AABSteiner

The blue of the sky and lake deepened. I felt nervous, ashamed at our having intruded, but when my friend and I arrived they seemed happy to have us. The men that were having the barbeque were all police officers in the capital, Ulaanbaatar. Like us, they came to The Great White Lake to relax. The ram they’d slaughtered was hissing away: a blowtorch roared against the three-foot metal drum. The Ram must’ve been medium rare then, but it wouldn’t be ‘ready’ for a while so I headed off to the store.
An infant on horseback passed me by. Along the shore a man sat beside his horse. “Sain ba nu,” I said smiling. I kept on walking. The earth began to shake. His swaying on the saddle made him no less fierce.
He caught up and grabbed ahold of my jacket. I knew enough Judo to break his grip. Off again, I ran into the lake. By this point he was so wasted that he was riding supine half of the time.
In front of the store, he chased me around an SUV for minutes before the Mongolian family stopped gawking long enough to unlock their car. I got in. They calmed the man down.
Back at the barbeque I couldn’t quite get across the insanity that had occurred. The ram was done. The metal lid went sproing and they unpacked the meat and greasy round stones. I was given a piece (of snout?). My second piece was nicer. We warmed our greasy hands on the greasy stones in the evening chill. I finished my meat and put it down on the stone. A few men looked at me askance; one showed me the error of my ways, picking up the bone and removing bits here and there with his teeth. “Ah-ha,” I nodded, smiling. To my further edification, he cracked the bone with a knife and let the marrow spill onto a stone. I slurped the marrow up and it was good.
It was dark inside the large ger. We sat in a semi-circle and drank Chingis Vodka. A bottle of whiskey was passed around and each person sang to earn his swig. I was drunk and sang all of Neil Young’s ‘Old Man’; everyone listened patiently.