Jennifer Rust

Post the last photo of your pet on your phone. No cheating.

The Mongol Empire conquered sixteen percent of the earth's land surface. Most accounts of how they did it focus on cavalry tactics. Few mention the bag of dried meat hanging from the saddle. It is called borts. The technique is brutally simple, which is part of what makes it so devastatingly effective. Take a freshly slaughtered cow. Cut the meat into long strips, two to three centimetres thick, five to seven centimetres wide. Hang the strips on cords inside a ger, where the steppe wind can move freely around them. Wait. After about a month in the dry continental air of Mongolia, the meat is no longer meat in any sense a modern supermarket would recognise. It has become hard, brown, wood-like sticks. All the water has gone. What remains is pure protein, fat, and minerals, in a form that does not spoil and cannot be killed by anything short of fire. Then they shrank it further. The dried strips were broken down, sometimes ground to a coarse fibrous powder, until what had once been the muscle of an entire cow could fit, by repeated tradition, inside the stomach or bladder of that same cow. A whole animal, weeks of feeding, condensed into a single sack a man could sling under his saddle. A pinch of borts powder, dropped into hot water, would yield a bowl of meat broth dense enough to feed three or four people. A warrior with a single bladder of borts on his hip was carrying months of food. He did not need a quartermaster. He did not need a cook. He did not need a wagon. He needed water, fire, and the few minutes it took to reconstitute what was effectively the world's first instant meal. European armies, by comparison, were dragging baggage trains across the continent. Flour to be milled, then baked. Salt pork in barrels that needed lifting. Wine in casks. Cooking pots, fuel, ovens, the labour of men whose entire job was to keep the fighting men fed. A medieval European army moved at the speed of its slowest cart. The Mongols moved at the speed of their fastest horse, because their food moved with them, on them, weighing almost nothing. Combine borts with kumis (the fermented mare's milk in the leather flask on the other hip) and the Mongol warrior had complete nutrition strapped to his body. Protein, fat, fermented dairy, vitamin C, B vitamins, calcium, electrolytes. Everything a man needs to fight, ride, recover, and fight again. No fire required. No stop required. No supply line to be cut by an enemy who had not yet realised the supply line was already in the saddlebag. The Secret History of the Mongols, the only contemporary chronicle written by the Mongols themselves, mentions dried meat as the staple of long campaigns. Friar William of Rubruck, riding with them in 1253, describes the same. He marvels at how little they seemed to require to keep going. He was watching men powered by an entire cow shrunk to the size of his lunch. Modern nutritionists, reconstructing borts, describe a food roughly 70 to 80 percent protein by weight after drying, with intact fats, full bioavailability of B12 and iron, and a shelf life measured in years. It is, for all intents and purposes, the perfect carnivore travel food. Designed eight hundred years ago. Carried across half the known world. Used to overthrow the largest civilisations of its day. The modern soldier, by contrast, eats an MRE. Three thousand calories of seed oil, refined wheat, sugar, and the bleak mathematics of corporate procurement. Cost: roughly $11 a meal. Shelf life: three to five years if you trust the packaging. Nutritional density per gram: a fraction of borts. Effect on the men eating them, by every honest field report in the last twenty years: digestive misery, blood sugar swings, and the sort of post-meal lethargy that is the exact opposite of what an army needs. The Mongols solved this problem in the thirteenth century. They solved it with a knife, a string, and the wind. We have spent eight hundred years complicating it. The bag of dried meat is still the answer. It always was.

I don’t usually post videos, but this sunset? Happy Friday from the front porch in South Carolina!

Patriots Day. Marking April 19, 1775. When Americans took up arms against their king, and bled, at the crack of terrible dawn. It's a holiday in Massachusetts and Maine, which was then part of Massachusetts. Should be a national holiday. July 4 marks the day they published a piece of paper, telling the king to shove it. Important. Up until then it was a civil war. Americans who considered themselves Englishmen fighting British troops. After that, it was Americans fighting the British for their independence. Patriots Day is first blood. I took my boy to Lexington for the re-enactment when he was just six. We arrived well before dawn, to get a place right on the Green. Right by the stone that marks the place where Capt. Parker's line was. With his reported order etched in it, "Stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here." Which is where it did. There was a light rain, and my boy pressed himself against my legs for shelter and warmth. A woolen horse blanket over our heads against the rain. Around 5 am he said, "Daddy, my feet are cold." I said, "Stamp your feet." So he did. Only complaint out of him. Brave boy. Just before dawn, we heard the fifes and drums coming up Massachusetts Avenue. The same road the British took on their 20-mile march from Boston to Concord to seize a cache of American guns and munitions. Why we have 2A. The British could see where things were going, and were actively trying to disarm the Americans. In New England, close to Canada, they were heavily armed. Nearly every able-bodied man had a musket and was in the militia. White and black. My boy and I heard the crash of boots. Loud. I felt him shudder against my legs. Then the British re-enactors rushed onto the Green, shouting. Both sides in their reports after the fact agreed, no one knows who fired the first shot. Was it an accidental discharge, a provocateur trying to get things going? No one knows. Both sides erupted in fire. A cacophony of flints sparking powder in the pan, then the discharge. A violent discordant atonal symphony, up and down the line. Clouds of white gunsmoke, with streaks of fire cutting through. The British troops in red uniforms and black leather helmets pushing forward, bayoneting the militia in their broadcloth farmers' work clothes. Officers trying to bring it to a stop. The British had fired without orders. Royal Marines Maj. John Pitcairn, who had been tapped to lead an Army vanguard, did not want this. He was a man respected and liked by the Americans who knew him. Killed later at Bunker Hill, buried in the Old North Church. The British troops by now hated the Jonathans, as they called the New Englanders, who never missed an opportunity to mock them. The troops finally brought to heel, they marched the five miles on to Concord. Leaving the American dead and wounded on Lexington Green behind them. The first Americans to take up arms for their freedom. My boy is grown. He's one of them now. An American soldier. Ranger tab, jumps out of airplanes. For you. He told me years later, he knew what he was going to do from age 5. 9/11. We always spoke to the kids in age appropriate ways about what was happening in the world. He knew. He was the one, flipping channels from Sesame Street to Nickelodeon before kindergarten, who saw the Twin Towers spewing smoke and went to tell his mother. When he was seven, when I was back from Iraq, tucking him in, he said, "Dad. When I grow up, if I'm not killed in battle, I want to be a major league baseball player." So we still make them like that, those farmers who lined up at Lexington Green.