North Face

by Matt Dickinson

  ‘One day I’m going to be rich,’ Karma said. ‘Buy a motorbike of my own and go round the world.’

  Karma’s crazy comments made Tashi laugh.

  ‘You can’t even afford a bicycle,’ she teased. ‘Get real.’

  They dismantled the family tent, unpicking the threads that held the felt panels together. Tashi tied the bundles tight with cord, helped by her brother.

  ‘Look what I bought,’ Karma said. ‘You see how they can’t stop me?’

  He showed Tashi a new photograph of the Dalai Lama that he kept in his top pocket. Tashi said nothing. Silently she applauded his bravado.

  The yaks took their loads with bad-tempered grunts. The winter had been long and hard for them and they were out of sorts with the world. Dried hay had kept them alive but Tashi knew they craved the lush grass of the summer grazing lands. With every year of her life she had seen the animals’ mood improve dramatically once they got to the valley.

  ‘Ya!’ Tashi’s mother gave the nearest yak a warning stroke of her stick.

  The twenty yaks ambled up the trail, gradually forming a long wavering line. Tashi stepped alongside them, feeling a glow of pleasure as she looked forward to the trek.

  ‘Feels good to be on the move, doesn’t it?’ her father said.

  Tashi nodded.

  The trek would take one week, passing through the mountains on narrow shepherds’ trails. Tashi found it refreshing to walk for hours each day, the chores of winter seeming like a distant dream as they passed through high mountain glades, carpeted with a profusion of spring flowers. Occasionally they found isolated tents, a lonely man or two tending a huge flock of sheep. Invariably they would be invited in for butter tea, swapping news from the plateau as bread and cheese was shared.

  ‘Have you heard the rumours?’ one shepherd asked them gravely. ‘Soldiers are closing off the land.’

  ‘There are stories,’ Tashi’s father replied cautiously. ‘But we haven’t seen any troops for a while.’

  ‘Better to keep it that way,’ the man said.

  They continued, and, with each passing day, Tashi found herself lighter of spirit.

  As they climbed up the final sloping path, Tashi picked up her pace. The long trek was almost over and the view from the top of the ridge was something that she relished. For years she had always been the first one of the family to reach that place.

  She remembered it as a gorgeous view; a wide and fertile valley locked between two snow-capped mountain slopes. From that lofty vantage point, the entire grazing area was laid out, thick pastures of lush grass stretching for kilometres. Several streams tumbled off the higher peaks. It was an idyllic place to pass the summer. An opportunity for the yaks to build up fat. A chance for the family to enjoy their time together.

  Tashi climbed, her heart filled with expectation. As she got closer to the ridge, Tashi heard the rumble of engines. Closer still she could see clouds of red dust filling the air. She slowed, frowning as she tried to work out what was going on.

  She reached the top. Then stopped dead.

  A road was being constructed. Just over the ridgeline. Bulldozers and earth movers were scraping into the bedrock of the valley wall. A line of heavy trucks was queuing to drop tarmac on to the newly graded surface. Fifty or sixty Tibetan workers were raking the hot tarmac into place. A dozen Chinese supervisors watched them impassively, clipboards clutched in their hands. The noise was horrendous. Rock was splitting and cracking. Pneumatic drills rattled a metallic serenade into the air. The road stretched away into the far distance. As far as the eye could see.

  Tashi felt her stomach tighten as her brother Karma came up next to her.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘Have we come to the wrong place?’

  ‘No. It’s the right place,’ Tashi said sadly.

  Karma put his hands to his ears.

  ‘What are they doing?’ he shouted.

  Their father joined them, all the colour draining from his face as he saw the mess the road makers had created.

  At that moment Tashi spotted a military man. He was talking excitedly into a radio set and gesturing towards them.

  ‘I think he’s talking about us,’ Tashi said nervously.

  The moment the soldier ended his radio call the family heard a roar of different engines. A couple of military trucks came speeding round the bend in the road.

