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[Editor's Note: Don't miss Rupert Isaacson's reading tonight at the Bagdad Theater, 3702 SE Hawthorne Blvd.]

(Read the previous part here.)

About 25 hours after coming down the mountain from Ghoste's camp, Rowan squatted down on a sandbank in the river Orghon, where we had stopped to swim and pitch tents, and did his first intentional poo. And cleaned himself. On camera.

We couldn't believe it.

Three days later, when we reached the nearest town, Rowan, for the first time in his life, pooed in the potty.

We drank the Ger camp out of beer that night.

And as we celebrated, Rowan joined the other kids in the Ger camp in their evening games. One of them. No longer the odd kid out.

From then on — for about the next three weeks — we had perhaps six tantrums of any note. Before Ghoste, that would have been about half a day's worth .

By the time we got back to the U.S., they had gone completely.

Rowan arrived home and immediately started making friends with the kids in the neighbourhood. He started riding Betsy by himself.

That year, he had his first birthday party. ...

(Read the previous part here.)

The Dukha, or reindeer people, are nomads, moving between fixed points of summer pasture and winter forage. So assuming you're going to find them just like that is, well, an assumption. And assuming you do find them, then you have to hope the shaman feels that he or she can help you. And agrees to.

We were lucky: the Dukha were about to move to another site, but we had hit them before they moved their tipis (if you ever wondered whether it was true that Amerindians moved across the Bering Strait from Siberia, then one quick look at the tipis of the Dukha and other cultures like them and, well, it all looks pretty familiar).

Ghoste, the shaman, asked us to visit him in his tipi that night. We were all exhuasted from two ten-hour days in the saddle (it had taken that long to make the ascent), but Rowan seemed to love being in Ghoste's tipi. The shaman, who was perhaps 70 years old, and still fit and lean, with a face crossed by weather, experience, and humour, took ...

So we get to Mongolia.

I had to admit that the capital, Ulaanbaataar, wasn't exactly what I'd had in mind — a kind of depressed, post-Soviet slum stretching some twenty miles of broken concrete, smokestacks, and old apartment buildings, down a long narrow valley between high mountains.

But the following morning Tulga, our guide, had organised nine shamans to come heal Rowan at the foot of a sacred mountain called the Bogd Khan. Some had travelled hundreds of miles to come do the healing. We drove out to meet them — the city stopping abruptly at the mountain wall, and wild nature taking over with no suburban, farming, or transitional zone.

And at first I thought I'd made a huge mistake. The shamans' drumming, whirling, chanting were all too much for Rowan at the beginning. As for Kristin and I — we got whipped with rawhide. Kristin was made to wash her vagina out with vodka (!) — I thought she was going to divorce me! Vodka and milk were spat in our faces. The day grew hot and humid. Had I grossly misjudged this whole thing? Was I going to have ...

(Read the first part here.)

So I'm standing there, looking at this amazing, unfathomable communication passing between my son and this horse Betsy, and even then it takes a while for the penny to drop. I assumed he was unsafe around horses — even after years spent as a horse trainer myself. It took me a little while before his repeated visits to the horse pasture resulted in my finally thinking, Hmmm, maybe I should put him on.

We were standing there next to Betsy as she grazed, contentedly hanging out next to us despite having 10 green acres to roam on.

"Would you like to get up?" I asked Rowan.

"Up!" he said — it was the first lucid, directed speech he'd ever given me. So I put him up. And immediately he began to talk. At first, this new, astonishing language didn't translate away from Betsy. But after a couple of weeks or so, and by now I was actually riding with Rowan, he began bringing it home to the house. Asking for juice ("Want juice?") instead of just taking mine or Kristin's hand ...

I'm sitting across the breakfast table from my son Rowan, seven years old.

"I am Iron Man!" he sings, imitating the Black Sabbath song he heard me listening to this morning (part of what my mother would call my Peter Pan, refusal to grow up, complex, oi veh). A red cardinal bird flits past the window. From behind the fence outside, my young horse, just beginning his training, snorts, wanting to catch my attention so I'll come out and grain him. The pygmy goats echo in demanding chorus.

"Better go feed them, Daddy," says Rowan. Then: "In the Narnia book the talking animals listen to their God."

I look up, shocked — still taken by surprise by this new, lucid, speech of his. Just 18 months ago I wondered if this kind of conversation would ever be possible. A few months before that, I didn't know if he'd ever be toilet trained, if he'd ever make friends, if he'd ever be free of the terrible, firestorm distress tantrums that used to wrack his brain and body as his over-stimulated nervous system misfired, like bombs going off inside his body.