Namma

considerable mountain of quilts and peered through the window. In the yard, not five feet from me, I saw the enormous carcass of a yak, half skinned, legs akimbo, the taut flesh of its stomach stripped pink and naked, steam flushing from the deep gash carved in its chest. Tsedo and Annay Urgin were butchering it. Both were panting from the effort of cleaving this vast beast and their breath clouded white in the hazy morning sunshine. Shermo Donker was running around fetching huge cauldrons in which to spill the fresh blood and her brother, Rinchin, had his arm inside the yak's strained neck, rummaging around for something. I decided to lie down again for a while and let them get on with it. The sounds of cracking bones and swilling blood, flaccid organs flung on to plastic and snapping tendons entertained me for a while, then I got up. I went to the house to watch the proceedings from the window, respectfully muttering, ' Ommani padme hum,' as I passed them.

From inside, I could hear their chaotic chatter and intermittent bursts of laughter. The children were all helping to pare the yak and one of the puppies was tearing excitedly at an enormous pile of offal, until it was dragged away by Sanjay. Tsedo came to the window to sharpen his knife on a stone and I saw the skin of his forearms stained crimson. An enormous liver sat on the gatepost and various organs were trailed along the wall like washing on a line. Soon the job was done. Tsedo came in and sat with me while I prepared him a bowl of water to wash in. 'Our Amdo home is not good,' he said. I thought that maybe he was unsure how I felt about the killing. I knew how much he regretted his task, but we all realised that we couldn't carry on eating just tsampa every day. The kill was long overdue. Until the next death we would have good food.

As they prepared the offal, I played with the children. They were a wild bunch, fascinated by everything and constantly asking me questions. Sometimes I would find one of them alone in the hut, rooting around in my rucksack for a new oddity from the West. As with every day, I took out my book of blank paper and a pen to write, and within moments it was wheedled from my grasp by small, furtive fingers. They wanted to draw. I don't know if they had ever drawn before I came, but I suspected not. It had become a new delight for them, and a fascination for me. It had started with me drawing for them, then I had encouraged them to try for themselves. At first they had touched the paper hesitantly with the end of the nib, intimidated by the white space, then gently and slowly they made tiny shaky marks, maybe a few squiggly circles, not really trusting themselves. As they gained confidence they began to draw yaks, horses, sheep, and eventually people. By now they had each developed a style. Dickir Che drew large, deliberate figures with huge round heads and stick arms, Dickir Ziggy's people were covered in intricate checked clothes and had tiny facial features, while Sanjay's people sometimes had no bodies at all, just heads, arms and exaggeratedly long stick-legs. It reminded me of English children's early drawings, known as 'tadpole men', a primitive body image. Sanjay's drawings were less developed than the other two children's.

I offered him my pad and asked him to draw his mother and father. Instead, he drew his grandmother, Annay Labko, large on the page, then his grandfather, Amnye Karko, smaller, and then Gorbo, with no body. All had enormously long legs. Gorbo was a tadpole man. These three were Sanjay's most treasured relations. As the smallest child in the family, he was unashamedly spoilt by his grandparents, and Gorbo was his hero; I wasn't surprised that he had preferred to draw them. In nomad society it was usually the grandparents who had most physical contact with the children, hugging and kissing them frequently, while their parents seemed more inclined to discipline them. Sometimes, Shermo Donker was particularly hard with the children. She barked her orders at them as they scurried around performing tasks for her. When they fell asleep at night on the floor, she sometimes wrenched them up by the arms to put them to bed, bellowing their names at the top of her voice. I saw their tiny faces contorted with discomfort and heavy with sleep.

