Inside the sacred wolf hunts of western Mongolia
High in the mountains, Kazakh herders have lived in careful balance with wolves for centuries. Now a celebrated tradition has become a matter of survival.
The horse’s body was still warm when the three men came upon it in the snow. From only the wounds and a constellation of tracks around the horse, the trio of Kazakh herders could unspool the morning: A pair of wolves had jumped onto the horse’s upper back and brought it to its knees. Because its tender rear flank was missing—the part a wolf might gorge on and then later regurgitate to a nursing mother tending to her young—the hunters were confident there was a den nearby. Eyes peeled, they stowed their guns and traveled on. The wolf hunt continued.
The hunters—Aibolat Kulmeskhan, Galym Bapar, and Serikbol Koshegen—belong to a community of nomadic Kazakh herders that has been shepherding livestock for generations through Mongolia’s jagged, windswept Altay Mountains. Though Kazakhs make up only 4 percent of Mongolia’s total population, they represent 98 percent of the roughly 105,000 inhabitants in Bayan-Olgiy, the country’s highest and westernmost province, nestled along the border of China and Russia. They raise sheep, yaks, horses, and occasionally camels for income and year-round sustenance, but it’s the gray wolves—both predators of their livestock and, in the herders’ culture, sacred beings—with which they have the most complex relationship.
Serikbol says his ancestors, the Blue Turks, who conquered Central Asia in the sixth century, descended from wolves. Most of the Kazakh herders are Muslim, but their spiritual regard for wolves is rooted in an animism that extends to horses and eagles as well. Wolves occupy a special place, though, and are revered for many of the same reasons they are feared, including their intelligence, courage, and heightened senses. Though wolves and herders have coexisted in the Altay for millennia, surviving the ebb and flow of empires and shifting borders, an increasingly volatile climate has pushed the wolves to attack livestock more frequently over the past several years. More often than ever, the Kazakh nomads are forced to balance their reverence for the wolf with their duty to protect their herds—and their livelihoods. This wolf hunt in April 2023 was the community’s first in two years.
It came on the heels of a particularly brutal stretch: a dzud year, as it is known in the region, with a summer scorched by record-breaking wildfires followed by a subzero winter. Rather than relief, spring had brought whiplash—days warm enough for rain, then nights so cold that some wet animals within the herd froze to death. (Serikbol says a neighbor lost 200 animals overnight in one snap.) At night, Serikbol and his wife would bring the weakest animals into their ger, a type of traditional tent, for warmth. He would often scale cliffs in search of wild grasses to feed his malnourished livestock. “We’ve had hard winters before, but never a dzud like this in our life,” he says.
The Mongolian wolves were just trying to survive the dzud too. A subspecies of gray wolf, they live throughout the region, though it’s difficult to estimate their numbers. Slighter than their North American counterparts, they tend to hunt in smaller packs. When their natural prey, such as wild sheep and red deer, become scarce, the wolves unsurprisingly turn to livestock for an easier meal. “We have a saying in Mongolia: The wolf fattens during a dzud,” says Bazartseren Boldgiv, an ecologist at the National University of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar.
Complicating matters, livestock herd sizes across western Mongolia have gone up while the number of herders has gone down, leaving domestic animals less protected. More than 90 percent of Bayan-Olgiy’s surveyed herders reported losing livestock to wolves, according to a recent study—on average, nearly 14 animals per herder, seven times more than just two decades earlier. That costs each herder nearly $1,300 a year, or around 40 percent of the herder’s annual income. “In nature, wolves are the ones who control the number of other animals,” Serikbol says. “But there is nothing to control the number of wolves.”
Back on the wolf hunt, Aibolat, Galym, and Serikbol alternated between horseback and foot as they moved through belly-deep snow. Spotting a wolf meant crouching, sometimes for hours, with binoculars. When the hunters finally approached a den the next day, their choreography was precise: Removing their boots to step quietly through snow in socked feet, they moved only when the wind blew their scent in the opposite direction. That day they killed an adult wolf and discovered a den of eight pups, eyes still pinched shut. Had the pups been a few weeks older, the Kazakhs would have considered taking most of them home to raise to adulthood—a form of population control passed down through generations, with the stipulation that at least one pup is always left in the den for the mother. Once grown, the wolves would have been killed, their pelts and other parts used for warmth and traditional medicine. These pups, though, were barely a week old, so herder tradition said they were too young to touch. The men left them alive in the den, despite knowing they would grow to become a risk to livestock. “There has to be humanity in your tradition,” Serikbol says.
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That humanity goes beyond veneration. Kazakh herders understand the role wolves play in the fragile mountain ecosystem, killing off weak and old animals on the steppe and strengthening the overall vitality of the herd. Serikbol once left a few male sheep behind when he changed pastures for the season, only to come back a year later to find they’d survived. Serikbol bred those sheep, deemed strongest in the face of predators, and had the healthiest herd around. “Wolf—we call it an ecological doctor,” says Saken Ospan, a park ranger who works in wildlife management in Bayan-Olgiy’s Altai Tavan Bogd National Park. “If the wolf disappears, there will be lots of diseases.”
Months later, on a separate hunt, Serikbol took home a pup from another den. He treated it like livestock, feeding it meat as it matured while keeping it tethered in the yard of his household. When the wolf is full-grown, he’ll say a prayer and raise his gun. Serikbol will sew the pelt into a winterproof vest and use parts of the animal medicinally. The herders believe that a raw tongue tied around the neck can help with thyroid issues, and that a wolf’s brain boiled into soup lowers blood pressure. Bullets are expensive, so to recoup some costs, Serikbol will sell the wolf’s skull. But he’ll keep the ankle bones for himself—the herders wear them to ward off bad spirits. They know their prosperity remains intertwined with the wolf’s, even in death.
A version of this story appears in the February 2026 issue of National Geographic magazine.
