Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

A man and a yak were coming up the mountain. As Shan watched they stepped into a pool of light from the setting sun. The man was wearing a robe.

"You'll be expected back at Norbu tonight," Shan observed in a tentative tone as Gyalo led the big, broad-backed animal toward the fire.

"It's an odd place, that gompa," the monk said in a distant voice. "The Committee says only thirty-five monks can be there, though there's room for three times that number. The Chairman stopped our class on the teachings of the Rapjung medicine lamas and started a class on the integration of socialist thought into the teachings of Buddha." He scratched the broad shoulders of the black yak as he spoke. "We have to sign a paper pledging not to criticize the government and recognizing the authority of the Bureau of Religious Affairs over all we do. If you don't sign, you can't be a monk anymore, they told us," he said, shaking his head as if in disbelief. "Some of the monks said we were lucky, that at some gompas monks had to sign statements renouncing the Dalai Lama, or be sent to a Chinese jail."

Lhandro stepped forward, his face heavy with worry. "You have to be at your gompa. They will send people to look, after what happened to Padme."

"For the last month I have slept only every second night. The other nights I have gone out by that dung pile," Gyalo said with a glance at Shan, "and recited my beads." He was saying he had been in spiritual crisis, Shan realized. He was saying he had been trying to make an important decision. "When I left to live at Norbu my uncle said to pay attention to the lamas who ran the gompa, because the senior lamas could be emanations of the true Buddha. But there were no Buddhas, there were only committeemen. They get paid by the government," Gyalo said, his brow creasing, "but Jampa and I, we don't think you can be a lama and be paid by Beijing. The closest thing to Buddha at that place was right here," he said, and placed his hands on either side of the yak's head. There seemed to be deep meaning in the stare exchanged by the monk and the animal, and everyone stood perfectly still as they watched. The yak seemed to look at each of them in turn, then it breathed heavily, like a sigh.

A murmur spread through the Yapchi villagers, and several of them nodded solemnly, as if they knew about Buddha yaks.

"Jampa was at that place, too," Gyalo said, as though he couldn't bear to say Norbu's name now. "The committee was going to get rid of him, as soon as all the dung was hauled away. He was deciding to leave all these past months. Now," Gyalo said with a shy smile, "they still have all that dung, but they don't have us."

"We can find you clothes," Lhandro said, and bent toward one of the horse packs.

"No," Gyalo replied quickly, then spoke in a slow, deliberate voice. "No. I am a monk. I am just a monk between teachers." He knew, as did all of those present, the significance of his words. He would be an unregistered monk, an illegal monk. If the knobs found him he would have no defense, and would be shown no leniency. He would be sent to a lao gai prison for many years. And after release he would be forever banned from serving in a gompa.

Nyma stepped forward, her beads held conspicuously in her raised hand. "There are mantras to be said," she suggested. Gyalo replied with a pleased nod and Lokesh stepped forward, beads in hand, followed by two of the villagers.

The monk followed Nyma toward a large flat rock near the fire. He paused and surveyed the others in the camp. "My name is Gyalo," he said. "This is Jampa. And the other's name is Chemi," he added with a gesture down the trail. "She wanted to sit and watch some clouds for a while."

Shan looked up to see a woman emerging out of the shadows, one of the mastiffs at her side, wagging its tail.

"She was at that ruined gompa, helping them sift through those ashes," Gyalo explained. "But she said she was on her way north, too, to her home."

The woman smiled shyly as she approached the fire, and Nyma handed her a bowl of tea. She leaned back against a boulder and explained to Lhandro she was returning to her family in the hills above Yapchi Valley. Nyma and Lhandro welcomed her warmly, explaining to Shan they knew her family, who lived in a compound of five small houses only four miles from their own village. Lokesh sat beside her and began speaking with her in low tones as if he knew her, and then suddenly a wind blew and she put on the hat she had been carrying in her hand.

Shan stared in disbelief. It was his hat, or had been his hat. She was the woman Dremu had found on the trail, sick and too weak to stand. He knelt beside Lokesh. "That tonde," she was saying to the old Tibetan. "It was a good one, I think." Shan remembered the fossil Lokesh had given her, and the confused way she had looked at Lokesh when he had first placed it in her hand. He saw now that there was still weakness in her face, but her color was back and her eyes bright.

Shan stepped to her side. "What happened? Who came that day?"

The woman offered a thin smile. "I am better now," she said, and her hand moved to the mala at her yak-hair belt. She began a mantra, her way of avoiding Shan's questions.

He stared at her, then at Lokesh. She had been waiting for someone that day on the trail, alone and sick but so confident the one she awaited was coming she had resisted their offer of help. A healer had come to her in the mountains, and Shan and Lokesh had seen a healer, at least the ghost of a healer, in the mountains two days later.

They ate their meal in the twilight, Lokesh and Shan sitting with Lhandro in the shelter of a rock with a candle, studying the rongpa's tattered map. They would be out of the high mountains in a day, and in Yapchi the day after. Shan stared at the map in silence, as in a trance, thinking absently that it might show him where a deity might reside if only he knew how to read it.

Chemi fell asleep beside the fire under a heavy felt blanket. Lokesh and Gyalo sat watching the moon. Tenzin settled onto a flat rock nearby, silhouetted against the night sky, saying his silent rosary, seeming to have lost his tongue again. When the wind ebbed Lokesh and Shan sometimes gazed at the mute Tibetan and shared a meaningful glance. They had been used to such scenes in the gulag, where monks learned to do their rosaries in their bunks without violating the strict curfew rules against speaking. After years of living in such barracks Shan had begun to discern something like a sound from the monks. At first he had thought it was simply the sound of their lips touching, but later he had begun to hear more: a strange low noise like a rolling, constant moan, as if his ears had become attuned to a different range of sound that the monks were using to reach out to their deities.

Suddenly a dog barked. Lhandro was up at once, one of the heavy staffs in his hand. "Someone's coming from above," he warned, and motioned Shan to take cover in the rocks.

"Is it you, Yapchi?" a strained voice called out from the darkness. Lhandro dropped more fuel on the fire and stepped to the trail as two horses came into view. There were two men, but both were mounted on the lead horse.

"The Golok," Lhandro announced quietly, then called out to Dremu. "What did you do to our horse?"

"The horse is fine," Dremu said wearily. "It's the American."

Shan shot forward to help ease Winslow's limp form out of Dremu's saddle, where he had been riding in front of the Golok, as though he needed support.

"Something in his head," the Golok reported. "I knew he had to come down, fast. He kept asking to go higher. He thought he saw someone higher. But it was too high for him. He's from America."

Altitude sickness, Dremu meant. As they lay Winslow on a blanket by the fire the Golok explained that in the late afternoon the American had seen something, a reflection of bright light, as though from a piece of metal, from equipment, but when they had stopped on a ledge to study it in the binoculars, the American had acted drunk, staggering about the ledge, almost tumbling off the edge.