Paying our respects

On the way to Borsoy I asked if I could stop off at the place where all my 8000 of my fellow saiga were buried last year, and where the villagers had also buried the 400 which died this year.

A sombre mood fell over the team as we drove across the barren steppe on the way there.

Even stopping off and discovering a local plant species, whose roots help with sore throats, couldn’t lift the foreboding mood.

I don’t know what I was expecting; maybe a monument to my fallen kin or flowers littering the steppe. But instead there was just a big fenced off area with a small plaque at one end.

It made me sad that so many had fallen and were buried in a mass grave, I wondered if the rest of the herd ever came to visit.