North Face

by Matt Dickinson

  ‘Come on!’ her father pulled her away. ‘We don’t want to attract attention.’

  They got a bit lost, reaching the accommodation block an hour later.

  ‘Better we’d never found it again!’ Tashi’s mother exclaimed.

  Tashi helped her mother and father to build a small shrine in the main room of their new home. Butter lamps were lit in front of holy figurines, incense was soon burning. It felt good to say a prayer for Karma.

  They prepared the evening meal, an improvised stew of boiled barley flour with onions and peppers.

  They placed a blanket on the unsurfaced floor and ate together from the blackened cooking pot. It was the first time Tashi had ever known the family to be silent during a meal. Back on the plateau, after a day with the animals, there had never seemed a shortage of things to chat and laugh about.

  After the meal Tashi’s father crossed to the window and stared out into the night. The metallic beat of hammers continued to split the air in the yard below and Tashi wondered if the workers would be going all night.

  ‘We are trapped,’ her father said miserably. ‘I fear we will never get out of this place.’

  ‘We will,’ Tashi’s mother replied. ‘We’ll go crazy if we have to stay.’

  Tashi saw her father’s shoulders slump. The sharp tone in her mother’s voice had cut into him. He shuffled to the sleeping room, looking small and defeated. The father she knew and loved, sitting tall and proud in the saddle of his favourite horse, seemed little more than a sad memory.

  There was a sharp knock on the door. The same official that had brought them to the apartment stood awkwardly in the doorway.

  ‘You will report for work to this place,’ he said.

  He handed Tashi a document. She saw a map printed on it.

  ‘She’s a child,’ her father protested. ‘Too young for work.’

  The man poked his finger into Tashi’s father’s chest.

  ‘Your family are already under scrutiny,’ he said. ‘Your son on the run from the law. Better you shut up or I’ll send her to work with you in the mine.’

  He handed Tashi’s father a second map.

  ‘There’ll be punishments if you’re late.’

  Then he spun around and strode through the door.

  Tashi went to her little sleeping place. It was more a cell or a cupboard than a bedroom. There was no heating and the temperature was low enough to set her teeth chattering. She pulled the blankets around her and tried to regain a little warmth.

  Tomorrow she would be given a job. She wondered what on earth it would be. The only ‘job’ she had ever had was to care for her family’s herd. She had no other skills. No other training. She remembered the hundreds of weary women sitting at the assembly lines in the factory. It seemed like a prison sentence.

  Tashi uttered a prayer for Karma before she slept. More than anything she hoped her brother was OK. Would he come and find them?

  Maybe he had already been caught.

  Tashi shivered through the night, gripped by a horrible combination of cold and fear.

  Chapter 4

  Tashi’s father accompanied her into town the next morning.

  Close to the central square they came to a place lined with butchers’ stalls. It was a busy scene of carnage, with dozens of shop owners cutting and sawing huge carcasses on wooden benches. In some places their wares were stacked in a tower two metres off the ground.

  ‘So much meat!’ Tashi exclaimed. ‘I never saw so much meat in my life.’

  ‘It’s no cause for celebration,’ her father reminded her. ‘The only reason this place is overflowing with cheap meat is that all the yak herds are being forced from the land.’

  Tashi stopped in her tracks, staring in dismay at the teetering piles of gory flesh.

  ‘These animals could be from our herd.’

  Some of the pieces were still attached to a yak head or foot, a sick trophy to catch the eye of the passing shopper. Looking into the glazed eyes of some of these dead creatures she was struck by the contrast with the eyes of the animals she had tended as a young girl. Those intelligent eyes, filled with gentle patience and sometimes spiked, she had seen, with a mischievous sense of fun.

  These cut up yaks belonged, she saw now, to families like her own. Families who had wandered the plateau as nomads for thousands of years. Many of them had been manoeuvred into situations where they had no choice but to slaughter their herds.

  ‘It’s all part of a grand scheme,’ her father muttered angrily. ‘Resettle all of us nomads in towns and work camps.’

  Tashi could see the logic of the plan. All that extra meat fed the army of Chinese workers flooding into Tibet. And it solved the nomad ‘problem’ at the same time. She was beginning to realise how efficient the system was.

  Her father was risking missing the bus to the mine, and so they split up, heading to different parts of town.

  Tashi reported to the recruiting office as she had been ordered. She was relieved to find she was not alone. A dozen other children of nomadic families were also waiting to be given official jobs. They sat together in a stark concrete waiting room, whispering dark rumours to each other about what the authorities might require them to do.

  ‘They send the pretty girls away to Beijing or Shanghai,’ one girl told her in a terrified whisper. ‘Then they’re never seen again.’

  Tashi wasn’t sure she believed her but the warning didn’t help. Perhaps it was one of those urban myths, Tashi hoped; one of those rumours that creates uncertainty and fear.

  For two hours they sat with nothing to do except read the public information posters on the wall. Most were laying down strict laws about drugs and gambling. But others were more in the way of propaganda, forbidding public gatherings or demonstrations.

  Finally a uniformed official entered the room. He consulted a clipboard for a few seconds then stared at the Tibetan youths in evident dislike.

