Ninja 1: The vet

“My dream was to be a vet, and that is what I was,” said the man who sat by a rectangular hole on the hillside. “But now you see that I dig in the ground to find gold for my food.” His name was Batnasan and we had come across him as we picked our way among the hundreds of hand-dug shafts, some only a few feet deep, otherwise worryingly black and vertical, in Bayan Ovoo, one of the soums in Bayankhongor. Batnasan’s hole was one of the worrying ones, but he sat beside it calmly: he wasn’t going down it again today. He was smoking a cigarette instead, enjoying every suck between lips that opened, now and again, to reveal the missing teeth behind. Batnasan was 50. He qualified as a vet for Ulziit soum, the next door district, in 1981. He used to do his rounds on his motorbike or horse, depending on the case, until the veterinary service was privatized and all the animals died in the dzuds. “When I was a vet it was a very wonderful time for me. I was working for the government,” he said. “Two or three times a year I would check each herd, give them vaccinations and drugs. It was a happy time for me. This was my profession.” He removed from the ash from his cigarette with his thumb. “To be a good vet you need to have very good skills of hearing. Animals cannot say what it is their mind: ‘I am hurt in the heart, my liver, my lung. I am hurt here.’ Vets must have very good hearing, good sight, good checking. It should be very quiet, very gentle, when they communicate with the animals.” Batnasan had been a ninja miner for two years now and would earn about 7,000 tugriks that day. “Every night when I am in bed, I think this should stop. Then every morning I go down 15 metres into a hole and think today or tomorrow I could die.” He did not think a mining would help Mongolia. “Do not believe this,” said Batnasan. “Some day soon this will all be finished.”