tilted his head to peek around Yangke’s back, grinning, his eyes wide. He ducked in and out as before, using Yangke as his shield. Then he froze, his carefree expression becoming solemn. He had seen Lokesh. He advanced without fear, seeming not to notice Shan, until he stood before Lokesh, studying him, his head tilting one way then the other. Then he spun about and disappeared behind the rocks.
Yangke gazed after him, then with one hand made a corkscrew motion next to his temple. “Totally crazy. I guess we’d be like that too if we’d lived in a cave for nearly forty years.”
But the action of the hermit was not crazy at all. Yangke and Shan were still clearing rocks when Rapaki returned, clutching the stems of a plant that he crushed and placed under Lokesh’s nose. The old Tibetan sneezed, snorted, and woke up. His eyes lit with pleasure at the sight of the ragged figure before him. Rapaki was a figure directly out of the old tales, the hermit beggar with brambles in his hair.
“Rapaki, Rapaki, Rapaki,” the hermit said as Lokesh was propped against the rock wall. Rapaki paused, gazing at Hostene as though for the first time, then abruptly he jammed a finger into Hostene’s chest, repeating his own name again several times, as if it were a protective mantra. He then studied Shan with the same intense gaze, jumped toward him, jammed a finger into Shan’s chest, jumped back to Lokesh, and began whispering something very quickly under his breath. He rose warily as Yangke approached.
“What is he saying?” Hostene asked.
Shan paused for a moment, confused. Yangke was trying to question the hermit about the avalanche, about whether he had seen anyone on the slope above but Rapaki seemed unable to hear him. “He seems only to speak in song and mantra,” said Yangke.
Soon they had cleared a path sufficiently that they could carry Lokesh across the rubble.
“He has to be taken back to the village, to Gendun and Dolma,” Shan told Yangke.
“We can make a litter, with poles and shirts, then the four of us can carry him.”
“No. Hostene and I must remain here. The murderer must be up here. And his niece, too.”
“It will take all day,” Yangke said with a sigh.
Rapaki materialized at Shan’s side and put his hand on Shan’s arm as he pointed in the opposite direction from the village. Lokesh looked up. Shan recognized the words the hermit now sang, in ever-louder tones, as he pointed with increasing vigor up the slope. It was a healing mantra. Rapaki might have lost all capacity for human conversation but he knew how to convey his meaning to the deities.
Rapaki had not been the first to use the cave they reached an hour later. The soot of butter lamps was heavy on the ten-foot ceiling and stained the upper half of a vast mural on one wall portraying protector demons. They were in an ancient shrine, intended for more than a hermit’s dwelling. Despite his injuries, Lokesh would not settle onto the pallet offered by Rapaki. First he hobbled along the walls, greeting with low exclamations of delight the small statues standing in niches carved in the living rock and the altar made of a heavy beam set on rock pedestals.
“It’s Bon,” Lokesh declared as he gazed at the once-vivid painting. “Very old. For the mountain deity. I do not even recognize some of the demons,” he added as he gazed in confusion at one in the corner. He had once been a monk official in the Dalai Lama’s government and was as intimate with the pantheon of Tibetan deities as any lama. He might not be able to name the crimson-faced deity but Shan had seen it before, on one of the open-air rock faces in Abigail Natay’s video. Below the painting, on a roughhewn block of juniper, was an unbound book, a peche. Loose pages were strewn on the floor around it. Shan kneeled to study the pages. They were old, illuminated in still-brilliant colors.
It was not the old but the new that Shan was seeking. He had begun to wonder how the hermit survived. In the summer, the slopes might be full of berries, even wild grains, but winter in such a place would be brutal. He supposed that like the yaks and goats the hermit must migrate in the winter to a lower altitude. Then he saw a sliver of shadow in a corner. As Rapaki and the others helped Lokesh onto his pallet he picked up a butter lamp and slipped into the narrow opening.
The chamber beyond, adorned with more dim paintings on the walls, had once held butter, barley, and water in orderly arranged ceramic pots, the shards of which could be seen along the far wall. Rapaki’s arrangement was much more modern, and chaotic. The floor was littered with empty cans of beans, fruit, and soup, as well as empty sacks of plastic and muslin. Along one wall were unopened cans, and sacks of rice, not stacked but carelessly tossed in a pile, on top of which was a small round tin. Shan lifted the tin and opened it. It had once held hard candy and was edged with little yellow flowers. Lemon Freshies, it said in English.
There was crumpled paper in the trash heap, thirty or forty pieces, most of them labels from cans, most of those with writing on the white reverse side. Shan flattened one across his knee. At first he thought it was a sketch for a tangka, a sacred painting, for there were figures of deities and sacred symbols along the edges. But most of the paper was taken up by Tibetan words. He struggled through the first half, some of which was crossed out. He could not read all the cramped words but many phrases were familiar. It was a letter addressed to Tara, signed
“I always wondered how he fed himself,” a voice said from the shadows. “He’s gone,” Yangke added. “He took a bag and ran as if he were leaving for good. He suddenly seemed to be afraid of us.”
“Did these supplies come from Chodron?”
“Not a chance. Chodron hates him and would be pleased if he starved to death. He is a symbol of all that Chodron cannot abide.”
“It would not be difficult for a man like Chodron to get rid of him.”
“Not as simple as you may think. You don’t understand how small our village is. Rapaki is Dolma’s first son. She only sees him every couple of years, but she won’t let Chodron forget the relationship.”
Shan sifted through some of the empty cans. Most were small, containing simple, basic fare, but several newer ones contained more expensive items like lychee nuts and pickled onions. Nearest the door were plastic bags whose labels indicated they had held salted sunflower seeds. A small foil pouch had contained chewing gum. Some of the labels were worn, as if having rubbed together in a pack.
“Why would the miners give him supplies?” Shan asked.
“I didn’t know that they do. But to some he’s like a mascot, a good-luck charm. And at the end of the summer some of them don’t want to carry extra supplies out.” Yangke squatted before the pile of cans, probing them. “If they left food behind, he would know how to find it.”
Shan lifted the lamp and went to the far end of the chamber, where he saw newer supplies. An unused pad of paper. A cotton quilt with a pattern of pandas frolicking among clouds. A sealed pack of sweet biscuits. These were not the abandoned supplies of miners.
“There were stories in the village when I was younger, about Rapaki’s grandfather,” Yangke said as Shan moved back to his side. “He came back from his flock one day very excited about the paradise he would soon live in. Next morning he took a pack of food and left, never to be seen again. People said he had stolen gold from the gods and gone down in the world to spend it.”
“What,” Shan asked, “was the name of his grandfather?”
“Lobsang.”
Shan picked up one of the letters and extended it to Yangke, holding the lamp close. Rapaki had mostly written to the gods. But at least one letter, which appeared newer than the rest, had been addressed to his grandfather.
“Impossible,” Yangke said in a troubled tone. “Even if he survived to a great age the man would have died decades ago.”
“One of the great advantages of being Rapaki,” Shan observed as he rose to check on Lokesh, “is that you are not constrained by the possible.”
Shan let Hostene lead the way as the two of them climbed the slope an hour later. The Navajo had been about to leave the cave to search for his niece by himself when Shan had stopped him, explaining that Yangke would stay with Lokesh. There was no clear path through the complex network of ravines, high meadows, ice-fed springs, and long fields of wind-carved outcroppings, and soon they realized that the best clues to Abigail’s trail lay within the little silver video camera.
“Can you find these places?” Shan asked as they watched the first few scenes on the tape again. “Sometimes the same painting appears in more than one scene, as if she were revisiting them.”