  ‘You will kill rats,’ he said.

  Tashi looked at the government man in amazement. She had never killed a rat in her life. The nomad children burst into laughter and began to chat in bewilderment.

  ‘It is not a joke,’ the man snapped irritably. ‘You will kill thousands of rats. And then you will kill thousands more.’

  The ‘rats’, it soon turned out, were not really rats at all. They were pika, grass-eating mammals of the plateau, targeted for extermination under a new environmental law which had been drafted from Beijing.

  Tashi had always been fond of pika; they were halfway between a rabbit and a gerbil – intelligent creatures she had been familiar with all her life. They were smart, Tashi knew; instead of hibernating through the winter, they built underground food stores of grass seeds. Sometimes as a child she had joined other nomad children, digging up the burrows to see how they were constructed. In the depths were the food stores and the crèches for the pika young. It was surprisingly well organised and clean.

  It was true that pika were widespread. But they were part of the ecosystem: food for the wolves, the bears, the foxes, the hawks and kestrels. Virtually everything ate pika, Tashi knew. What would happen if the pika were gone was something she could not contemplate, yet to the authorities the creatures were public enemy number one. Pika cause the grasslands to wither and dry, their reports said. They are breeding out of control, digging millions of burrows, ravaging crops and laying vast tracts of the Tibetan plateau bare. They spread plague, harbour fleas. Pika are the enemy – they must be destroyed.

  Tashi and the other children were ordered to report to a depot the following morning. They returned home to their government housing blocks in a gloomy state of mind.

  ‘Do you have a job?’ Tashi’s father asked her.

  ‘Kind of,’ she replied. She felt her cheeks flush. Her father waited for more information but Tashi strode stony-faced to
her room without saying more. Killing pika was just about the worst job she could think of.

  At daybreak she walked across town with two of her new friends. They found the depot right on the outskirts, next to an abattoir that pumped out noxious grey smoke.

  They were issued with plastic gloves and a face mask and bundled on to the back of an open truck. A two-hour drive followed, bouncing around in the metal box as the vehicle lumbered up a potholed track on to a wild grassland area. There were no tents visible and the land was dusty and dry. Plastic sacks of grain were offloaded from another vehicle. Each was marked with a skull and crossbones symbol.

  ‘This is special grain,’ the official told them, ‘coated with a poison to kill the rats. Two handfuls in each rat hole will be enough.’

  The children exchanged glances. There were thousands of pika burrows dotted around this area of grassland. The task would be a backbreaking one.

  ‘Pick up these baskets and fill them with grain,’ he urged. The bamboo baskets were massive and badly worn out. Bits of broken bamboo were sticking like knife points from the weave. None of the children moved.

  ‘Come on! We haven’t got all day! There’s a quota to fill!’

  A few of the children walked uncertainly across. They slipped the leather straps over their shoulders and moved over to the store where two workers slit open the plastic sacks and poured the contents directly into the baskets. Tashi winced as she saw a cloud of dust swirl around her friends’ heads.

  ‘Isn’t that dangerous?’ one of the other children asked. ‘If it’s a poison they shouldn’t be breathing it, right?’

  ‘It’s harmless to humans,’ the supervisor snapped.

  Tashi couldn’t help noticing that he kept as far away from the toxin as he could.

  ‘I don’t want to kill pika,’ Tashi blurted out.

  The supervisor placed himself squarely in front of her. Tashi felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle as his fish-cold eyes locked on to hers.

  ‘You can always be sent to a correction centre if you prefer?’ he sneered.

  Tashi shivered. She had heard spine-chilling tales of such ‘correction centres’, labour camps in which Tibetans were forced to produce written confessions of their ‘faults’ whilst labouring ten hours a day. Smashing up rocks into tiny pieces for road gravel was a favourite task for such ‘criminals’.

  ‘Well?’ the supervisor snapped.

  Tashi bit her lip. She thought about running away, sprinting across the grassland and escaping from these horrible people. But she knew her mother and father could be punished. She had to stay and see this through.

  ‘That’s better,’ the supervisor stroked her head in a patronising fashion. ‘Come and get your load.’

  Tashi followed him to the pile of grain sacks and was issued with a basket. On the side of the sacks she read the words Botulinum Toxin. She had never heard of this particular poison but she memorised the words anyway.

  Botulinum Toxin. What did it do? She wondered. How would it act on the pika? Would it kill them quickly, without pain? Or was it a slow death? Tashi hated to think of so many thousands of creatures suffering and dying.

  A whistle blew. It was time to get to work. Each of the children on their own. There were plenty of pika to be seen and the burrows were literally everywhere.

  Tashi found the work was repetitive and painful. Bending down to place the poisoned grain into the pika burrows, the heavy load biting into her spine.

  Each time the basket was empty she returned to the truck. The driver refilled it with fresh poison and the supervisor pointed out a new area of grassland to work in. She did this six times, getting ever further away from the truck as she pushed away from the road.

  Finally she was out of sight of the organisers and could take some time out. She put down the basket and lay back on the cool grass, staring up at the azure sky and letting her mind slip away.

