big sky, black tongue
she once had yaks….
Here’s an interview with Annessa. She lives in West Oakland.
myrobotispregnant: You’re from Montana? What happened back there?
My parents raised yaks.
mrip: Did you drink their milk?
They were ornery when they were pregnant. Or had babies. It was too hard to get near them to milk them. Moms were really protective. They go have the baby somewhere hidden. They disappear and you go find them. They hid in the bushes.
mrip: Why did your parents buy yaks?
It was a pyramid scheme. The biggest ripoff. The idea was you buy a rare animal, they have babies and you sell them for a lot of money. But when a lot of people buy rare animals and they have babies, they aren’t that rare any more.
mrip: Where’d you keep them?
So my dad hadn’t built the fence yet, just a fence around the house. So they were in our yard. Every morning my sister and I went to catch the bus, and we’d go to the screen door and try to figure out where they were at because of the big bull. We were so afraid of it.
mrip: Did they chase you?
One of the things you’re supposed to do is grab a can because they’re afraid of noise, so we had coffee cans with pebbles and we’d shake it. But coming home we didn’t have the cans. We didn’t take them to school with us. So one time I made it to the front door and I heard my sister screaming. I turned and saw my sister running and a yak chasing her. She ran and grabbed on to a big tree and hugged it. It was actually pretty smart because the yak wouldn’t want to head but a tree. It just ran off.
Then someone gave us a horse. Yaks love to run and they’d be running with this pretty horse running along with them.
mrip: Do your parents still have them?
The yak market, the bottom fell out of the yak market so we used them mostly for meat. They had a lot of babies…you know that movie Seven Years In Tibet? They were looking for yaks and we ended up selling them to them and they took them to Argentina. They left them there. So there’s a yak herd in Argentina. They liked our yaks because we had a really big bull. It was beautiful.
mrip: What else was on the farm?
We had long horn sheep and they can jump too. One jumped over my mom and its hoof hit her forehead. She had a welt. I watched it happen. I couldn’t believe it.
They had black tongues. The yaks. They burped all the time. The babies looked really cute. We tried to tame one.
mrip: did you ride them?
In Tibet they ride them. Not ours.