Leaving Mother Lake (10 page)

Although Great-Uncle had retired, he still liked on occasion to spend time in the mountains and he had been quite happy to come and watch over the herd while Uncle went to Zuosuo to get me. Great-Uncle had not seen me for some time. “You’ve grown,” he said approvingly. And I smiled at him and looked sideways. Since he had caught me in the storeroom during Grandmother’s funeral, I always felt somewhat sheepish around him, guilty and uncomfortable, as though he knew a dark secret about me — which, of course, he did.

Great-Uncle had already cooked our dinner, a gruel of corn and rice, and all Uncle had to do was to throw in some of the fresh vegetables we had brought with us from my mother’s garden. As for me, I was so hungry I did not notice how bland it tasted. When their dinner was over, the two men brought out the wine and drank and spoke a few words, and I fell asleep.

Next morning Great-Uncle led me out of the tent to introduce me to the yaks, the horses, and the dogs. “If you see a wolf,” he said as we walked through the pasture, “don’t run. Just watch him until he turns and goes away. And if an insect bites you, just take the ash from your uncle’s cigarette and rub the sting with it.”

When we had reached the yaks, he showed me how to call out to them and how to give them salt to lick so they could produce more milk and where to go to fetch the water. Over the weeks, he explained, I would learn which pastures I could take the yaks to and which I could not. We then walked back to the tent, where Uncle said that he was going to accompany Great-Uncle up to the pass and that he would be back by noon. And thus, I was left in the high mountains with two huge dogs and a herd of yaks.

At first I sat quietly inside the tent and ate my breakfast of roast potatoes and butter tea. Then I untied and retied my little bundle, where my mother had put a cape and a blanket woven from coarse yak wool, a cotton towel to wash my face, some of my sister’s old clothes, and the stalk of an opium poppy in case I got a stomachache or a headache. “Remember that you have to boil it first,” Ama had said. “You can’t just chew on it.”

This inventory over, I sat staring at the fire for a while, feeling at a loss as to what to do next. Then I went outside.

Although I had walked on the mountain paths and our own house in Zuosuo was nestled at the foot of a tall hill, I had never before seen the mountains as I saw them that morning, as I stepped barefoot into the white, vapory dew rising from the grass. Red granite and evergreen forests towered over the meadow, and peaks like saw teeth pierced the blue sky, slicing through feathery clouds — ridge after ridge, and as far as I could see. The air was so pure, so still, so empty of familiar smells and sounds that I might have become frightened if I had not been overwhelmed by so much wild beauty. And if I had not been so curious. Calling the dogs over to my side, I retraced the steps I had taken with Great-Uncle toward the yaks’ enclosure, where I put my hand out to a large hairy cow with a white triangle on her forehead. The cow wrapped her rough, pink tongue around my fingers, looking for salt. It was a strange sensation and I quickly pulled my hand back.

So much for the yaks, I thought, and I walked over to a bamboo enclosure around a vegetable garden where Uncle hung his laundry to dry. I surveyed the potato patch and then went to inspect the horses, who, like the yaks, were locked in a corral but with the added luxury of a stable, built of rough planking. I concluded with great comfort that my uncle’s tent and the enclosures in the meadow were just like our house. Meanwhile, I stole some beans from a wooden trunk and brought them back to the tent to roast in the fire. When they were burned, I shelled them and ate them. And when Uncle came home, he found me lying on my side near the fireplace, holding my cramping belly in both hands.

“You see what happens if you steal the horse’s food?” he said, laughing. “Don’t worry, it’s just gas!”

During the years I spent herding yaks with my uncle, I was never lonely and I was never bored. Of itself, life in the mountains was more varied than in the village. There was always something new, something unexpected to do — mostly on account of the animals, who seemed to have their own idea of where they should go and what they should eat — and there was always something beautiful to look at, a multitude of wildflowers, birds and rabbits and deer, and an ever changing sky. Besides, we were always on the move. Whenever the yaks had finished grazing on a pasture, we had to shift them to another. The pastures were all well established, with fenced enclosures where we could lock up the animals at night. We moved the horses and took our tent and pitched it again wherever the yaks ate. In springtime we did not always bother putting up the tent and just made our home inside a large tree trunk or in a cave.

