Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

"News comes slow this far away from the highway," Shan ventured.

The two men exchanged a puzzled, uncertain glance. "Director Tuan suffered a terrible loss," Khodrak said, indicating his companion with a nod. "His deputy, a man named Chao, was murdered in Amdo town. We all must work to prevent the wrong kind of reaction."

"A Deputy Director in Religious Affairs was murdered?" Shan asked the question slowly, fighting the chill that crept over his limbs. The purba at the river had said an official was killed but had not known it was a howler. It was the worst possible news, the kind of news that brought martial law to a district, for Religious Affairs was a favored child of Beijing, its most important political vehicle in Tibet.

Khodrak nodded gravely. "Killed in a stable near his office. Deputy Director Chao is a martyr to our noble cause. You must be watchful. Important things will be happening."

A senior howler had been killed and the reaction of his superior and the abbot was to distribute propaganda among the herders. Shan tried to make his bone-dry tongue move. He raised the pamphlets Khodrak had given him. "I will do what I can," he said, and backed away.

The stocky monk lingered a moment at the rear of the vehicle, wiping mud from his hand with a tuft of grass as the others climbed inside. Shan offered him the rag he carried in his back pocket as a handkerchief. The man declined with a grateful nod, then leaned toward Shan. "Be careful with their words," he said in a low, confiding tone. "The abbot is really looking for a man with a fish."

Shan studied the monk in confusion. "You mean the killer? From the lake? A fisherman?" It made no sense. The Tibetans of the region almost never ate fish, would never take fish from a holy lake.

"Warn the dropka, warn my people," the monk said urgently, then quickly joined the others. He had not even fully shut his door when Director Tuan gunned the engine and the minibus roared away.

Shan stared at the minibus as it disappeared down the track that ran along the shoreline. Had the monk been suggesting that a man with a fish was connected to the killing? But Religious Affairs did not conduct murder investigations, Public Security did. And the knobs were chasing an old lama. Did they think the lama was the murderer?

He handed one of the pamphlets to Lokesh as they reached the top of the hill. Inside was a photograph of the Chairman of the Communist Party, crudely interposed over the image of the Potola in Lhasa, above several paragraphs of small print. Dremu reached out and grabbed the brochure from the old Tibetan, inserting it in his pocket without opening it. "Firestarters. The howlers always have good paper for burning."

Shan quietly scanned his own brochure before folding it into his pocket. It was a polemic about the economic disadvantages of devoting resources to religious reconstructions, complete with tiny graphs. He glanced back at the words at the top of the paper: Serene Prosperity. Below them was the full official title of the campaign: Religious Serenity Must Be Built on Economic Serenity. A perennial gripe of political officers was that Tibetans undermined the economy by giving a disproportionate share of their meager incomes to the reconstruction of gompas. Where contributions were limited to no more than two percent of income, one chart purported to demonstrate, prosperity soon followed.

Shan stared back in the direction the minibus had taken. Have you come to understand, the strange monk with the gold fringed robe had asked him. Shan understood nothing. The stocky monk seemed to be warning Shan, suggesting that Tuan and Khodrak were engaged in a subterfuge, that they were actually looking for a man with a fish. In all his years in Tibet Shan had never even seen a fish.

By mid-afternoon the five riders crested a small knoll to see a long rolling plain that gleamed white from salt encrusted on its surface, at the center of which lay a busy camp containing four white tents and three black ones. Dremu told them to wait as he rode toward the camp. They watched as a man in a derby emerged from one of the white tents, shouted at the Golok, then picked up stones and threw them at him. Dremu wheeled his horse and trotted back.

"This is the place," he declared with a satisfied tone, and gestured for Shan to lead the way toward the yurts.

It was a salt camp, Lokesh explained excitedly, as they dismounted amid several small children who darted among the horses, rubbing their noses and helping Tenzin loosen the saddles. Shan untied his saddle bag and relinquished his mount to a beaming girl whose cheeks were smeared with red doja cream, one of the dropka's defenses against high altitude sunlight. As he took a tentative step into the camp a sweet pungent scent wafted by, the smell of yak butter being churned.

Several men and women worked at the shoreline, using short wooden pestles to break the rough crust of salt into coarse pieces, then pushing the salt into piles with crude rakes. Others were packing the salt into small colorful woven pouches which were fastened together in pairs with stout cords. Like saddlebags, Shan thought as he noticed a woman sewing the bags shut, though too small for horses.

The man in the derby who had yelled at Dremu stood at the flap of a white tent near the center of the camp, a brown and white mastiff at his side, motioning them toward the fire that lay smoldering in a ring of stones by his feet. Shan and Lokesh passed a stern grey-haired man in a tattered chuba sitting at the entrance to one of the tents, a heavy staff across his legs. A dropka woman wearing a bright rainbow-pattern apron sat by a solitary yak, tethered to a stake, working a long wooden cylinder with a handle protruding from its open top, a dongma, one of the churns used to mix the tea, butter, and salt for the traditional Tibetan beverage. Her hair was arrayed in dozens of braids, each ending with a bead, a style that had been worn for centuries by devout women, always using one hundred eight braids, one for every bead of the Buddhist rosary. She acknowledged them with a casual, disinterested nod. Shan surveyed the little village and realized it was actually a series of camps, separate fires and separate tents brought together by the salt.

The man at the white tent eagerly searched the line of new arrivals as they walked toward his fire, his brown eyes gleaming with anticipation as he lifted his hat, revealing a head of shaggy black hair streaked with grey. A birthmark in the shape of an inverted, slanted U was conspicuous on his neck above a necklace of small turquoise stones that supported a large silver gau. Suddenly his face lit with a smile. "Nyma!" he exclaimed as the nun dismounted and darted to him. "Blessed Buddha, it is true!" They embraced tightly before Nyma gestured toward Shan. The man straightened, suddenly very sober, and silently inspected Shan.

Shan removed his own hat and returned the man's steady gaze.

"You are the virtuous Chinese," the man observed skeptically. He abruptly raised his hand and gripped Shan's chin in his calloused thumb and forefinger, turning his head from left to right as though measuring Shan for something.

"Just a Chinese who was asked to help," Shan replied impassively. He was accustomed to being greeted with taunts by unfamiliar Tibetans.

The man frowned in apparent disappointment. "I was expecting someone taller."

Shan found a grin tugging at his face.

"His back used to be straighter," Lokesh offered in the same dry tone used by the stranger, "before they forced him to build lao gai roads."

The man acknowledged Lokesh with a solemn nod, then called out, cupping his hands toward one of the salt teams, to announce their arrival. "I am called Lhandro," he said, smiling now, and gestured toward the small knot of men approaching the white tent. "We from the Yapchi Valley offer you welcome."