Namma

us were full of wolves. Tsedup, Tsedo and Gorbo pegged the exterior walls with sharp spikes to prevent the predators from jumping in and savaging our flock. I helped clear the corral of long grass, which the family had grown there throughout the spring and summer. Tsedo cut it with a crude scythe and Shermo Donker and I gathered it up into bundles and bound each one into a sheaf with stalks. We stored the sheafs in a pit at the rear of the house. This was to be fodder for the animals when the weather was too harsh for them to forage for themselves. At the end of each day after our work, our hands were mapped with tiny cuts, scratches and weals from the sharp stems.

Despite the family's insistence that I should not work, I continued harvesting a few days later at Annay and Amnye's house near the town. The more they spoilt me, the more pale and feeble I felt, like some wan character from a Jane Austen novel, and I wanted to be involved with the preparations as much as possible to prove my worth. Ama-lo-lun sat on the step outside the tumbledown house spinning her prayer wheel and watching us toil. It tried to snow, but we ignored the flakes and I ignored Tsedo, who kept urging me to rest. 'Mar sho! Mar sho!' he cried every five minutes, but I relished the work. When we did rest, we all lay in the piles of grass together and compared injuries to our hands and fingers. At night we slept in a row on the low platform of wood and straw, Shermo Donker cradling Sanjay inside her tsarer. I listened to their regular breathing in the dark and to Ama-lo-lun's small voice as she chanted prayers in the adjoining room, before she gradually ceased and fell asleep.

One morning when we were working at the winter house, I was given the responsibility of driving Rhanjer's enormous truck. I had to collect clay from a nearby hill, which was daunting, as I had never driven a heavy-goods vehicle before. Even more perturbing was that half of our family and most of the tribe's children were in the back. It was a challenge and I took it slowly. With much gear-grinding and screeching of brakes I managed to park precariously on a steep slope at the foot of a cliff. Everyone leapt off excitedly and began to dig then sling the earth on to the lorry with spades. Dolma and Wado were in charge of ensuring an even dispersal of clay, in case the truck toppled over, and they stood in the back, spreading fiercely with their hands. They laughed as the diggers lobbed their spades'-worth into the air and showered them with earth. Before we had use of the truck, we had laboriously loaded the clay on to two yaks and returned it to the house over the stream. This was going to make life easier. As usual it was also a chance for everyone to be boisterous and soon we were all covered in clay.

I drove the lorry through the stream and back to the house in first gear; my manipulation of the clutch had somehow failed. The noise of the engine was painful. Tsedo and Amnye laughed at me when I got back. To them, it was an amazing thing that a woman could drive a truck, as none of the women here drove, but it was amusing that she wasn't quite good enough. Women drivers. When their laughter had subsided, Shermo Donker, Sirmo, Amnye, Tsedo, Tsedup and I started making an extension to the house, the extra room were Tsedup and I would sleep. The men built the walls from turf and stone, and we girls spent the day slapping clay on top to create a smooth surface and block up the cracks. It was the hardest job I have ever done. The clay, which was mixed with water, had to be squelched in our hands to form a good strong mix, then slapped on the walls and spread with our palms.

Although the sun shone brilliantly from a perfectly blue sky, the earth was so cold our hands ached. It was even worse when we came to do the interior: it was freezing in the shade and there was no longer the psychological comfort of seeing the sun on our skin. I had to take a break as I had lost all feeling in my hands. To make myself useful I collected water from the stream for the workers, then rejoined them outside the house and enjoyed smearing in the sunshine, the feel of the sludge between my fingers. It was incredibly messy work and I couldn't help thinking that a manicure wouldn't go amiss; also a revision of the wardrobe situation, as I looked nothing less than eight months' pregnant in my multiple layers of mud-splattered clothing.

'You have a baby inside,' they teased.