  Her daydream took her back to childhood years, when her family could move freely. She remembered every camp, the fun of bathing in fast-flowing meltwater rivers, the dramas of yaks that went astray for days on end and had to be tracked by the dogs, the birds of prey that were tamed by her grandfather and taught to hunt hares.

  Tashi wondered if she would ever live in a tent again. Or was that part of her life over for good?

  A siren was blasted at lunchtime and the hungry children gathered by the truck. A pot of cold rice was produced and they crouched round it on their haunches, eating with their bare hands. Green tea was handed out in plastic cups.

  ‘I feel dizzy,’ someone muttered. Tashi wondered if the poison was beginning to take effect.

  They gulped down the rice and tea and all too soon the supervisor was yelling at them:

  ‘No time for lazing! We’re moving to the next location.’

  The team was loaded back into the truck and the vehicles lurched off. They travelled down a small track, passing several huge mines along the way. These complexes were busy eating away big chunks of hillsides, thousands of tons of rock being crushed in machines that could be heard roaring several kilometres distant.

  Explosions split the air. Billowing clouds of dust spewed from the mines, darkening the sky.

  ‘What are they digging for?’ Tashi asked.

  ‘Gold,’ came a reply. ‘It gets sent to Beijing.’

  After the mines came a high col, and a descent into a region of pretty valleys. It was perfect pika habitat, Tashi knew, but she soon learned that the creatures in this area had already had their burrows laced.

  ‘This is a zone they’ve already poisoned,’ one of the other children exclaimed. ‘I was working here the other week.’

  Tashi wrinkled her nose as a pungent smell reached her. The stench of decomposition was faint but identifiable. Tashi felt bile rise in her throat as the scent of rotting pika bodies hit her.

  The trucks stopped. The supervisor jumped out.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ he told them. ‘I need to check things here.’

  Men were wandering about the grassland, holding long sticks. They were dressed in identical grey overalls and one of the children muttered that they might be prisoners. They were retrieving the rotting corpses of the dead pika from the burrows and piling them up by the side of the road.

  ‘They burn the bodies,’ someone said. ‘Stop the other creatures eating them.’

  Tashi thought about this, wondering how efficient the system was. Did they really manage to find every dead pika? What if a fox or an eagle ate one of the poisoned animals? Would it also get sick and die?

  She looked around, her heart sagging as she realised there was no life in any direction. Not a single songbird, not a hawk in the sky. Even the grasshoppers that usually chirped incessantly were quiet.

  The land was dead. Slaughtering the pika seemed to have upset a natural balance. Nature had fled.

  By the time they were delivered back to the town the children were utterly exhausted. Burned by the sun and feeling rather sick, Tashi walked back to the concrete block that was now her home. Her parents greeted her with loving embraces and fed her warm barley soup and sweet momos of honey.

  ‘Did they treat you well?’ her father asked.

  Tashi nodded her head. She didn’t want to worry her parents.

  Tashi went to her sleeping cubicle. At dawn the next morning the whole process would be repeated again. She rested her head on her pillow, wondering in the final moments of the day what she could do to break free from this horrible work. Was there a way out? How long would she have to spend poisoning the pika?

  She was bone-tired but could not sleep. The thought of all those creatures eating the grain and feeding it to their young was more than she could bear. A terrible guilt washed over her.

  As the days turned into weeks and she continued to work with the toxin, Tashi felt her body weakening. Getting
out of bed became a slow process, stretching her aching muscles and rubbing her legs vigorously to coax them into life.

  One day she felt so faint she had to pause on the way to work, reaching out to steady herself against a nearby wall.

  ‘I’m seeing double,’ she told her friend.

  ‘That’s strange. I’m the same.’

  ‘My throat has stopped working properly,’ another worker complained. ‘I can hardly swallow food.’

  One boy told how his digestive system had locked up in a terrible bout of constipation.

  ‘We should get on to the internet,’ he suggested. ‘Maybe we can discover what this poison is doing to us. There’s a man I heard about who knows how to get round the censorship.’

  Tashi joined her friend after work and they took a bus across town. He took her to a basement beneath a block of flats and at the door they buzzed a special code.

  A nervy-looking guy with shoulder length hair opened the door a crack, then, after a brief interrogation to satisfy himself they weren’t government spies, he let them in.

  ‘Just call me Mouse,’ said the computer buff. ‘It’s ten yuan an hour.’

  He showed them into his computer den, a sweltering box room with blacked-out windows and a lingering smell of egg noodles.

  ‘Just tell me what you want to know,’ Mouse said. ‘I can hack most things.’

  ‘Hack? What does it mean?’ Tashi asked.

  ‘The Chinese government stop people looking at stuff on the internet,’ the guy explained. ‘Google, Facebook, Twitter. They block them all.’

  ‘Why?’

  Tashi’s friend and Mouse shared a knowing look. Tashi felt her cheeks redden, she knew she was naive about these things.

  ‘When people rise up against a government they often do it using social media,’ her friend said. ‘That’s what happened when the people of the Arabic world rebelled against the dictators who ruled Tunisia and Egypt.’

  ‘You think the Chinese government is frightened of their own people?’ Tashi asked.