In the warmer months, our day began with a silent breakfast of butter tea and roasted potatoes seasoned with chili pepper. Then I fed the yaks their salt lick. And since that was about the extent of my duties, I was free to roam around the pastures and the woods for the remainder of the day, until I got hungry again or the moon rose in the dusky sky. I picked flowers and looked for birds’ eggs and collected the large tree leaves we used to wrap around the butter my uncle churned from the yaks’ milk. I also gathered wild mushrooms; some we ate, and others I kept and dried to bring to my mother.

My Ama had told me that there were three types of beings in the world: the gods and ancestors who lived in the heavens, the people who lived on the earth in the middle, and others, who had done wrong things during their lifetime and who lived under the earth, where they swept the floors of hell. “And that’s why in this world,” she explained, “we need to turn the sweeping brushes upside down when we put them away.” It never occurred to me that I could ever do such bad things in my life as to deserve sweeping the floors of hell, but when I could not think of anything to do, I would put my ear to the ground and try to listen to the people in the underworld. When I heard nothing, I had conversations with myself or I sang at the top of my lungs the songs I had heard from the people in the village — songs of love for my mother, and working songs, and in a softer voice so that Uncle would not hear, songs of love for my future lovers. And when I ventured too far from the camp and did not know how to get back, I sang to let Uncle know where to come and get me. Then, as the sun dipped behind the mountain peaks, we came home together. We locked the yaks into the enclosure and milked the cows, and we cooked dinner. My uncle was a terrible cook. He boiled everything. I missed my mother’s cooking, but I always finished my bowl of food. I was always hungry.

Uncle teased me: “How will your mother make a Dabu out of you? You’re so greedy, you’ll eat everything before the rest of the family comes back from the fields.”

I ignored him and helped myself to another potato.

But although he made fun of me, whenever we had meat, Uncle always put the biggest piece onto my plate. “You eat it,” he would say.

And when I would put it back onto his plate, he gave it back to me: “Eat. I already had some.”

When Uncle woke up in a good mood, he would say: “Madam, do you want to eat bird or rabbit today?” Then he would walk into the forest and set a trap. Sometimes I woke up to the smell of rabbit or bird already roasting outside on a campfire, and I ran out of the tent to my uncle, who’d hit me on the head and taunt me: “Sorry, today is bad luck. I only caught one bird. There’s nothing for you.”

I liked my uncle’s teasing, perhaps because when he teased me, he talked to me. For he was a very silent man. So silent that after living with him for some time, I began to notice that in fact there were different silences about him. Some were just quiet, others were sad. My uncle was always very sad when he sat down to weave cane baskets, and I often wondered if he was thinking of the baskets he had made for his lover who had died in the mountains. But I never dared to ask him.

Sometimes, when he had drunk too much wine, Uncle talked about his dead brother who had gone to Tibet and never come back. “Your uncle could really ride a horse. Sometimes he rode backward! From the time he was little, he always loved horses. He painted horses, and he rode them.”

But mostly when Uncle drank too much, he fell asleep without even wrapping himself in his blanket, and he kept me awake with his snoring.

On one of those nights, I was also kept awake by a terrible storm. I was terrified of storms — because I had heard a lot of stories from the old people in the village about trees and people being split in half by lightning. That night the forest was howling and our tent was shaking, pounded by rain and wind, but as I shook with terror under my blanket, Uncle slept on, dead to the world. The storm lit the walls of the tent and thunder roared in the nearby sky, but my uncle went on snoring and grinding his teeth. He had got so drunk that I could not wake him for anything, no matter how much I pushed and shoved him — until I thought of something. I took some dried chili from our supplies and broke off a little piece, which I pushed up his nostril.

He breathed in, made an awful coughing noise, and sat straight up, his hands to his nose, his face dark red and bewildered. His eyes streaming with tears and bulging out of their sockets, and frothing at the mouth, he coughed and groaned horribly and grabbed at his nose and blew out of his nostrils like an angry bull yak, but even as he managed to blow out the chili, his nose kept on burning and burning.

It never occurred to me to worry about him. I just thought it was funny, and I laughed uncontrollably. Meanwhile, Uncle looked at me through his tears and said nothing — but much later, when he had recovered, he grabbed me by the shoulders, turned me around, and kicked my backside straight out of the tent and into the thundering rain. I had trouble sitting for two days after that. When I went home and told this story to my mother, she said sternly: “Namu, you could have killed him!” Then I really did feel ashamed of myself, because I loved my uncle.

