after Brian Doyle
Consider the word takhi for a moment. Written, the word might remind you of a Taki, the preservative-loaded, neon-orange, finger-staining, spicy snack. In Mongolian, it’s a one-syllable word, the sound at the end a white-noise-like “kch.”
Consider its English translation. “Spirit” or “wild” or “worthy of worship” and also the word for what we usually call the Przewalski’s horse, the last living species of undomesticated horse.
I’m not objecting to the English language. I feel compelled to say Takhi instead of Przewalski’s horse because of that apostrophe. Must these last wild horses be objects of an Imperial Geographer rather than their own wild things, these creatures who evolved from natural selection instead of human selection, not bred for height or speed or power or flashy, pleasing colors, but evolved to camouflage with their own food, the long grasses of the Steppe?
Consider the takhi’s home. At the National Zoo in Washington, DC—free to enter thanks to your federal income taxes, about 15 cents per taxpayer per year to fund its 20 million dollar annual budget—the Przewalski’s horse exhibit sits just next to a parking lot and across from the path winding into the expansive home of the giant pandas, whose tumbling, cavorting, panda-cam fame launched a thousand animal cams. Two staid horses, heavy and dun and short of leg, manes a brief bristle on the backs of their bulky heads. It takes only seconds to walk past their corral.
Consider the takhi’s former and true home, the Steppes of Mongolia, Western Russia, Northern China, where in the 1940s they were declared extinct in the wild. Whether they were truly extinct in the wild is debatable. Since then, they have been bred and re-introduced by programs like the National Zoo’s, but these wild things don’t like to breed in captivity, and two human generations into the project—or two takhi lifespans, to measure with a different metric—there are now 144 breeding pairs, a tenth of the amount needed to consider the project a success.
Consider the takhi’s impact on human history, the victories of the Huns over the Roman Empire, whose army couldn’t figure out how to ride a horse and shoot an arrow at the same time.
On this particular point on the zoo’s brick path, steps lighter if they’re heading down the hill, trudging and heavy if they’re heading up, the herds of children cry out “Pandas!” and occasionally “What’s that? That one’s empty.” and “Wait, is that a donkey? No, it’s a horse. Boring. Can we see the pandas? Can we get a snack?”
Consider the image of a horse. A logo, a bumper sticker, a mascot. Its body lean, its mane flowing behind it, a symbol of all that is wild and free. But those silhouettes are tame things, not like the 150,000-year-old Takhi, who waits in its pen at the zoo to be bred, not seen by streams of hot and hungry humans. When they look the other way toward the pandas, the tourists are responding to the horses the way hundreds of thousands of years of evolution would prefer it. This is the way in which they belong to themselves, not to Przewalski or any other human.
Note 1: This piece is a response to Brian Doyle’s “Joyas Voladoras,” a beautiful meditation on time and the heart, which begins: “Consider the hummingbird for a long moment.”
Note 2: The Giant Pandas at the National Zoo were shipped back to China in late 2023, to the dismay of panda lovers locally and nationally, many of whom travelled to see the pandas before they left. Six months later, it was announced that the zoo would soon get a new pair from China.
Emily Ellerbe has always worked with books: in libraries, bookstores, and classrooms. Currently, she teaches writing and literature classes to homeschoolers in the Washington metro area. She's seeking representation for her first novel, about time disintegration on an extremely off-grid commune, and writing her second.
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