Tania, a hardworking nomad of the Nenets people in northern Siberia, looked after us without complaint in her crowded family-tent. Outside, on the Arctic tundra, the temperature might fall through minus 40, but she kept the stove stoked with seasoned wood, swaddled us in heavy furs, fed us raw meat, fish and frozen bread as honoured guests.
One afternoon, when the men returned from the tundra with the reindeer herd, there was a commotion outside. We found Tania behind the tent among the sleds in the trampled snow, her face covered in fresh blood. She was surrounded by the children; their faces, too, were smeared. In their hands were chunks of a red, raw heart that had just stopped beating. Beaming with maternal pleasure, she raised a steaming mug to her lips, passed it around before it could congeal. Her eldest son skinned the strangled reindeer, disembowelled it and hung the carcass from the branch of a lone tree out of reach of the dogs.
It was evening on the tundra and the cold gripped our fingertips with icy pliers. The sun was bare and livid, as if it, too, had been skinned and left to hang just above the horizon. Tania followed us into the tent of hides, lit a blazing fire, prepared a different meal. We joined in her celebration. That day, a Russian helicopter had brought ballot-papers to the scattered Siberian clans for the presidential election. There was no joy in that for the nomads, but the same chopper had dropped the children home from their faraway school for an unexpected visit. The tent was packed that evening - elders, parents, children, dogs and guests nestling among the furs, laughing, talking, telling stories - the extended family of universal tradition.
A few days later, we crossed the mouth of the River Ob in a convoy of sleds. Hour after hour, we slid and lurched across the ice, into the wind, swaddled in skins. The clan was migrating north into the Arctic Circle with the reindeer. The oldest member was 87, ancestral, her face the map of her migrations; the youngest was a boy of seven months. The weakest in the group was me. No hint of summer, or even spring, about this journey to the summer pastures; steel sky, deep snow, sub-zero winds. I was making the documentary for TG4 in Irish, speaking English to our interpreter, who spoke Russian to the Nenets, who conversed in their own singing Arctic tongue. I longed for a psychic shortcut straight to Nenets . . .
The mouth of the Ob in northern Siberia is 40 kilometres wide. Where the Arctic Circle slashes the estuary, the snow is scoured and carved like desert sand - white dunes with scalloped edges smoking wildly in the wind. No shore visible north or south. If the cloud came down, you'd lose your bearings, go round in circles. I rode on the leading sled with a vivid Arctic youth, Leova, who had the face of a warrior, slit eyes, a helmet of black hair, tunic of reindeer-hide, thigh-length rawhide boots. Behind us, the trotting herd stretched out in a thick, straight line for miles. Navigation was simple, Leova explained; if we strayed right or left the line behind would bend. I took the reins, veered a little, and six thousand deer began to curve. A landmark on the northern shore took shape; the caravan stopped for lunch. Fire blazed in a bucket, a kettle boiled. There were grandparents, sons, daughters, brothers, wives - and Artur, the heir, seven months of age, big enough for a child of two, already on solid food and glugging tea from his granddad's saucer. We lounged on the ice on scattered pelts, heedless of wind and flurrying snow. Deer shuffled, sensing the void beneath their hooves. We ate raw meat and fish, drank tea; there were savouries in honour of the day. "Musica, '
Dermot." I was called upon, in Russian, for a herding-song: I rattled it out: An Cailleach an Airgid. The Nenets are a polite people; it was, they said, a fine herding-song.
These were the 8th Brigade, led by the Serotetta family, herding for a state farm in northern Siberia. Their homeland is the Yamal Peninsula, the north-westernmost point of Asia. There are 35,000 Nenets thinly spread throughout the area; about 4,500 are still nomadic. Their culture animates everything with spirit; the land is - or was - living and sacred. Patterns of work, habitation and travel protected it. They have herded deer on the tundra in winter snow and summer heat for countless generations. They live in tepees of reindeer-skin, shift camp every few days in a cyclic journey of about 1,200 miles a year. To some observers, they practise a dying way of life. Among the world's 5,000 languages, many already doomed, theirs has a dying cadence.
They are a proud, unbroken people, defiant of decline - and yet their own children return to the tundra on holiday from state schools, with bubblegum and Walkmans, speaking not one, but two languages: Russian and their native Nenets. Across the web of tongues between us, their parents talked of language, identity, survival, as anxiously as an editorial in an Irish-language magazine.
For centuries, they resisted Russian occupation. They retreated north under constant waves of pressure, melted into the Arctic tundra, survived in cocoons of reindeer-skin, lived on the flesh and blood of reindeer. Theirs was an animistic culture, a world dense with spirits, mediated by their shamans. A Russian bishop under Peter the Great herded them into a river to baptise them; they blessed themselves and later replied in blood.
The Soviets brutally colonised them in the Peoples' revolution, enslaved them to state farms, persecuted the shamans, broke the clans into Brigades, took the children away to state schools.
Today, in the new Siberia, the Nenets children are still in boarding-schools, the herders harnessed to state farms. But there are no markets for the reindeer-meat, no central funds for wages.
The 8th Brigade has not been paid for years, except in bread collected from a depot, 700 loaves, three or four sled-loads at a time. To survive, they have private resources, private herds, their own marginal economy among the strands of penury and providence that weave the fringes of Russian commerce. There is a labyrinth of migration-routes, rigorously managed, throughout Yamal so that the herds can stay in constant motion without stripping the landscape bare. But the herds have increased (with private ownership) to a total of 180,000 head; this, according to ecologists, is 50 per cent more than the tundra vegetation can sustain. Experts testify to the overgrazing. "Not so," the herders angrily refute: "We do what we have to do".
Where had I heard that before?
When the soil was being flushed off the mountains in the west of Ireland a decade ago, overgrazed by sheep, funded by headage-payments, Irish farmers angrily denied the erosion until it was too late - because they could not afford to acknowledge it. They had a right to live, a right to an income wherever it could be got.
During that crisis, those of us who commented were bitterly criticised by farming-organisations for daring to suggest there was anything amiss. They defended their practices as professionals do. Farmers on the hills though, were less fervent, if you met them on a human level, rather than faction versus faction. Hardy and rugged, they were on the hills in their wellingtons and they knew something was wrong.
I tell the Nenets the story of the mountain-sheep . . . They're not interested in the moral. Headage-payments sound good to them. How much a skull? Let's see - 180,000 head of deer . . .
Perhaps Yamal, like much of Ireland, is no longer a living land; it has become a livelihood. The Nenets are the focus of another irony, almost cosmic in its scope. Their peninsula - half the size of Ireland - jutting into the Arctic Ocean, turns out to be steeped in oil and is one of the richest gas-reserves in the world. Russia has heavily colonised the area, the nomads are vastly outnumbered in their homeland. The development has begun. Traditional usage may soon be an arcane whisper in a blizzard of exploitation.
But the day on the frozen river was a milestone in belief for me.
There was something ancestral, eternal, about those people crossing the ice with their animals to the promised land of the summer-pastures, their homes and all their belongings on their hand-made sleds, travelling as they always have across the grain of a landscape, against the currents of our time, at a tangent to our world; travelling out of a hard, uncommon history into a defiant future of their own.
When, in time to come, we need to rediscover survival - as we will - the secret will not be with the Special Forces of the sophisticated powers; it will be kept by nomads, in the Sahara Desert, on the Tibetan plateau, in the Siberian tundra.
The TG4 documentary featuring the Nenets of Siberia will be shown later this year