  ‘Now we’ve got trouble,’ Tashi’s father muttered.

  The army vehicles came to a halt on the other side of the road, the soldiers inside them jumping out with their guns at the ready. Her father put a reassuring hand on Tashi’s shoulder.

  ‘I’m sure they are just lost,’ he told her.

  Tashi felt dozens of staring eyes locked on to her. She wasn’t sure she liked the expression on the faces of the young soldiers.

  ‘They’re looking at us like we’ve done something wrong,’ she said.

  ‘Just ignore them,’ her father replied, ‘I’ll go and talk with the commander.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Tashi offered.

  ‘No,’ he told her hastily. ‘You stay with Karma and Mother. Better I deal with them alone.’

  Tashi and Karma turned around and started off back down the track. As they went their father called after them:

  ‘Don’t let your mother come up here. I don’t want her to see this.’

  They intercepted their mother halfway up the hill.

  ‘The Chinese are in our valley?’ she raged. ‘Let me go up there and see about that!’

  She made to race up the slope but Tashi and her brother held her back. Somehow they managed to stop her.

  They found a small glade where the yaks could rest, hobbling the creatures to wait for their father to return. They rigged up the tent. Their mother brewed a kettle for tea but they found they had little appetite to drink or eat.

  ‘Until now we have been lucky,’ Tashi heard her mother say. ‘There had to be a day when the Chinese would stand in our way.’

  One hour passed. Then another. Tashi found her imagination running wild. Where was her father?

  ‘What’s happening up there?’ Tashi’s mother wailed. ‘How long does it take to tell them to leave?’

  ‘Perhaps he had to go to see a supervisor,’ Tashi reassured her. ‘We must stay calm.’

  Finally they heard the noise of the tent fabric being pulled back. Tashi’s father’s face was grey. A nervous tic was pulling at the muscles of his cheek, something Tashi had never seen before.

  ‘The soldier says the valley is closed,’ he said grimly. ‘The land is to become a national park, no people are allowed.’

  There was a long silence as the family digested this unappetising revelation.

  ‘You mean, we can’t go into the valley today?’ Tashi asked. Her young mind had failed to understand the enormity of the news.

  Her father sighed.

  ‘It means we can’t go in forever,’ he said. ‘It’s over.’

  Tashi’s mother stepped forward. She clutched her husband’s hand.

  ‘There must be some mistake,’ she said. ‘Our families have always used this land.’

  ‘I told them that,’ Tashi’s father said. ‘They say it makes no difference.’

  ‘What are they going to do with this “national park”?’ Tashi’s mother asked. ‘What’s the point of it?’

  Her father took a long sip of tea.

  ‘They said the land is destroyed by animals grazing,’ he said. ‘They want to preserve it.’

  ‘Preserve it?’ Karma spat. ‘It’s not even their land in the first place.’

  ‘They asked me for paperwork. Documents to prove that we had a right to graze the land. Of course I had nothing.’

  ‘You had nothing because such papers don’t exist!’ Tashi’s mother stabbed at her thigh
with her finger as she spoke each word. ‘We have the right to graze this land in summer because of the hundreds of years our families have been here! It has always been this way.’

  ‘They don’t care about that,’ Karma said. ‘They want to mess us up, that’s all.’

  ‘They can’t stop us taking our animals in there!’ Tashi said angrily. ‘We will fight them if they try!’

  Karma leapt up: ‘Yes! That’s the answer!’

  ‘Fight them?’ Tashi’s father laughed bitterly.

  He pulled back the tent wall so they could see up the slope.

  ‘You see that?’ he said. ‘That’s what you’ll be battling against.’

  Tashi looked out, seeing that the military vehicles were now lined up on the ridgeline, overlooking their campsite. Each one was packed full of armed troops, staring down on them with hostile expressions.

  ‘Oh,’ she whispered. ‘I see.’

  ‘Where will we go?’ Karma asked angrily. ‘How can we feed the yaks when we can’t give them good grazing?’