Except for the electrical storms, I was never really frightened of the wilderness — although I did fear snakes, and on my mother’s advice, I always carried a piece of string to make a tourniquet in case a snake bit me. Not that we had ever known anyone to be bitten by a snake, and the snakes probably had more reason to be afraid of people than we had to fear them. On several occasions I had seen my mother cut a poisonous snake in half with her scythe while working in the vegetable garden or in the fields. But then again, it was not really the snake’s bite that I feared most.

In our village there was a family whose house was set back at a short distance from the others. One of their daughters, Tsilidema, was a grown and very beautiful young woman, but no man ever walked to her house to visit her at night. Whenever we met anyone from that household, we kept away from them — and not only my family did this but all the other villagers. Tsilidema’s people likewise kept away from us. Once, when I was returning from the fields with my sister Zhema and my mother, we passed Tsilidema and her sisters on the village street.

“You’ve been to Mother Lake?” my Ama asked pleasantly enough, although she kept going and stayed well clear of the girls’ path.

“Yes,” Tsilidema answered, averting her eyes, and in a voice so quiet we hardly heard her. She quickened her pace as though she were running from us, while her two sisters hastened behind her with their heads bent toward the ground.

Watching Tsilidema and her little sisters scurrying away, it occurred to me that of all the people in the village, they were the only ones who never came to our house for dinner. Then it occurred to me that we had never visited Tsilidema’s family at New Year, and that I had never seen Tsilidema at any of our neighbors’ houses. When we came home, I asked my mother why Tsilidema and her sisters were so shy.

“They’re not shy,” Ama answered matter-of-factly. “Their family has the Gu.”

“What’s the Gu?”

“The Gu is a very dangerous thing,” my mother continued in the same tone, as she put her workbasket on the ground. “During the fifth lunar month, there are people who go into the mountains to collect snakes, centipedes, spiders, toads, sometimes bats — if they can catch them. They take all these dirty animals home and put them in a jar. Then they close the lid and all the poisonous things fight and eat each other until, at the end, only one is left. That one is the Gu, and it’s the most poisonous thing in the world.” She stopped talking and stoked the fire under the cooking stove.

“Then what?” I asked, my heart beating fast.

“Then what?” my mother repeated without interrupting her chore.

“What happens to the Gu? What does it do?”

“Well, it has to eat — just like everything else. Except that it eats only dirty things.”

My big sister Zhema then joined in the conversation with the grisly details. “If a man owns the Gu, he feeds it the sweat of his armpits, and if a woman owns it, she feeds it her monthly blood.”

“Oh, yuk!” I said.

“And that’s not all,” Zhema continued. “The Gu doesn’t just eat dirty things. It has to give its poison to other people. If it doesn’t make people sick, it will harm its own masters.”

I protested, half believing these bad things and also a little bothered by the fact that once again my older sister knew something I didn’t. “Tsilidema doesn’t look like a bad person; I’m sure she wouldn’t let the Gu make us sick.”

But my Ama scoffed: “She can’t do anything about it. The Gu cannot die and it is passed down the generations. Even if Tsilidema is the best person in the world. Even if she doesn’t want the Gu anymore, she can’t get rid of it. She’s stuck with it forever and so are all her people and all their descendants.”

Now, I felt very sorry for poor, beautiful Tsilidema, who was cursed with the horrible Gu and who had no one to talk to, no friends to invite her for dinner or a bowl of butter tea near the fireplace, no man to give her a belt in token of his admiration, but Ama’s words and the gravity of her tone truly frightened me, and a terrible thought engulfed my sympathy. “So, Tsilidema’s Gu could really get us?”

“Of course it could!” Ama cried out in alarm. “The Gu can get anyone. That’s why we don’t have anything to do with Tsilidema and her family. And that’s why nobody ever invites people who have the Gu into their house. That’s why only Gu people can talk with Gu people. Don’t you remember when Dujema’s older brother got sick a few months ago? Well, that was the Gu. A lot of people get sick. You don’t even have to touch someone who has the Gu to get sick from it. All you have to do is eat while you’re near them, or even swallow your saliva when they look at you. All of a sudden you smell something very strange, like cigarette smoke or sweat or a wild animal, and then you lose your appetite. The next day your stomach swells up and you can’t eat anything except the thing you were eating at the time the Gu poisoned you. Then you can’t stop eating that thing, you crave it and eat and eat and eat. You can get very sick.”