​A daily routine is being established incredibly quickly. It is the herders who set the rhythm for the day. At dawn, the night-time herders come down from their watch and the whole camp stirs. At dusk, the daytime herders return hungry for food. We all eat. The day herders are also exhausted. The camp turns in to sleep.
 
Today Great Grandmother takes my arm. She leads me up to a low ridge. She stops at one rocky outcrop. At our feet the slopes run back down to our encampment and to the lake beyond. Away in the distance we can see the outline of the grazing herds of horses. Sitting up here we can see too, in the distance, the tumuli raised by Scythian warriors who have passed this way.

​At our backs the rocks are blackened, their surfaces engraved with ancient petroglyphs.
 
‘We all used to come up here during the war when we women were in charge’ says Great Grandmother. ‘There would be a time of day after the early evening meal when the small children would settle down, the night time herders would have set off and when we could relax after the efforts of the day. We talked. It was the older women mainly. But we teenagers could also chip in. We all shared a pride in our ability to manage the summer migration.’

Walking up to this outcrop with Great Grandmother has become a daily habit. I help my friend in the morning. We shake the bedding, wash the children in the lake and prepare some food for the day. But the afternoons are for her. My friend is happy to see us together. She does not want her wandering off alone.

​ I ask Great Grandmother what memories have stayed with her from those summertime gatherings up here among the rocks.
 
‘Of course in those wartime summers we mainly talked about our daily concerns – sicknesses or injuries, the condition of the herds, our saddle sores.

But as I looked back in later years on those summers I realized that something quite different and more important had begun to root. Simply because we were managing by ourselves up in the summer pastures, over the course of those summers we women came implicitly, without putting it clearly into words, to challenge our traditional place and role’.
 
‘I don’t think that the elder women realized how much my generation of young teenage girls absorbed this sense of questioning of what had traditionally been a masculine dominated world.

​For the older women the direction of their lives had been already set. But, for us younger girls a question had been seeded in our minds that would never leave us’.

​‘When the wartime years came to a close, a traditional way of life was re-established for all of us’ continues Great Grandmother the next day. ‘Those men who did return took up their old roles without a thought. I myself became an obedient wife and daughter in law.

To some extent though that resumption of the old ways was superficial. There were after-effects from those summers of a women’s world that stayed with me and my friends and contemporaries. We kept them hidden. But we each knew they were there’.
 
‘When we came back up here in future years as wives and mothers we always tried to meet alone up by these rocks. We could not get away often, but each year there would always be a few gatherings. I like to tell myself that my friends and I did not lose our questioning around our given roles in life.

​ Now when I hear about the wide horizons of your life, and even see expanded horizons for those women who remain to live here, I feel a sense of continuity with my own generation of hidden subversives’.
 
‘Now I am the sole survivor of that generation. My exact contemporaries have died. But the feelings we had to keep hidden then I can pass on to you today’.

Today I ask Great Grandmother about the changes she has seen in her lifetime.
 
‘Perhaps the most obvious change is in the degree of isolation in which we then lived.’ Great Grandmother says. ‘We had so little information about the outside world. Reports from the war fronts were propaganda, letters rarely got through to our town’.
 
‘Today I see you and your generation struggling with too much information. Except up here where you are cut off from the internet, your cell phone is like another limb. Even my infant great grandchildren reach for the screens.

​If you have a question you can ask the internet. But in those days we had far too little information. Even what we had was usually false news. Of course you complain that you are also bombarded with false news. But you still have other sources you can turn to. We did not’.
 
‘Tourists come to this part of the world because they want to savour the remoteness, the feel of an earlier way of life. I am proud of the traditions we have retained such as this summer migration. But I am also glad of our new ties to a wider world and that my great grandchildren will be so much better connected than my generation was’.

​Today Great Grandmother talked to me about the lessons she learnt from the gatherings with her friends up here on this rocky outcrop.

‘The most important lesson for us was quite unexpected’ says Great Grandmother, ‘It was the value we came to attach to uncertainty.

None of us in those wartime years could be sure we would see fathers, husbands, sons or brothers again in this life. In our efforts to cope with the overhanging sense of uncertainty our talk up here in the evenings moved without conscious break from our most trivial daily anxieties to much more fundamental questions about what we could believe in.’
 
‘Don’t get me wrong’ says Great Grandmother. ‘We women were not philosophers, or even well educated, or conscious of talking about matters which people have pondered for centuries. But the war forced us to confront death in our families. Inevitably we wondered about whether that was all, the end, or whether there might be something beyond.
 