  ‘There are other places,’ his father replied. ‘Maybe we will get lucky.’

  ‘They need high ground,’ Tashi reminded him. ‘The yaks will get sick if we have to go beneath three thousand metres. We should insist on staying.’

  ‘We cannot insist on anything. There’s nothing we can do.’

  Tashi stared at her father. She felt a hot flush of anger in her cheeks. Why was he giving in so easily?

  ‘You want to let them win?’

  ‘It’s not a question of winning or losing,’ he replied. ‘You cannot “win” against the authorities. Not by force, at least. We have to take the example of the Dalai Lama, make prayer our focus.’

  The family stayed in that spot for the night, watched over non-stop by a contingent of troops. At daybreak they packed up the tent and trekked for a few hours with their yaks to a small valley much further down which might offer a few weeks of grazing.

  To their surprise, even though the place was too low for the yaks to be truly healthy, there were five or six other families already there, each with their herds of livestock.

  ‘This land will be exhausted in no time at all,’ Tashi’s father said as they looked at the scene.

  The other families welcomed them with genuine warmth, but their stories were bleak. All of them had been turned off their ancestral grazing lands, displaced by Chinese officials for a variety of reasons, each more distressing than the last.

  ‘They’ve built a dam across the end of our summer lands,’ one nomad raged bitterly. ‘By this time next year the whole area will be drowned beneath a lake.’

  ‘There’s a mine being constructed on ours,’ another herder complained. ‘A hundred trucks every hour running down a new road. So much dust the grass has turned white.’

  Tashi’s father’s prediction proved correct. The small valley could not sustain so many horses, yaks, sheep and goats, the grass cropped right down as the animals ate their fill. By midsummer the small patch of grazing was dried out and worthless, not a lush blade of grass in sight.

  The yaks began to sicken as parasites attacked. They were so finely adapted to the thin air above three thousand metres that this lower place made them ill. The families remained, hoping that summer rains might replenish the grass.

  One day a small convoy of vehicles pulled up next to the family camp.

  ‘Visitors,’ Tashi’s father said ominously.

  Tashi felt her heart lurch in her chest. One of the vehicles was full of soldiers.

  The family watched as workmen unloaded sections of steel fence from the back of a truck. They got to work, building a small temporary compound in less than an hour.

  Later a Toyota jeep arrived, dropping off three men in white laboratory coats.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Karma asked.

  ‘I have no idea,’ their father replied. ‘But it doesn’t look good.’

  Boxes were taken from the Toyota and a table was erected. Medical instruments and glass containers were laid out on the surface. One of the men in white laboratory coats approached Tashi’s father. Three soldiers walked behind him.

  ‘We need to test your animals for disease,’ he said.

  No attempt at a greeting. No friendly hello. Just a raw statement.

  ‘Disease?’ Tashi’s father said. ‘What are you talking about? There’s nothing wrong with them.’

  ‘We will be the judge of that,’ the man said. ‘Bring them to us.’

  Karma had been holding his tongue. Now he flared up.

  ‘What if we don’t want to?’

  ‘The soldiers are here,’ the man said. ‘They can deal with you if necessary.’ The military men scowled at Karma. They looked like there was nothing they’d like more than to give him a good beating.

  ‘It’s just some basic medical tests,’ the man continued soothingly. ‘Nothing to be worried about so long as your herd is healthy.’

  The yaks were taken into the metal compound one by one. The family could see that a number of procedures were carried out on each animal but when they tried to get closer the soldiers warned them away.

  Finally the animals were released and the temporary compound was dismantled and loaded back on to the truck.

  ‘Aren’t you going to tell us something?’ Tashi asked the men.

  The scientists said nothing, just climbed into their vehicle and drove away.

  A week went past. The family was on edge. Tashi and Karma spent a lot of time away from the camp, cutting grass with a scythe, then carrying it back to the herd in wicker baskets. Tashi would pile the cuttings right over her head. She had a special technique to tie it in a teetering tower on her back.

