OUT OF EDEN WALK

Paul Salopek paused the Out of Eden Walk at the foothills of the Tian Shan in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, late last year to wait out the mortally cold winter months.

In December I paid him a visit, along with partners from Harvard’s Project Zero and the Abundance Foundation. My luggage, which held equipment intended for use on the next leg of the walk, never turned up. As a salve, Turkish Airlines offered me a free upgrade to first class on the return flight from Bishkek to Istanbul.

To reach Kyrgyzstan from New Mexico, I covered more miles in 30 hours than Paul has walked during the past four years. In the context of visiting the winter base of one of the most ambitious, and intentionally slow, foot journeys of all time, the surreality of flying is thrown into sharp relief. As part of the project’s “slow” journalism ethos, Paul will not break from the walk unless emergency strikes, as he wrote before taking the first of 22,000 miles of anticipated steps: “The Out of Eden Walk will move through issues of our time at the pace as we as a species have adapted to survive: step by step, three miles an hour, a distinctly human tempo. We’ll leave the nano-headlines to others. Our observations will be episodic, and will seek to uncover deeper truths hidden in the vast but often overlooked spaces in between.”

Add to flight travel the hyper-conscious comfort of first class, and you get as far from the Out of Eden Walk trail as jet engines can take you.

My seatmates were two American men in what looked like army fatigues. One of them leaned over and asked what the hell I’d been doing in Bishkek.

He’d been hunting Marco Polos.

Marco Polo sheep, or Ovis ammon polii, belong to the argali family. They populate a wide variety of terrain across the mountains of Central Asia and have been spotted as far north as Russia. The first known documentation of the creatures, whose distinctive double-spiral horns endow them with mythic appeal, is found in Rustichello da Pisa’s 13th-century work The Travels of Marco Polo.

It was a surprising coincidence to encounter self-described hunters in the flesh on the flight out of Bishkek, as on the flight in I’d been reading Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez, specifically the chapter entitled “Migration,” wherein Lopez considers the mind of the aboriginal hunter:

"The evidence is good that among all northern aboriginal hunting peoples, the hunter saw himself bound up in a sacred relationship with the larger animals he hunted...Hunting in my experience...is a state of mind. All of one’s faculties are brought to bear in an effort to become fully incorporated into the landscape. It is more than listening for animals or watching for hoofprints or a shift in the weather. It is more than an analysis of what one senses. To hunt means to have the land around you like clothing...The mind we know in dreaming, a nonrational nonlinear comprehension of events in which slips in time and space are normal, is, I believe the conscious working mind of an aboriginal hunter. It is a frame of mind that redefines patience, endurance, and expectation.”

To Lopez, hunting depends on mental patterns shaped by physical hunger, a memory of the hunter’s family, and a more conceptual memory of the landscape. He considers hunting in its original form—for survival, not sport. The men I met in first class were a new incarnation, trophy hunters hosted by companies that assure ease, safety, convenience, and a 100-percent success rate. No need to wear the land around you like clothing.

People today may hunt wild animals for sport to fulfill some latent predatory urge, or for the trophy prize, or for more complicated reasons. Whatever the motivation, the activity has morphed into a balancing act among such justifications as: government revenue generation, bragging rights, cultural preservation, and conservation support.

Kyrgyzstan is a tiny country, one of a trifecta of “stans,” with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, at the omphalos of Central Asia. For Americans who have heard of Kyrgyzstan, there’s a chance it was in the context of hunting Marco Polos, whose horns are the region’s most coveted trophy.

Argali are classified as “Near Threatened” on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List, based on population counts done a decade ago, and they’re listed as Appendix II species under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). That means they’re “not necessarily now threatened with extinction but may become so unless trade is closely controlled.”

They range through ten Central Asian countries, but no systematic, reliable count has been done since that decade-old survey, when the Kyrgyz population was estimated at somewhere between 6,000 and 16,000. “This is an ecosystem that has received very little attention,” the biologist and nature writer George Schaller—who has spent years roaming the mountains of Central Asia studying snow leopards, argali, and other native species—told National Geographic in 2006. According to Schaller, geopolitical tensions in the argali range region are in part responsible for a continuing lack of essential information about the species.

Kyrgyzstan is the only country besides Tajikistan where hunting Marco Polo sheep remains legal, and it seems that the government is worried enough now about their status to be considering how trophy hunting is affecting them (and other animals with uncertain population counts).

On March 16, 2017, a bill before Parliament to ban the hunting of endangered animals (including argali, ibex, and snow leopards) through 2025 was narrowly rejected (by four votes)—after initially having been passed by the same margin.

Last year the government authorized sport hunting permits for 70 argali at $7,000 each, totaling nearly $500,000. The law stipulates that 35 percent be earmarked for the salaries of some 60 employees, whose work includes policing and anti-poaching activities. An additional 25 percent is to go to local communities where hunting takes place, and 40 percent to the hunting concessions themselves, to help finance conservation activities.

Almaz Musaev, the director of Kyrgyzstan’s Department of Natural Resources Protection and Use, under the State Agency on Environment Protection and Forestry, says foreign hunters bring in not far short of a million dollars a year by participating in hunting tours. He says local communities that benefit from hunting revenues are motivated to combat poaching because they want argali to be available for legal hunting—to ensure that the money keeps coming.

Opponents of the hunting ban bill say that a sudden moratorium on hunting would undermine argali populations overall and spur poaching—not to mention cause a loss of revenue.

But co-author of the bill Janar Akaev dismisses these arguments, saying there are “no grounds” for claims that a hunting ban would reduce income. “The issuance of licenses does not bring significant profits, and it also goes into the pockets of individual officials or hunting concessions,” he says. Akaev cites political corruption, not concern over conservation resources or community development, as the reason the bill died in parliament. “I believe many members were put under pressure to vote against the ban,” he says.

Whether or not trophy hunting is undermining Marco Polo sheep (competition from livestock is a bigger threat, experts say), one-off, rapid-fire expeditions enabled by global air travel, powerful weaponry, and predictable outcomes have little in common with the hunting experience Lopez describes.

Similarly, the production and digestion of stories in a sound-bite-driven world requires little in the way of endurance, patience, expectation, or attention to land and people. It seems counterintuitive that modern luxuries like air travel and satellite telecom capabilities would condense or trivialize the experiences they were designed to amplify. As with hunting, much of storytelling—or journalism—today bears scarce resemblance to the oral histories memorized, performed, and lived by aboriginal people. Memory, preserved by the Lopezes and Salopeks, who have committed their lives to bearing witness, requires more effort.

Before parting ways with the two hunters, I asked one of them what he’d done with the sheep he’d killed. “Left it there,” he said. A guide would prepare the head and horns and ship them to the U.S. to be taxidermied and mounted. This duffel-bag service costs upwards of $10,000.