American looked back at the animals as they wound their way up the slope '- you're carrying something illegal.'
No one spoke, which was answer enough. The wind moaned around the corner of the rocks. The little stove continued its low hiss. In the distance sheep bleated.
The American looked into his hands with a pained expression. 'The missing woman is named Melissa Larkin,' he explained. 'People seem to have given up on her. She is presumed dead. You'd be surprised how many Americans die in Tibet,' he added. 'For tourists, it's an expensive destination that takes a long time to see, which means many of the tourists are senior citizens. Then there's the dropouts who don't understand about bandits in remote places or the diseases they would never catch at home, or how altitude sickness can kill them overnight. You can die of things here that would never kill you in the States, because medical treatment can be so far away.' He looked up with a frown. 'It's the embassy that has to get the bodies home for burial.'
'But surely the Chinese authorities must help when foreign bodies have to be collected,' Shan stated with a pointed glance at the American.
Winslow bent to turn a knob on the stove. The hissing stopped. 'This Larkin woman is different. Thirty-five years old. A scientist. Geologist, seismologist. Worked in the North Sea, Alaska, Patagonia. Someone who can handle herself.'
'You mean she was working in Tibet?'
'In old Amdo for the past year,' Winslow nodded. 'Southern Qinghai Province, just across the border from the TAR,' he said, meaning the Tibet Autonomous Region, Beijing's misleading name for what had been the central Tibetan provinces.
'A snow avalanche. Rockslide. Bandits,' Shan said. 'Just because she was independent didn't mean she could avoid bad luck.'
'Right. That's what they all say. I had to argue with my boss just to get the right to look for her.' Winslow spoke with an odd note of challenge in his voice. 'I have two weeks, then off to a conference in Shanghai.'
No one spoke. Shan and Lhandro exchanged sad glances, and Shan knew the Tibetan and he were sharing the same thought. They had been brought up in a world where people went missing all the time, where almost no family was exempt from the pain of losing someone. People might walk into the mountains and never come back. People were dragged off to prison without warning, without announcement. People might come back from prison and find that all those they had known had vanished. Shan himself was missing, although he doubted his former wife or even his son cared, and would prefer to assume him dead. Shan saw that his companions were all staring at the American. Winslow lived in a truly different world.
The entire caravan was visible above them now, climbing up a switchback trail on the slope above.
'I don't know these mountains,' Winslow said in a softer, pleading tone. 'I just need a way in, so I don't waste my time finding the right trail.'
Still no one spoke. Suddenly the American sighed and handed Shan the radio. Shan held it in his hands a moment, then laid it on a flat rock, the American watching uncertainly. The Tibetans inched away. Shan grabbed a large stone, raised it over his head, and, as Nyma uttered a small surprised cry, slammed it down on the device. He hammered the radio once, twice, three times, until the case burst and bits of broken circuit board and wiring fell into the dirt.
'Dammit,' the American growled. 'You could have just taken the battery.'
Shan ignored him, silently gathering the pieces of the radio and throwing them into a narrow cleft in the rock. 'I still don't understand something,' he said as he turned to face the American. 'Why this pass? This woman could be anywhere in the mountains.'
Winslow stared at the hole where the shards of his radio had disappeared, shook his head, and turned to Shan. 'I spent four days looking around her base camp to the north and found nothing. Her company had other field teams out searching for her body. I thought I would work from the south up. But I didn't know where exactly. Then today after that yak and I met, I stopped to study the map with my driver, on the road below this spot.'
The American hesitated a moment, pushing his hair back with a self-conscious expression. 'A large bird, like a grouse, with white in its plumage, landed on a boulder nearby while I was working with the map. It kept staring at me. I walked over and it kept staring until it flew to another boulder a little way up the trail.' Winslow shrugged and looked up sheepishly. 'Like something was waiting for me up the trail.'
Lokesh nodded solemnly. Shan studied the man. When speaking of the day's events, he had not mentioned meeting Colonel Lin, only meeting the yak.
'A bird,' Nyma whispered soberly, to no one in particular.
'Where is this base camp exactly?' Shan asked. 'How far north?'
'In one of the valleys where they are drilling. There's a mountain called Geladaintong, which holds the headwaters for the Yangtze. This place is twenty miles west of there, inside the ridges of another huge mountain. It's called Yapchi Valley.'
Lhandro let out a gasp of surprise. Lokesh began nodding his head, as if it all made perfect sense.
Winslow stared in confusion as Shan replayed what had happened at the village. The American had emerged from the rocks to confront Lin after the colonel and Lhandro had spoken of Yapchi. He had not heard them speak of the distant valley.
'The Yapchi oil project,' Shan said.
'Right. She works there.'
Shan sighed, looking into his friends' expectant faces. There would be no denying the American now. The Tibetans would say it was predestined that the American travel with them. He knelt and helped the American repack his bag.
They camped that night below the pass in a field of boulders where the wind blew incessantly and they could light a fire only after building a small wall of rocks to shield the flame. The American offered to cook on his little stove but Nyma simply pointed to a figure climbing along the slope above them. It was Tenzin, who still seemed unable to complete a day without gathering dung.
'It must have been a bad thing he did,' Lhandro had observed when he had first seen Tenzin with his sack, exchanging a knowing glance with Shan. The rongpa, like Shan, had guessed that Tenzin was performing penance. Shan remembered Tenzin's strange behavior in the hailstorm, and later at the lake. Drakte had freed him from prison and he was going north because someone had died.
Winslow studied the silent, stooped figure with a bewildered expression. 'I don't think a cowboy could be a cowboy,' he said slowly, in English, to himself, 'if he had to collect cow shit every night.'
'Keeps you close to the earth,' Shan offered in the same tongue.
The American looked up in surprise. 'You speak American well.'
'My father taught me English before he died.'
Winslow contemplated Shan, as if sensing a story in Shan's words, but did not press. 'Don't see my bird,' he said, switching to Tibetan as he gazed back over the slope. 'I never believed in signs, until I started coming to Tibet. First couple trips, no big deal. Flew into the airport to meet the coffin of a former governor who had a heart attack climbing the Potola steps. Second time, I just went into Lhasa for a mountain climber who had died of altitude sickness. But the third time I was on the road to Shigatse and told the driver to stop for a monk who was looking for a ride.' He paused, seeing the others had closed around the fire and were listening. 'An hour later I told him to stop again,' Winslow continued. 'I got out without knowing why and stared at this high hill. Not really a mountain but big and steep, all rock and heather. I had to climb it. I still don't know why, it was like a dream. Afterwards, I thought maybe it was the medicine I was taking. But I started walking. Took almost an hour to get to the top.'
'What was there?' Nyma asked.
'Nothing. Not a thing. Except an old piece of cloth jammed under a rock. An old square of silk with Tibetan writing on it. At the time I didn't even know it was one of those wind horses, a prayer flag. But I freed it so it flapped in the wind. Then I picked up a rock, a small red rock, and I threw it far down the slope without knowing why. It just struck me that the rock didn't belong there, that it needed to be thrown. Afterwards, when I got to the truck I told the two Tibetans. The monk nodded with this wise expression and said that clearly it had to be done, and thanked me for coming to Tibet to do it.'
The Tibetans at the fire nodded knowingly.
Nyma filled her bowl with buttered tea, then shaped three butter balls and set them on the edge of the bowl.
