anyone to go up there. He warned the villagers against disturbing the deities.”
“Do you and Chodron share the same deities?” Shan asked, immediately shamed by the harshness of his words. He’d felt an unfamiliar surge of anger at the mention of the headman’s name. In the same perverse way that he invoked the old traditions, Chodron was seeking to use Gendun as his minion, to turn the lama’s compassion into something dark and ugly.
Yangke contemplated Shan’s question. “What Chodron and I share is the will to survive.”
“For some, the most difficult thing in life is knowing what they are surviving for,” Shan said, pausing over the mystery not of the killings but of Yangke. He had been born in the village and left it for a monastery, then knowingly returned to Chodron’s peculiar brand of despotism.
Yangke did not reply.
They watched the sheep spread out over the broad, rolling slope, the early sun washing over them, the light breeze bringing a scent of mountain flowers. Shan was falling into a languid doze when thunder suddenly boomed and the earth seemed to tremble. Several sheep bleated and trotted toward Yangke, who pointed to a plume of dust perhaps two miles away. It was not thunder that they had heard.
As Shan watched the settling dust a new sound rose, an alien, crackling whirling that he could not identify. Yangke shouted out in warning. Sheep bleated in alarm. As Shan spun about, a man in a tattered green quilted jacket and a soldier’s helmet painted with black and yellow stripes burst around a rock on the trail, riding a bicycle. The sheep scattered in terror. Shan dove into the grass as the man sped by, laughing, waving a bundle of claim stakes over his head.
Yangke bent and launched a well-aimed stone. Though the rider was already some distance away, it bounced off his back, raising another laugh from the man before he disappeared around an outcropping.
“Something else new this year,” Yangke said in a low, angry voice. “They brought in two or three of those mountain bikes. After so many centuries the sheep trails crisscross the mountain like highways, worn smooth enough for those heavy bikes. The sheep hate them. I hate them.”
Only Lokesh seemed unaffected by the sudden intrusion, and the shadow that settled onto Yangke’s face gradually lifted as he watched the old Tibetan. Lokesh had rearranged the stakes, placing them in a long line perpendicular to the stream, anchoring them with small cairns built around each base, then stringing rope from one to another. He had torn small pieces of canvas from the abandoned tarpaulin and was tying them to the rope. A grin appeared on Yangke’s face and he struggled to his feet, then went to the remains of an old campfire near the stream. Shan was at his side a moment later and saved him the trouble of bending by handing him a stub of charred wood.
Lokesh had begun writing a series of familiar Tibetan words on the cloth scraps. He was turning the miners’ equipment into a battery of prayer flags, erected in a defensive line between the miners and Drango village.
“Lha gyal lo,” Shan said.
The young Tibetan silently opened and shut his mouth, as though trying to remember how to speak the words. “Lha gyal lo,” he finally repeated in a voice that cracked with emotion, then stumbled down the slope to help inscribe more flags.
An hour later Yangke led them onto a long, wide shelf, one of the many tiers that rose like irregular steps for several miles before ending at the base of the jagged summit.
“One of the other shepherds discovered the bodies,” Yangke explained. “They had made camp by the trees,” he said, indicating several gnarled junipers and pines that grew by a small spring, beside a series of high outcroppings that would have shielded them from anyone higher up on the slope. “He did not know about one camp but one of the dogs starting growling as if a wolf was near and then he saw a backpack lying out in the open. He was going to skirt the camp but the dog went in and wouldn’t return.”
“Where is their equipment and bedding?” Shan asked as they approached the grove of trees. There was no sign that anyone had been there except for compacted soil under the trees.
“Gone. I came here two days later, as soon as I could without Chodron’s men seeing me. I found the cold ashes of a small campfire. Lots of dried blood. Boot marks all over. The miners watch each other. If one dies, any equipment that is not looted immediately is gathered up and auctioned to the others. They are like vultures.”
Shan paused and looked back at Yangke. “Do you mean miners have been killed too?”
