Sad Week

I just got word from Alan Gates that Aralbai has died at just 54.(Photo by Cat)He might have been “The Coolest Man in the World” and was a serious drinking companion, but many people from many countries from here to England to Japan (I may tell that tale later) appreciated him as a guide and …

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Kazakh portraits

I’ve been doing some experimenting with black-and-white, and thought I’d share a few images of the Kazakh men who hunt with golden eagles that I met while I was in western Mongolia in 2008.

Canat is Well

A bittersweet result of hearing the melancholy news about Aralbai below was a note from my old friend Canat with great photos. We did mourn a bit of lost youth (he was moved by my white hair and grandchild, which he knew of only abstractly)– was it really fifteen ears since I first set foot …

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Sad News

Alan Gates writes: “I have sad news that Aralbai has been diagnosed with throat cancer, he refused the laser treatment he was offered at the UB hospital because he believed that those that had had this type of treatment, die quicker. “He has deteriorated a lot from the time I last hunted with him, and …

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Some Replies–Eagles for Jim, “UFO Area” for Chas…

Below, Jim Cornelius wrote: “Caught an episode of Human Planet on Saturday, featuring a 16-year-old Kazakh making his first hunt with an eagle he had captured and trained. They had a camera mounted on the eagle. OH, MAN! I want to see an entire movie on this type of hunting in IMAX.” Actually, a wonderful …

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Fat Horses

Large- mammal and Pleistocene maven Valerius Geist thinks more is going on with the spotted horse cave paintings below than just realism– be cites their exaggerated fatness as well: “Horses in top condition thus have a large gut-fill, expanded further by storage fat about intestines and omentum. Consequently, the belly bulges downward. Simultaneously, the fat …

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Mongolian Art

Just for fun– the cover of a small Mongolian pb treatise on Eagle Hunting (in Mongolian– can’t read a word of it) that I found as I dug deeper into the library.. Sure, it is sort of Soviet- influenced I suppose, but its bold vivid block print style is still striking.