This is the second installment of a two-part series examining the hardship nomadic herders face in a fast-changing Mongolia.

ULAANBAATAR, Mongolia One afternoon in the mountain pasture where her family had grazed their livestock for as many generations as anyone could trace about 800 miles west of this polluted capital to which she was forced to flee Ishtsooj Davagdorj accidentally ran her sheep and goats into those of another herder, one shed never seen before. He was from another remote village. As their animals blended and bleated, she blushed. Her heart fluttered.

He was handsome, Ishtsooj recalled one afternoon in mid October, a coy smile flashing across her face.

This was roughly two decades ago. Back then, her parents had hundreds of head of livestock but few children to help with herding. They liked the man. Before long, Ishtsooj was married. Children would soon follow. These were happy times in Mongolia. Tall green grass grew on the ocean-like steppe, allowing the herders who still made up the majority of a population smaller than that of Los Angeles to roam a country nearly the size of Mexico. The fall of the Soviet Union, with which Mongolia aligned but never officially joined, brought democracy to a rural nation landlocked between Russia and China.

The family lived simply in a traditional ger, the stout cylindrical tents, framed with wood and usually covered in white cloth, sometimes called yurts in English. Their animals the ultimate sign of a nomads prosperity numbered more than 400, with sheep, goats, yaks and horses, and as many as four two-humped Bactrian camels used for milk and for transporting their belongings across the northern reaches of the Gobi Desert.

By the late 2000s, however, the weather patterns that had allowed her ancestors to sustain herding practices for millenniums began to change. Each year, the desert crept farther into what were once reliably verdant grasslands. Dust storms, previously rare, became frequent, turning the clear air solid with brown filth that clogged the nostrils and sandblasted the eyes. The summer rains stopped coming. Springs ran dry.

But nothing was like the winter. Mongolians have a word for winters so cold and severe that herds die off: dzud. In white dzuds, snow coats the ground and makes grazing impossible. In black dzuds, the earth freezes, turning vegetation into inedible ice. In the past, a long life on the steppe might see a dzud (pronounced zood) once a decade at most. Suddenly dzuds came year after year. Ishtsoojs livestock began dying faster than new animals could be born in the spring.

Mining companies, lured by Mongolias rich deposits of copper, coal and gold, seized broad swaths of land Ishtsoojs herds once grazed and left behind craters into which animals fell to their deaths. Wolves came in the night and killed yet more of the herd. As edible grass disappeared, some hungry livestock died gnawing at poisonous vegetation.

In 2009, Ishtsooj took out a loan worth nearly $3,000 to replenish her herd, putting up her existing animals as collateral. But as more died, she missed payments, destroying her credit and placing her on a financial blacklist. By the time she paid off the debt in 2018, she had shelled out almost double the principal in interest.