Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

They had followed the lakeside trail for only twenty minutes when Dremu halted at the top of a hill and dismounted, staring down the far side with a worried expression.

Shan dismounted and followed the Golok's gaze toward a white vehicle, a heavy compact minibus of the type sometimes used to convey passengers between Tibet's cities. It had apparently arrived from the southeast by means of a narrow dirt road, and had just turned onto the rough track that paralleled the shores of the lake. Two men sat on a large flat rock in front of the vehicle, one in the maroon robe of a monk, the other dressed like a businessman in a white shirt and tie, while three men in monks' robes struggled to free the left rear wheel, which was mired in mud.

"Better to go around," Dremu warned.

But Shan was already striding down the hill as the Golok spoke.

The men on the rock watched Shan with disinterested expressions as he approached. With his broad-rimmed hat and tattered coat, he looked like just another dropka. The man in the tie was a middle-aged Han, bald on the top of his head, his remaining hair thin and long on the sides, combed back. The small black eyes that looked out of his wide, fleshy face seemed as brightly polished as his shoes. A cigarette dangled from the man's lips. The Tibetan he sat with had thick, neatly trimmed hair, and wore a robe unlike any Shan had ever seen, for it was fringed with gold and appeared, implausibly, to have a monogram embroidered over its left breast. Between them on the rock was a bottle of orange drink and what seemed to be a plastic bag of sunflower seeds.

The Han exhaled a long plume of smoke toward Shan as he approached the rock, as though to warn him away. Shan offered a hesitant nod and stepped around the two men, slowing to read the six-inch-high Tibetan and Chinese characters painted on the side of the bus. New Beliefs for the New Century, they said, and below them in smaller letters an adaptation of a familiar slogan: Build Prosperity by Breaking the Chains of Feudalism.

He looked back toward his companions. Lokesh and Nyma followed, but Dremu and Tenzin had retreated, so that only their heads were visible above the crest of the hill. Nyma approached the rock with the two men, then froze and cast a nervous glance up the hill as if thinking of fleeing. Shan saw a small legend stenciled on the driver's door: Bureau of Religious Affairs.

"Howlers!" Nyma whispered in alarm as she reached him. It was what many of the purbas called the members of the Bureau, for the strident way they often addressed Tibetans. At first the howlers had screamed at tamzing, the criticism sessions that had long been the Party's favorite tool for political correction. Now, with tamzing losing favor in Party circles, they continued to be howlers, just in subtler ways, fervently preaching to Tibetans about the socialist sins of traditional Buddhism.

Shan's throat went bone dry as he glanced back at the Han in the tie. These were the men who granted, and revoked, the licenses of nuns and monks; the ones who anointed gompas based on the political correctness of their inhabitants; the ones who opened or shut monasteries with the stroke of a pen and granted the right to practice spirituality as though they were courtiers granting political favors.

Nyma pressed her hat low over her head and stepped close to Shan. The chuba she wore hid her makeshift robe.

The three monks were struggling to free the wheel, a small trowel and a long jack handle their only tools. Two of the men, spattered with mud, knelt by the wheel as the third, a stocky monk with the thick arms and broad hands of a laborer, carried stones from the hillside to the mired wheel.

"A flock of sheep was on the road," the broad-shouldered monk explained as he dropped the stones by the bus. The other two monks, both younger than the first, cast sharp glances at the man as though warning him not to speak. "They couldn't wait, so they drove around them, off the road. I don't know which made them angrier, getting stuck or the way all of those sheep stopped and stared at them after we went into the mud." Nyma gave a small sound of amusement and nervously looked back at the men on the rock.

"Digging around the wheel just moves the mud around," Lokesh suggested to the mud-spattered monks. "You need to make the wheel grip something," he said, pointing approvingly to the stack of rocks collected by the third monk, then followed the stocky man toward the hill to collect more.

They were a mobile education unit, the monk explained as Shan joined them on the hillside, bringing news of government programs to the local population. "Counting the barley fields," the monk added.

Shan stared out over the landscape. It was a land of herders. He doubted there was a barley field within fifty miles. "But you're from a gompa," he observed.

"Khang-nyi." It meant Second House. "The only gompa for a hundred miles." He paused and looked at the men on the flat rock. The wind had died, and a cloud of cigarette smoke hung about them. A puzzled expression crossed the monk's face, as though the two men on the rock confused him. He bent to retrieve another stone.

"What kind of government programs?" Shan asked.

The monk looked at Shan uncertainly. "Build Prosperity by Breaking the Chains of Feudalism," he recited in the formal tone of a mantra, as though to correct any wrong impression he may have made, and carried away his stones.

Ten minutes later, the vehicle freed, the men on the rock stretched lazily and stepped toward the front doors of the minibus. As Nyma and Lokesh hurried back up the hill, the one wearing the elegant robe reached inside the bus and pulled out several pamphlets, handing one to Shan.

"Have you come to understand, comrade?" the man asked abruptly. His eyes burned brightly above a hooked nose that gave him a hawk-like appearance. His companion stepped closer and pointed sternly to the words on the cover of the pamphlet: Serene Prosperity.

Shan stared at the men uncertainly. For some reason he remembered being stopped years earlier on a Beijing street by an earnest young woman in a brilliant white blouse, who handed him a pamphlet and asked, "Do you believe?" This team from Religious Affairs were also missionaries of a sort, for the godless agency that regulated the deities of Tibet.

Serene Prosperity. He stared at the words. They had the sound of a cruel joke played on the Tibetans. Suddenly Shan realized the man in the white shirt, the howler, was staring at him. "This is a land for herders," the man observed. "The ones they call dropka." He seemed to have suddenly recognized Shan as a fellow Han. His small black eyes moved restlessly back and forth, scanning the hill behind, though his head did not turn.

Shan sensed the muscles of his legs tensing, as if something in him expected the howler to coil and strike.

"You have companions who are hiding from us," the elegant monk observed in a casual tone. "So shy, like pups, running when a vehicle comes." His voice was smooth and refined, an orator's voice. "These people need to understand," he added, as if enlisting Shan's aid, "they need our help." Then he handed Shan the pamphlets remaining in his hand. "I am their abbot. Khodrak Rinpoche."

Shan found himself staring at the man. He had never heard a monk introduce himself as a revered teacher.

"They need our protection," Khodrak said. "Are you a school instructor?" The government sometimes sent Han instructors among the nomads, riding circuits through the vast pasture lands. "They don't understand what is at stake," he continued, not waiting for an answer. "The Bureau of Religious Affairs is the key to their prosperity. Misinterpretation of events is dangerous."

Shan didn't understand a word the men were saying. The Han in the white shirt acted anxious, on the edge of anger; the abbot as if engaged in some form of political dialectic with Shan. They both assumed they could confide in Shan. In their world Han did not travel with Tibetans on the remote changtang voluntarily, so he must be on government duty.