Our communist leaders put science on a pedestal. But we knew, even in our ignorance, that there was no scientific knowledge on which to draw about another world.

​If there is another life to which our brothers and fathers had gone, we came to accept that it is not accessible through any form of what we call ‘knowledge’ available to us. We came to accept that this most fundamental of beliefs has to remain uncertain’.

‘Over the years, me and my friends came more and more to value the importance of uncertainty’, says Great Grandmother.

‘We came to understand that it is those who are certain who do the greatest damage to our lives.

In the post war world my generation saw so much harm done by those communist party members who proclaimed certain knowledge about how to organize this world. Of course they spoke against religion. But now that communism has gone we see a revival of religion and those who preach certainty again about the next world. We see great harm done by them too – an intolerance and demand for social control that infects all our lives.

My generation has seen that so many of those who claim certainty, about this world or the next, misuse their claims. They manipulate others and enjoy power and position for themselves’.
 
‘What we first experienced up here, that day-to-day undercurrent of questioning of the established ordering of things, and that imperceptible movement of out talk between practical tasks and speculation about much larger matters, became the most important legacy for us from those wartime summers.

​That legacy gave to me and my generation a life-long impetus for a more fundamental questioning of claims to certainty. Instead, we came to value the necessity of uncertainty in order to keep us from the greatest harm‘.

​There has been a break in my daily routine. A big party is planned by the camp.

Traditionally the party marks the midpoint of the summer grazing. In fact, my friend explains that the most experienced herders will stay on after the departure of the families. They will stay until the first snows come. The horses are able to continue to graze in the snow, but they need to be brought down before the deep winter drifts begin to form and predators come down from the highest mountains. The pastures need time to recover.
 
I help my friend with the preparations. Expeditions have to be made back below the treeline to gather wood for the fires. Mares’ milk goes through the fermentation process. The embroidery on old blouses has to be re-sewn.

​Those with performing skills bring out their viols and mouth harps. I have not heard them since my childhood. Their sounds bring back an earlier world of make-belief and shamans.
 
I have to admit I am not much use to my friend except as a pair of eyes on her boys. It rains on the night. But it does not matter. We all have a good time.

​After the remains of the party has been cleared away, I revert to my afternoon walks with Great Grandmother. ‘In the last year of the war I also had my last year of school’ she said.
 
‘One of the things we learnt about in that final year from one of my Russian teachers was about some ancient Greek philosophers. Only one thing stuck in my head. It was about a life of reflection as the highest form of ‘the good life’. It struck me as so wrong, so self-congratulatory’.
 
‘it was so wrong because in neither the big decisions that affected our lives then, nor in our daily lives, did we have any time to reflect or even much of a choice. When the women of the town took the decision to continue the summer migration during the war they did not have time to weigh all the alternatives. Similarly when the war ended I had no choice about marriage.

After the war my father returned. He had already promised me to his closest friend from the war. The other girls of my age group were in the same situation.

​The world we faced was not a world of reflection. It is a world where most of us have to live with the hand we are dealt. In any definition of a good life we have to embrace the vast majority who face a daily struggle in a world determined for them by others’.

​Today Great Grandmother has chosen to walk to the Scythian tombs we had seen in the distance. ‘I came up among these Scythian tombs in the years after the war because I found that the sights and sounds up here could somehow settle my mood. I was so angry and frustrated as I struggled to accept my stipulated role as wife, mother and as a housebound daughter in law’.
 
‘In those wartime years the women around me had also experienced times of feeling helpless and of their lives being shaped by outside forces so much larger than anything they could influence. When things were particularly bad, because the rumours from the war were all about disasters, or because we had had some bad accident among the herds, we all used to walk over here’.
 
‘It was the marmots on these hillsides that made our hearts sing again. They are nervous, shy animals. But somehow they got used to our visits to the tombs. We got endless amusement from their antics. They reminded us that life carries on. So this place with its strange combination of wide open views, ancient history and scurrying animals came to stand for us for survival. And that gave us the strength to go on. It was the same for me after the war’.

​‘The atmosphere of this place’ continues Great Grandmother, ‘is also about the gods and goddesses of earlier times.

​Here, when times were bad, we prayed for help from gods and goddesses that had been prayed to long before ours. Up here during the war, I saw the women renew a sense of fittedness about their decision to continue the summer migrations. Up here after the war, I too came to accept a sense of fit with my motherhood and my other given roles. So did most of my friends.
 