The children were always looking nervously at their parents to see if they could get away with doing something and were often seen as a nuisance. If they leant on me affectionately they were reprimanded for getting in my way, and if they scribbled on my drawing book, they were told to stop because they didn't know how to draw. I knew that Tsedo and Shermo Donker were trying to make life easier for me, but I didn't mind the children. I tried to encourage them as much as possible, whenever possible. But I was not naive enough to spoil them. I was aware that without discipline a nomad child possesses the innate qualities of a feral beast and will run wild through the vast grassland unhindered: I knew that Shermo Donker loved them. She was always telling me how good it was to have children and how Tsedup and I should have one soon. I had been thinking about it a lot. I had never spent so much time with children before and I had discovered they made me happy. I thought how good it would be to have my own family.

Sanjay giggled and chewed his dirt-encrusted finger as he surveyed his creation. The snot dribbled from his nose.

'Marger! I can't do it,' he said.

'Warger! You can do it,' I replied.

He was a tiny boy for a six-year-old. Tibetan children were generally much smaller than their western counterparts, but even among his nomad peers Sanjay was small. He was an excellent mimic, copying Tsedup when he sang English songs and making the whole family laugh. Now, bored with drawing, he went outside and ran around pushing a small wheel fixed to a metal rod. He reminded me of a Victorian child with his simple toy.

I gave Dickir Che the pen and asked her to draw something, but she hesitated. Although bossy, she was the least confident of the three. I could feel her desperation for affection in the way she clung to me. Unfortunately, at eleven she was too old to be sweet, and her attempts to attract attention meant that she still spoke in a baby voice and recounted any random piece of information to the family, no matter how mundane, to entertain them. Consequently, she was largely ignored. But she was my great companion, and I loved her.

Dickir Ziggy snatched the pen from her elder sister and went to sit in a corner, where she aimed, no doubt, to draw better pictures than any of them. As she drew, she talked incessantly to herself in a hyperactive babble. I felt that if any of the children should go to school, Ziggy should. She was amazingly quick with numbers and had so much energy and enthusiasm that she didn't know what to do with. She was also very affectionate and would often spontaneously take my hand or hug me.

Afterwards we sat outside in the sunshine and made clay animals, which we painted with water-colours. The children were pleased with the results and lined them up on the window-sill of the hut to dry in the sun. Then Shermo Donker shouted something to them and they scurried off. I watched them from the house as they ran across the far hill in the morning sunshine chasing a stray yak. They called to me, 'Ajay Shermo, Ajay Shermo! Aunty, Aunty!' and I called back across the flat plain, my voice carrying to the depths of the deep shadow at the foot of the hill where they now stood, like matchsticks in a row, waiting for my reply.

That afternoon I saw two distant figures hunched over a hole in the ice of the frozen stream. Dickir Che was helping her father, Tsedo, to wash his clothes. They were scrubbing furiously and occasionally rubbing their hands together for comfort. Shermo Donker had refused to wash them. She had found them filthy in a rice sack and had quickly folded them up and put them away again, giggling with me. Was this nomad feminism, or just common sense? Obviously Tsedo was proud enough of his appearance to risk losing his fingers from frostbite, and Dickir Che would do anything to help.

That evening, when the children had gone to sleep, Tsedo, Shermo Donker and I washed our hair together. The iron stove was well stoked and we sat around in our T-shirts in the stifling heat and took turns to pour warm water over each other's heads from the kettle. They were very impressed by my shampoo. 'Our hair is so soft,' they said, after using it -sounding, ironically, like an advertisement. I laughed. Tsedo and Shermo Donker insisted on regular beauty sessions, and I loved the intimacy of these evenings. With Amnye and Annay away, the atmosphere in the house was far more relaxed, and we laughed and joked outrageously sometimes. Dado, a young man from the tribe, dropped by on his way to hornig and we teased him about not having a wife. He was only twenty-three, poor fellow. Luckily he could take a joke. He asked for a hairwash too, then rode off to impress some girl.

The skin on my hands had become ingrained with dirt and had cracked open in places. I realised that I now had the hands of a nomad woman. At least part of me was like them. I guessed it was because of their exposure to such extremes of temperature and that it was impossible to keep them clean; no matter how often I washed them, they were dirty again within minutes. The winter dust was everywhere.

Going to the loo was now something of an endeavour since, on bad days, the wind gusted