When the walls were finished, the roof was put together from beams, bamboo and earth. Shermo Donker shinned up and set about spreading thick handfuls of twigs from the mountain bushes on top of the beams. She then spread plastic sheeting over it and completed the canopy with a layer of clay to seal it. Soon we had an extra room on the house. There was a hole for a small window in the front, which lacked glass, and a hole for a door to be put in. Although glad of a roof, I hoped they wouldn't forget these details. This was to be our bedroom for the next three months and it was below freezing at night now. Sometimes, by morning, my glass of water had turned to ice.

By sunset we had finished toiling and rode home. About fifteen of us made a caravan on horses and yaks back to the tribe over the hill from the winter houses. The evening light shone gold over the scorched grassland, and everyone was in jovial spirits. Soon they were whipping each other's yaks and racing one another. Shermo Donker, overtaking me on the inside, giggled devilishly and cracked a rope on the rear of my beast as she passed. It bolted and I shrieked into the wind, as I hung on for dear life. Ahead of me Sirmo fell off her yak and everyone teased her. My breath caught in my throat, not because of the wind but because I was overcome by an intense surge of emotion. I felt a strange sense of unreality, as if I was in a film. I think you would call it elation. If there had to be one defining moment that depicted Tibet in all its beauty and wildness, then surely that was it for me.

The next day I woke up to a seven-year-old piping Amdo songs. Dickir Ziggy had shared my bed while Tsedup had stayed with his brother, Gondo, on the other side of Machu. We lay and chatted about my brother Phil and his naughty antics as a child while the frost gathered on our breath. She was especially interested to hear the story I told her about him lying in the road and pretending to be dead. When the cars had stopped to see what had happened and the drivers got out to check on him, he would jump up laughing and run away. Ziggy giggled.

I went and washed in the cold stream in the morning sunshine while the sheep collected curiously around me. In the tent I made tsampa and the milk boiled over in the pot on the fire, leaving a pungent smell from the burnt splashes on the clay. Outside, Gorbo led the white stallion across the open entrance. It was the most seductively beautiful creature I had ever seen; pure white and graceful, like a unicorn without the horn. The tents had all but disappeared now. The river valley looked bare, apart from we few stragglers, and the dung mountains that the early movers had left behind. Next door Annay Urgin's tent had gone and only a lonely clay stove was left on the ground where her home had been. The nomads never destroyed a fire. I had watched the tent being dismantled while everyone stood fussing round the yaks, packing huge sacks of belongings – cheese, butter, barley, clothes, the altar, tent poles and the tent itself – on to the animals' backs. Excitement and change had permeated our daily routine and I was looking forward to our move in a few days' time. We had been away in Labrang during the first migration and I was not going to miss this experience. But first we had to go visiting. Apparently this tribe was bigger than I had thought and we had been invited to the other half by the families on the opposite side of Amnye Kula. Tsedup promised we would be back in time.

I was collected by jeep from the town and driven to a northern valley on the other side of Machu by Namjher, a jovial, portly man. Tsedup followed behind on the bike. He had known Namjher since birth and had grown up with all of the people I was about to meet. It was a sad fact but today the tribe was split in half. During Tsedup's years away the introduction of new legislation from the government meant that there were now land-division policies, with which the nomads were forced to comply. Large tribes were discouraged from cohabiting in favour of small groups of families occupying their own sections of land within the wire-fenced boundaries. A way of life that had been practised for centuries had been changed irrevocably. The very nature of nomadic pastoralism was at threat.

Before the legislation, a meeting of the heads of the eighty tribes in the Lhardey Nyima area, north of the Yellow river, would have determined where and when they should move within their vast grasslands. Tsedup remembered the land available to his own tribe as covering an area of between ten and twenty miles. At that time, they also moved more frequently, every month in the summer, to allow the grass to regenerate more quickly. Today they were confined to moving only three times a year within their designated areas and the grass was of poorer quality.

When the nomads had been given the order to divide up, they had been left to sort it out for themselves since the authorities did not have the ability to organise vast areas of nomadic pasture and were concerned about tribal conflict. A group of officials inspected it annually to ensure that the nomads had conformed to the guidelines, and enforced restrictions if they thought there had been any cheating. The Tibetans also had