riding after a herd of runaway reindeer and stayed for me instead. He was gentle and unafraid, therefore I married him, and for the first time the forest felt less like a place that only takes.

But one winter a prized reindeer wandered off into a rising blizzard, and Lajide would not let it die alone. He rode out into the white storm to bring it home, therefore he vanished into the driving snow while I waited by the fire.

When the blizzard broke, the men followed his trail and found him at last — frozen to death, yet still sitting upright upon his reindeer, the reins in his stiffened hands, as though he had merely paused to rest. Therefore I was widowed young, with children to raise.

Grief did not last forever. A chieftain from another clan, Valodya, came to us bearing gifts and a quiet strength, and he loved my children as his own. Because I could not herd and mourn forever, I let my heart open once more and became his wife.

My brother Luni had married Nihau, a gentle woman who became our clan's new shaman. But Nihau's gift carried a terrible price: each time she danced to pull a dying soul back from death, one of her own children would be taken in exchange. Therefore every rescue was also a burial.

Once a feverish boy from a passing family lay dying, and his parents begged Nihau to save him. She knew what it would cost, but she took up the drum anyway — and as the stranger's boy grew strong, her own small son fell from a tree and died. Yet she never refused a single soul.

Then the wider world came climbing into our mountains. Japanese soldiers marched into the forest, conscripted our men, and drilled them like animals. Because we knew the taiga and they did not, some of us survived by guiding and some by hiding — but the old peace was broken forever.

Valodya led us through those years as chieftain, but the forest claimed him as it claimed the others. Hunting to feed the clan, he was set upon by a bear and killed. Therefore I buried a second husband, and the weight of leading what remained fell partly upon me.

Worse than any soldier were the gifts the outsiders left behind. Strangers brought liquor and sicknesses our bodies had never known, therefore some of our men drank themselves hollow, and some coughed out their lives from plagues no shaman's drum could dance away.

My aunt Yveline had grown bitter over long years, for her husband's heart had always belonged to another woman and she had borne him no living child. Therefore she nursed her resentment like a coal, and when a settlement town was built below, she was the first to long for its walls.

In time the government built a settlement at the foot of the mountains and asked us to come down — to live in fixed houses, to pen our reindeer, to send our children to school. Because they meant kindness, many believed them, and one by one our tents fell empty.

Yveline went down eagerly to the town she had dreamed of. But the penned reindeer sickened without their open moss-lands, the neighbors mocked her forest ways, and the walls she had longed for only closed around her loneliness. Therefore the heartbreak she fled the mountains to escape was simply waiting for her below.

Nihau danced one last time when a great drought set the forest smoldering. She beat her drum for rain to save the trees and the beasts, and the rain came down in torrents — but this time the soul the spirits took in payment was her own.

Even those who stayed near me could not hold the old ways whole. My grandchildren's tongues slipped toward the city's language, and the stories I told them thinned in the retelling. Because the young must live in the world that is, the world that was survives only in an old woman's mouth.

At last the day came when the others gathered their reindeer and walked down the mountain toward the settlement for good. They asked me to follow, but I could not trade the sky for a ceiling. Therefore I stayed behind in the forest with a handful of reindeer and my memories.

What it means

To us the fire was alive — a god we never let die, carried in embers from camp to camp. We spoke to the wind, read the clouds, and laid our dead in the branches of trees so the spirits could lift them skyward. This was not superstition; it was how we belonged to the world.

With Lajide I bore children and knew an ordinary joy — the smell of birch smoke, the warmth of reindeer milk, the drum of hooves at dawn. We moved with the seasons, and because the herd was healthy, our small band lived without fear for a while.

For our reindeer are not cattle; they cannot be fenced. In the settlement they refused their fodder and grew thin, and their bells fell silent one by one. Because a herder without a herd is only a ghost, I understood that to go down was to slowly disappear.

And so I have told you my life across a single day, from the morning light to this last quarter of the moon. The fire burns low, the reindeer breathe in the dark, and I remain — the last keeper of a world the rest of the mountains have already forgotten.

This is what the book leaves in your hands: that when a people is asked to trade its mountains for comfort, something irreplaceable dies quietly — a language, a god, a way of seeing. Progress is real, but so is everything it forgets to carry with it.

🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.