  ‘You look like a mobile haystack!’ Karma laughed.

  The foraging expeditions became longer and longer. The family’s herd had worked its way through all the lush grass within the radius of a one-hour walk. Her parents began to help with the grass collection, even though it meant leaving the camp vulnerable to an opportunistic thief or animal rustler.

  ‘This place is a disaster,’ her mother kept saying over and over. ‘We will lose our herd this winter if we’re not careful.’

  The herd was not putting on enough weight. The animals were restless, tetchy with each other and their human guardians.

  ‘They know they’re being cheated out of their normal pasture,’ Tashi said one night. ‘They’re not happy.’

  Then, at dawn one morning, the ministry Toyota came back. The familiar truck full of soldiers followed it. Tashi was the first to spot them. She shook her family awake.

  ‘Get up!’ she told them urgently. Even Karma was quick to rise from his bed.

  One of the men in the white lab coats got out and approached them with an attaché case in his hand. He walked into the tent and brought out some papers.

  ‘Your herd is contaminated,’ he said. ‘We have an order to destroy it.’

  A deep silence followed. Tashi was aware that even the yaks seemed to have become quiet, the normal lowing and grunting of early morning had mysteriously stopped.

  ‘Contaminated?’ Tashi’s father said slowly. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  The man thrust some papers under Tashi’s father’s nose.

  ‘Infested with parasites,’ he snapped. ‘Riddled with contagious diseases.’

  He pointed at a long row of Chinese characters.

  ‘Look at this list,’ he said. ‘Your herd must be destroyed immediately.’

  Chapter 3

  Tashi took the paper and read it out loud.

  ‘Anthrax, ticks, salmonella, worms, tuberculosis … ’ her voice tailed off as a lump grew in her throat.

  ‘That’s rubbish,’ Karma said sharply. He pointed to the yaks. ‘Look at them! They’re not so bad!’

  ‘They can s
pread diseases,’ the man continued. ‘We’re going to destroy them before it’s too late.’

  ‘The things on your list are present in every animal,’ Tashi’s father explained patiently. ‘I agree our herd is not in the best of condition but … ’

  ‘We had to bring the yaks down too low,’ Karma cried out. ‘Because our normal grazing grounds were blocked.’

  The official riffled impatiently through the papers. He found a page marked with a huge black stamp and showed it to them with a flourish.

  ‘This is the official seal from Beijing,’ he said grandly. ‘Your herd will be destroyed in the next twenty-four hours and that is the end of it.’

  ‘This is our livelihood,’ Tashi’s mother spat. ‘You might as well put a gun to our heads and shoot us. It would have the same effect as taking away our yaks.’

  ‘You will get compensation,’ the man said. ‘I will bring more forms to fill in soon.’

  He replaced the papers in his attaché case and snapped it shut.

  ‘I suggest you take your tent and go away from this place,’ he said.

  Then, with the soldiers in tow, he marched out.

  Tashi’s mother let out a cry of sheer desperation; over by the compound they could see two of the ministry men preparing huge syringes. With a sickening feeling in her guts Tashi realised they were preparing to put the animals to sleep right away.

  ‘Follow me!’ Karma yelled. He ran forward, overtaking the soldiers and the man from the ministry.

  Tashi raced after her brother, the two of them holding hands and blocking the entrance to the enclosure where their animals were held.

  ‘Please,’ Tashi begged. ‘You can’t do this … ’

  The parents ran to their children’s side. The whole family linked arms, forming a fragile human barricade.

  ‘Get them out of the way!’ the officer commanded.

  Half a dozen soldiers raced forward, their batons drawn. Two of them struck out at Karma, beating him on the shoulders and arms, sending him sprawling to the ground. The others attacked Tashi’s father, pushing Tashi and her mother aside and throwing him backwards into a ditch filled with stagnant water and animal waste.