Lokesh would recite his mantra as the darkness faded, then just before the first rays of light he would abruptly cease, catch his breath and hold it, not inhaling again until the sun appeared. Shan had never seen him fail, never seen him have to draw in another quick breath before the brilliant rays of light appeared. At first he had tried to decipher the strange calculation that Lokesh surely must be doing, then eventually decided there was no calculation, that Lokesh was connected to the natural world in a way he would never experience. Once, coming from a twenty-four-hour meditation, deprived of sleep, Shan had found himself watching Lokesh, not the sun, and for a moment had been overcome with panic that Lokesh would forget to inhale, and the sun would not come up.
Shan was close enough to see Lokesh’s chest freeze and found that he too was holding his breath, watching until a blinding seed of energy materialized on the rim of the mountains. Lokesh acknowledged Shan with his uneven smile, made crooked by the boot of a prison guard years before, then finished his rosary before rising and continuing up the trail. It was one of the many little rituals that defined the lives of the old Tibetans.
They had walked perhaps a mile when they saw a second group of sheep, a dozen rugged, long-haired creatures that sat in the lee of an outcropping above a stream, all intently watching something below. Shan saw the familiar brown mastiff first, on the slope a hundred feet away, as curious as the sheep at the strange sight on the bank of the stream. The figure at the water’s edge was readily recognizable, though the actions of the man in the canque were not.
Yangke was performing what appeared to be a dance, jumping in the air, then kicking out with one foot. His hands were no longer bound by the fittings of the canque, though he was forced to keep a grip on it with one hand to maintain his balance. As they watched, he kicked several times, the last so violently the weight of the collar threw him backward onto the ground. Rising, he made a long sweeping arc with the end of the beam, seeming to scrape the earth, then moved fifty feet downstream and repeated the motions.
“I do not know this ritual,” Lokesh declared in a puzzled tone.
This time Yangke executed a more delicate step, using his toes to separate rocks in a small pile at his feet and coax them along the bank before swatting them into the fast water.
“He practices one of those games people play with sticks and balls,” Lokesh suggested.
“What he practices,” Shan said as he watched Yangke, “is anger.”
The former monk did not turn immediately when his dog barked, but walked a few more feet up the stream, then gave a high-pitched cry, one of the calls used to summon wandering sheep.
As the dog bounded toward them with a wagging tail, Shan bent to pick up a stick lying near the first place they had seen Yangke kicking at the earth. The wood, two feet long and over an inch thick, had been stripped of bark and painted with three thin rings near the top, two red with one yellow between. Shan pulled out the little sticks that had been tossed down by the angry intruder in the stable. The markings were similar but the colors did not match.
“The sheep are apt to roam far this time of year,” Yangke explained as he turned with a show of surprise and greeted the two men.
Shan went to the second place they had seen Yangke perform his strange dance and retrieved a second stick from under some stones that had been kicked on top of it. It bore the same red and yellow colored rings as the first. He held the sticks, tapping the painted ends in his palm as he approached the young Tibetan. “Or perhaps it troubles them to see their shepherd become so upset over a few sticks,” Shan observed.
Yangke walked up the slope to where his dog sat and eased himself down beside the animal, resting one end of his heavy collar on a nearby rock. The dog licked his face and Yangke began stroking its back. “Chodron allows me the use of my hands when I am working with the herds, as long as I work my hands back into the bindings when I go near the village. For him,” the former monk added, “that is compassion.”
Shan lowered himself onto the grass beside Yangke and surveyed the landscape. He saw another painted stake on the far side of the stream, then another a hundred feet upstream. “I met an old lama in prison,” Shan said after a moment, “who always laughed when he heard about Chinese buying plots of land on sacred mountains. He asked who signed the papers for the land deity.” As they watched, Lokesh waded across the shallow, ankle-deep stream and collected the sticks that were still standing.
Yangke kept patting the dog, which watched attentively as Lokesh gleaned a piece of rope, then a ragged piece of canvas from the rocks beside the water. “When I was a boy we would come up the mountain on festival days, with my uncles and aunts and cousins. The children would collect the pretty yellow rocks in the streams and put them inside cairns with prayer flags and mani stones arranged about them,” Yangke explained, referring to the stones that bore inscribed prayers left by the devout at sacred sites. “Each visit we would build one cairn, to honor the golden earth deity that resides in the mountain. Sometimes it would be six or eight feet high.” He paused and gazed into the clear cobalt sky. “After I went down to the world my surviving aunt wrote me letters. When she described how men came and tore down all the cairns, I didn’t really understand. When she said they had changed the course of some of the streams and stopped a waterfall I used to play in, I thought she was making some sort of strange joke.”
Shan watched a soaring bird, a huge lammergeier, as he pondered Yangke’s words, then surveyed the long, wide slope before them. Scattered along the stream were piles of rocks, not the carefully stacked cairns of the devout but what could have been the ruins of cairns. “I don’t understand,” he said. “Gold mining requires roads and enormous machines.” He glanced up at the bird circling overhead. The feather in the vest of the stranger in the stable had come from such a large bird of prey.
“Suppose a mountain was so remote that Chinese survey crews ignored it when they cataloged mineral resources decades ago,” Yangke said. “Suppose a secret base happened to be built on the far side of the mountain that discouraged anyone from venturing too close. Suppose, eventually, a few Chinese discovered streams with nuggets and gold dust, even veins of gold in the rocks, but they knew the army would never permit legitimate mining operations because the secret base was so close. Suppose it became something of a hobby for some of them, a pastime, to sneak across the mountain after the snow melted and extract a few ounces of gold. It wouldn’t take too many years before word would spread and others arrived, who took their work more seriously.”
“Outlaw miners,” Shan ventured. He had heard of such men elsewhere in Tibet, prospectors who operated far from the reach of government taxes and mining regulations. The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away, ran the age-old saying.
“It’s been a closely guarded secret, confined to criminals mostly, men with little to lose, with good reasons to keep out of the government’s sight. They used to hide, from the rest of us and from each other. But they grow bolder every year. Some work the streams with pans. Some use dynamite to open the veins. They arrive after the snow melts and leave in September. Like migrating geese. Except these geese eat the land itself.”
“Why would they bother to stake claims?”
“They respect each other’s workings. They’ve begun to organize themselves, enacting rules for peaceful coexistence with each other and with Drango village.”
“But someone in Drango could inform the government.”
“And what then? The slopes would be crawling with troops. Public Security would ask questions about Drango that no one would want to answer. The Bureau of Mining would descend on us. Municipal administration bureaus. The Bureau of Religious Affairs,” he added with a shudder.
“But you said the two murdered men were holy men,” Shan reminded him.
“I crept as close to their campsite as I dared with this tree about my neck. They had rebuilt a cairn near their camp. These men ignored the streams. They wrote in books and cleaned old paintings. They had started making a
“A sandpainting?”
Yangke nodded. “But maybe they were miners as well. They dug into the rocks and crawled into small caves. But I think they were scared of the others. The other miners camp in the open, to warn competitors off. But the ones who died, they camped in outof-the-way places, hidden places.”
Miners and monks. It seemed to Shan an impossible combination. “Were these sticks used by the dead men?”
“No. They never used claim stakes. These are new. No one has ever staked a claim so close to Drango before. Some of the miners say the village sits on the richest vein of all. Once I had a nightmare in which they blew the village off the side of the mountain to get at the gold.”
Yangke followed Shan’s gaze up the slope. “You’ll just make more trouble,” he said. “Chodron has forbidden
