Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

Winslow nodded again. "A team of four or five. She took two Tibetan assistants up a slope five miles from the field camp and sent them off to collect rocks at a ledge she saw through binoculars, told them to meet her in three hours at another ledge. She never showed up. They backtracked. They called in a company helicopter the next day. They even took dogs to search. Nothing." Winslow paused, turning to stare at the long high plain the pass had led them to. Suddenly he pointed. Something was moving across it, a rider galloping toward them, raising a long plume of dust behind him.

Lhandro, at the front of the column, raised his hand for them to halt, then jumped on a rock to better see the rider as the others anxiously gathered around him for a report. But Shan did not need to be told. He knew it was Dremu, and the Golok was frightened.

Dremu wheeled his horse around Shan. "He's out there," the Golok said, gasping, shaking his head as though in disbelief. "It must be that demon again." He extended his hand and pulled Shan up behind him as Lhandro began stripping the bags off the lead packhorse.

They rode hard out onto the plateau, Shan not understanding what to look for, part of him fearing the Golok had led them into a trap. But when they had gone less than a mile the horse stopped so abruptly that Shan almost flew off. A body lay on the path, a man in a red robe.

Shan and Dremu leapt off, the Golok circling the man, facing outward, his long knife in his hand. Shan knelt by the man's side. The monk lay outstretched, his arm extended toward the south. One leg was bent under him as if he had been crawling when he had collapsed. The short-cropped hair on his scalp was matted with blood. His mouth lay open against the earth, a trickle of fresh blood running onto the soil.

Shan turned the monk over. He was breathing, but barely. A long tear in the side of his robe exposed a green-black welt along his ribs. Another long bruise ran almost the entire length of his forearm. His hands and arms had several long cuts and scratches, from which thin lines of dried blood ran. Shan could find no other injuries. The man had been savagely beaten, perhaps even flogged, but not stabbed or shot.

As Shan pulled off his coat and placed it over the monk a second horse wheeled to a halt, carrying both Lhandro and Lokesh.

"A holy man!" Lhandro gasped.

Lokesh knelt by the battered man and lifted his left hand, arranging his three fingers along the man's wrist to take a pulse, then touching his neck. "He has had a terrible shock to his system," Lokesh declared after a few moments. "A violent beating. But he is young. His blood is strong."

"Who is he?" Lhandro asked in alarm, then began walking around the man, pulling his hat low as he surveyed the landscape. "What is a monk doing up here?"

Shan lifted the man's right hand. There were black smudges on his fingers, and similar smudges on the bottom of his robe. He touched one and pulled his hand away, rubbing his fingers. It was soot. But there was no sign of a fire. And there were no other monks, no minibus from Religious Affairs, no vehicle of any kind, not even a horse. The monk must have been on a retreat, or perhaps a solitary pilgrimage.

Lokesh produced a bottle of water and began to gently wash the monk's face, speaking in soft tones, first telling the man he was with friends now, then beginning a mantra to the Compassionate Buddha. Lhandro began clearing a circle of bare earth and collecting rocks. He was going to do what Shan had always seen herdsmen and rongpa do when someone was injured. Lhandro would light a fire and make buttered tea.

As Shan knelt opposite the limp form of the monk the man's eyes fluttered open and he jerked his hand from Lokesh. "You will need weapons! You must have weapons to stop the thing!" he groaned. His eyes widened, and he squinted at Lokesh as though trying to recognize who, or what, the old Tibetan was. Then he faded back into unconsciousness.

Moments later the caravan began to arrive. The Yapchi villagers rushed to the monk's side, murmuring excitedly, confusion and fear twisting their faces. No monk had come to their valley for many years, Lhandro had said. Tenzin quickly produced the sack of fuel carried by one of the packhorses and helped Lhandro ignite a fire in the circle of rocks. The American pulled the sweatshirt from his rucksack to make a pillow for the man, then produced his first aid kit, from which Lokesh selected small squares of sterile gauze to dab at the worst of the monk's wounds.

Shan pulled out his battered fieldglasses and stood on a flat boulder to survey the high plateau. The land was surprisingly fertile, carpeted with the spring growth of plants, many of which were unfamiliar to him. He carefully studied the entire terrain without seeing any sign of life, then began again with the northwest side of the plain, the direction from which the monk seemed to have been crawling. For a moment he thought he saw a wisp of smoke in the distance, then it was gone.

"What kind of bastard would do this?" a deep voice near Shan asked. "A harmless monk." Winslow was aiming his compact binoculars in the direction Shan had been looking.

"I thought I saw smoke," Shan said.

"Smoke?"

"The monk has soot on his hands and robe."

Shan turned back to the caravan. A pan was being unpacked, with a kettle and churn. Lhandro had decided to make their midday camp early, to cook tsampa and check the bindings on the sheep packs. Shan caught Winslow's eye and motioned toward the two empty packhorses that now stood grazing on the sparse spring growth.

"If the monk does not strengthen we will stay here tonight," the rongpa headman said when he saw Shan and the American leading the horses away. "But if we are not here when you return, ride to the grove of junipers at the far side." Lhandro pointed to the high ridge that defined the northeast side of the plain, perhaps ten miles away. "On the other side is a ruined gompa where there is better shelter."

Shan and Winslow trotted side by side over the rough terrain, stopping to follow a flash of movement on the side of the high ridge they had passed through that morning. After a moment they saw in their glasses that it was a family of goats. As they started again Winslow raised his hand. The sound of pounding hooves made them turn. Dremu was bearing down on them.

"You have to stay with it," Dremu growled in a scolding tone to Shan as he pulled his horse to a sudden halt.

"It?" Winslow asked.

The Golok replied with a frown. "You're looking for that fire?" he asked.

"Did you see a fire?" Shan asked.

"No, but I smell it. Not yak dung. Not wood," he said, and kicked his horse into a trot toward the northwest corner of the plateau.

A quarter hour later Shan and Winslow dismounted behind Dremu, who stood at the edge of a shallow bowl perhaps fifty yards wide, marked by a two-foot-high cairn covered with lichen. The bowl differed from the rest of the landscape because it was lined with a uniform growth of a short grey-green plant, ten inches high, that Shan had not seen growing elsewhere on the plain. But half of the small hollow was blackened, the spring growth burned to the ground. A pungent smell, at once sweet and acrid, filled the air.

"Why a fire here?" Winslow wondered. "Lightning?"

"A campfire," Dremu interjected, and pointed to a low, dark six-foot-long mound on the far side of the bowl, adjacent to the scorched earth, ten feet from the cairn of rocks.

They walked their mounts slowly around to the mound, their pace slackening the closer they approached, each man glancing warily toward the slope above. Shan could not escape the sense that they were being watched, but he saw no sign of life on it other than a family of pikas scurrying over the rock talus.