We turned off-road for the last ten miles, jouncing along on rutted dirt, pluming reddish dust. It’s best to go by Land Cruiser, as my guide and I did. If the road is intact and the weather is decent, you can usually reach Hustai within two hours. The summer-green hills of the western Tov province begin just after the last gas station, the last cluster of gers, the last spewing smokestacks, the last of the human street-sweepers standing amid madcap traffic, swinging huge, witchy, straw broomsticks at dusty curbs in utter, sweaty futility. But, as I discovered recently, town becomes country abruptly in Mongolia. It seemed astonishing to me that such a wild thing lived so close to a city of 1.4 million people. There are roughly 2,000 takhi in the world right now, and the largest number of them live at Hustai National Park, within 60 miles of Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar. Other horses that are thought of as wild are in fact feral.
While it has been captured and occasionally confined to zoos, it has never been tamed-it is the only truly wild horse in existence.
You don’t ride the takhi, or stable it, or-pony-like as the horse appears-saddle it up and perch children on it at birthday parties. This animal is generally known as “Przewalski’s horse” (pronounced shuh-VAL-skee), or “P-horse,” for short, but Mongolians call it takhi, which means spirit, or worthy of worship. Not so long ago, the species, once prolific on the Central Asia steppe, was one cruel winter, one hungry wolf pack, one outbreak of disease away from extinction. For this to happen, you would have to be in Mongolia, Kazakhstan, China or Russia, the only places the horse lives anymore in the wild. If you were able to observe this creature in person, which is hard to do, given that they live in only a few places on earth, you would find it in a family network-a harem-with a dominant stallion watching over mares and their offspring, in groups of 5 to 15. The babies are often pale gray, and woolly like lambs, and while any sensible human would immediately want to pet one, if not outright hug it, wolves see lunch. A matching line runs like a racing stripe all the way down the horse’s back. Its muzzle is white, its mane black and bristly, erect as a fresh-cut mohawk. Its body is the color of a stirred cappuccino, but the legs are dark, as if dressed in stockings. The holy animal of Mongolia is big-headed and stocky, like a pudgy foal that overgrew in odd places.
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