Riding the Slave

By Ophelia Lovelace

© Ophelia Lovelace 2012

Smashwords Edition

Cover photo © Can Stock Photo Inc. / maxroje

It took three days of hard walking through mountain passes to reach the Mindirian settlement. When I saw the small village nestled in the lush valley below me, I could barely believe it was real. The mountain range was one of the most remote on Earth, surrounded by hundreds of miles of forest steppe. The few nomadic tribes who scratched a living on the steppe kept their distance. Each had a long oral tradition of the Mindira, a mountain tribe who would periodically ambush nomads and take them as slaves. Early researchers dismissed this with a paternalistic smile, but the nomadic people took their legends seriously. They never ventured far from their encampments alone, reciting tales of people who vanished forever, carried into the mountains as slaves.

Mindirian culture fascinated me ever since the first satellite images confirming the existence of their settlement were released, around the time I started studying anthropology. It’s hard to convey how exciting the news was; we had sent people to the Moon and yet there was a whole society completely unknown to the rest of the world! Now, armed with a passable knowledge of the Mindirian language and a PhD proposal, my University was sending me to do a month’s field work.

My research would focus on an area of their culture that was alien to our modern sensibilities: slavery. I was desperate to prove myself as a serious academic, which is why I decided to abandon traditional observation methods. They’d take too long. If I wanted to research slavery from an anthropological perspective then what better way than to become a slave?