No doubt we would have loved some dramatic intervention to prove that our prayers for help had been heard by the ancient gods and goddesses. In our lives we learn to look for causes and effects. But If there is another world that has influence in ours it has to be in a way that is compatible with our own responsibility in facing what is given’.
 
‘Perhaps when we look for help from our gods and goddess we should not look for cause and effect but for that sense of fit between our inner nature and the events, circumstances and help along the way that determine our lives’.

​Since our midsummer party there is a change in our daily rhythms. What is entering into our routine is the beginning of the preparation for the return journey from the high pastures.

The big change is that a start is made on the culling of the herds – the decisions that have to be made about how much of the herd is to be overwintered and which animals are judged too weak or old to be worth maintaining.
 
My friend tells me that most of the culling is done after the herds are brought down from the pastures. But a start is made on the weakest and oldest animals. The reason is that up here the meat and sausages can be preserved for the winter by air drying.

I join in gathering reeds from the lake and gullies on which the meat will be laid out for drying.
 
When it comes to the air-drying of the meat and the making of sausages I am hopeless. Even though I grew up near here, I have become totally used to seeing meat in supermarket packages completely detached from any relationship with a living animal. Up here I suddenly see the slaughtering of animals up close.

​I wash their intestines in the lake for the sausage casings. My own attempts at stuffing them for sausages only produces laughter. I am told that it is time for me to take Great Grandmother for her daily walk.

​The destination of my daily walks with great grandmother has reverted to the rocky outcrop. Here we can sit among the petroglyphs and warm our backs.

​‘There was a third hard lesson I eventually absorbed from those wartime summers and the aftermath of the war’ says Great Grandmother. ‘It was about the incomplete’.
 
‘Only one of my two brothers came back from the war with my father. To the end of her days my mother would go each morning to the gate of our house in the town and look down the road. She never gave up hope that one day my missing brother would return. I did not share her hope. But I could not destroy hers’.
 
‘I struggled to understand the death of my brother. It seemed so unjust. Others of his generation had returned to the town yet he had had no chance to live a life. Others of my friends who experienced similar losses also felt the injustice’.

​‘After the war had ended my friends and I continued to see the daily unfairness of life around us. Those women who led us through those years never saw rewards from what they did. The survival of the herds and the maintaining of the town was taken for granted in the aftermath of the war. Those men who found success in the post war period were the unscrupulous, the vicious and those who made their accommodations with communist party members and officials’.
 
‘Nor did the collapse of communism change the nature of success. The rewards went to a different set of the corrupt and the dishonest, and even the beneficiaries of the previous regime often became beneficiaries under its successor.

​We came to realize all too fast as we reached adulthood that the deserving do not get their rewards in their lifetime and the selfish, the ignorant and the malign do not receive their retribution either’.

‘We tried not to become cynical and bitter’ says Great Grandmother when our walk resumed the next day.

‘Again it was the summer migrations to the mountains that helped us to come to a reconciliation with this sense of incompleteness. In our treks up here to the summer pastures we observe the cemeteries of travellers who have gone before us. Placed by the roadside and facing out to the passer by, the tombs present life as a journey, with journeys before and journeys yet to come.
 
‘These outward-facing markers suggest that this one short life we have is neither the beginning nor the end of the story. From them, my friends and I took comfort. We came to believe that that the injustice we experience here is not the end of the story, but only a stage on a longer journey.

​If there is a rectification of the injustices we see around us it occurs in the frame of that longer journey. The markers suggest that the way we live our lives affects the lives of others and our own continued path on that longer journey’.

​I am invited by two older women to join them in their searches for mountain herbs.

I can recognize the gentians and edelweiss but many of the plants are unknown to me. For those with the knowledge there is a lucrative side-line in gathering and drying mountain herbs. They will bring them back and sell them to middlemen for export to the herbal remedies industry in Europe and the United States. My new friends tell me what to gather and which parts to keep – the roots, leaves or flowers.
 
I still have time for my daily walks with Great Grandmother. I tell her that the lessons she and her friends had learnt are very hard ones to live with.

People do not like to live with uncertainty about what is most important;

we look for simple explanations of cause and effect in understanding the pathways of our lives;

​we find it difficult to accept a sense of incompleteness in the working out of what we think is fair and just.
 
’Of course they are hard’ says Great Grandmother. ‘That is why we create the idea of gods to help us on our path.

​On our yearly journeys up here we accepted and sought help from all the gods and goddesses we found on the way. It does not mean we reject the idea of the universal god we have been brought up with. But we opened our hearts to other pathways to belief. We learnt not to turn away from any source of help’.