"Cook Dog"

The day after my tiptoeing adventure, they showed me a giant bowl of gross-looking broth with large bones sticking out of it. Irka, my host brother, clearly said “cook dog.” Disbelieving, I looked up both words in my dictionary, and he confirmed them. I pointed at each bone, and said “noghoy” (dog)? They affirmed. Finally, after just starting to believe, I realized that by cook dog he meant dog food. They were sheep bones from the mutton we’d had that night, and this was the slop that would be put out for both the vicious khasha dog and his mellow brother.

It’s one in the morning, window-breakingly windy outside (they keep extra glass that they cut and replace them with frequently,) and you’re bathing by flickering stovelight as close to the stove as you can safely get. By bathing, I mean kneeling, naked, over a liter of water in a small plastic “timpun” tub, washing body parts individually (always from the hair downwards to the feet!) For the bottom half, you squat over the tub to avoid spillage. The tub is wide and shallow enough that boiling the water is nearly pointless, as so much surface area and about a centimeter of depth cools it off almost at once. It’s at a time like this, as you catch your breath and prepare for each freezing-cold splash, that you think “wow, I’m really in Mongolia.”