“It’s a dangerous job,” Yangke said. “And the miners like to take care of their own problems. I hear things from the other shepherds. There was talk about a miner killed last year, another found dead last month. But the miners and I, we stay away from each other.” Exhausted from climbing while burdened by his canque, Yangke settled between two boulders, resting one end of the beam on each. He raised a weary arm to gesture toward a small mound of rocks not far from the trees. “Their campfire was there.”
Someone had tried to obscure the fire pit by stacking rocks over it to make it look like the base of one more cairn. Shan kneeled and rolled away the rocks, then examined the ashes, trying to recognize the mélange of scents released when he stirred them. He closed his eyes to focus on the smells. Burned feathers. Burned plastic. Rice and wild onions, scorched in a pot. Singed butter. Sifting the ashes, he produced a lump of hard blue material, three inches long, then another similar piece. The remains of water bottles or plastic cups or even remnants of a small nylon pack? The ashes yielded nothing else but pebbles, dozens of small gray pebbles. He sifted several onto his palm. They were identical, each less than half an inch long, with a dimple on one side and a corresponding convex curvature on the opposite side. He retrieved more of the little shards, placed one on a flat stone and smashed it with a larger rock. It dented but did not break. The pebbles were made of plastic.
At his side another hand reached into the pit and began retrieving more of them. Lokesh scooped them into a pile as Shan, still perplexed, tossed one in his palm and began pacing in ever-widening circles around the fire pit. The scavengers had been thorough. But on his first circuit he found the stub of a pencil, on his second a little red feather, and, pushed into the dirt by a heavy boot, a silver instrument, eight inches long, as thin as a pencil but ending in sharp curved points at the end. Another dental probe. On the third and fourth, a dozen slivers of wood, all tapered, all a uniform length. Toothpicks. He stepped under the trees, noting the pattern of the pressed earth and pine needles, the imprint of a sleeping bag. The soil beneath the trees was dry and loose. He raked his fingertips through the earth at the edge of the imprint. Pebbles turned up in the little furrows, then a white nugget, as hard as a pebble. Dried cheese, a traditional Tibetan food that, like buttered tea, appealed to few outsiders. But an outsider might have politely accepted the cheese and then discreetly buried it so as not to offend. He tried again, turning up a small stick, bits of quartz, a shard of old bone. It was a camp that had, no doubt, been used before. He rose then paused to pick up a little stick. Its bark had been peeled, a shallow groove cut in one end as if to indicate legs. He extracted the piece he had taken from the comatose stranger in the stable. The two pieces fit together, forming a crude figure that reminded him of the little clay images of saints traditional Tibetans used. This one, like those in the village, had had its body broken, perhaps by the killer.
Shan gripped the little figure, studying the ground, seeing no more signs, then sniffed at it. It had been cut only days earlier. He walked around each of the half dozen trees, and found four stubs oozing sap, then held the stick close to one of the stubs. It was a match, or close enough. Had there been four stick figures? But there had been only three people in the camp. Pocketing the sticks, he took a step, then looked back at the trees. There were many branches that might have served the purpose, but all of the sticks had been cut from the east side of the trees.
When he looked back he saw that Lokesh had laid the plastic pebbles in a row and was counting them in a low voice. As Shan approached he reached one hundred eight.
“Not for a rosary,” Shan said to his old friend. “Not for praying.” He picked up a handful and with a tentative expression began a second line parallel to the first. He laid out the double line for eighteen inches then held up two of the pebbles and showed Lokesh how each curvature fit into the dimple of the next. “A zipper,” he explained.
Lokesh gestured to the pile of gray shards. “But it would be four or five feet long.”
“Do you smell the ashes? A sleeping bag was burned. Nylon and feathers would be easily consumed by the flames. Though why someone would burn something so useful in the mountains I cannot say.”
Shan left the old Tibetan wearing a puzzled expression, continuing to assemble the charred teeth in tandem lines. He paced about the campsite again, noting now the broken twigs of several nearby bushes. He kneeled to study the way the slanting rays of the sun played on the ground. A vague line of shadow, the barest smudge of gray, ran from near the fire, around the outcropping, and up the slope. It was the vestige of a very old path, unused for many decades.
Two other paths were betrayed only by crushed plants and a few boot prints, recently made, going toward
