After an hour of arduous climbing up steep switchbacks they crested the northern arm of the steep mountain to enter a high plateau with scattered patches of snow. After a quarter mile they rounded the far side and saw Tumkot far below. Shan pointed to a fork in the trail, and gestured Yates toward the higher path, that led into a chill wind from above that smelled of ice.
Half an hour later Shan set his pack down at the entry to a large cave flanked by more faded paintings of deities. With painful foreboding he studied the soil around the entry, compressed with the impressions of so many boots he could not manage a clear count of the number of people who had recently been there.
They advanced with hand lights into the cave, following a vague scent of incense that grew stronger as they walked. When at last they reached the main chamber they had no need for their lights. The cavern in which Dakpo sat was lit by shafts of sunlight slanting in through a long, narrow cleft in the outside wall. The monk was not praying but cleaning, rolling up three worn sleeping pallets. He greeted them with a surprised grin. “I go for months without a visitor,” he said, “and now my home is like a town square.” He silently accepted Shan’s help in rolling and stacking the pallets by a plank that held three pairs of tattered sandals.
“You need to hide all this,” Shan warned the old Tibetan. “Men may be coming in search of them.” The hermit nodded absently, looking past Shan’s shoulder with an amused expression. Shan turned to see Yates standing as if paralyzed before what looked like an altar in a dimly lit corner. But it was not an altar Shan saw as he approached, just a low table made of planks on stones. On it sat a rectangular object under a blanket, with an electric cord wrapped in frayed cloth fiber extending out of it, leading to a strange wooden box with two crank handles jutting out of its sides. Yates shined his light on English words stenciled along the side of the box and gasped. US ARMY, it said in black stenciled letters.
The American pulled the blanket away, revealing a device with several dials and gauges on its front. “It can’t be!” he exclaimed in surprise, and kept repeating the words as he knelt, examining it with his light held close.
Dakpo, sitting on a little three legged milking stool, wore an oddly satisfied smile.
“Ama Apte’s uncle,” Shan said. “This is why he came up here all the time.”
The hermit nodded. “Kundu and I were good friends, long before he took that mule shape. We would go outside on a ledge facing south. He had been trained by the Americans to stretch the antenna in a certain way. At first I was too frightened to turn those handles, because of the little lightning bolts they made at the end of the wires, but he taught me how to do it safely, the way the Americans taught him.
“There was a rebel who kept transmitting,” Yates recalled in a whisper. His fingers hovered in front of the dials but he seemed reluctant to touch them. “He kept on transmitting for years after the program ended, even though no one answered.”
“There was no world afterward,” the hermit declared in a thin, haunting voice. “We had to make do.”
The words brought Yates out of his trance. “No world?”
“Down below were all those Chinese, destroying everything Tibetan. On the other side of the mountains were all those who had given up fighting, who were becoming new kinds of Tibetans, Tibetans as Indians, Tibetans as Nepalis. If we wanted to stay the way we were, we had to become invisible.” Dakpo rose and reverently dusted the top of the radio with a rag.
“The day they. . the last day of fighting,” the hermit continued, “we knew our world was gone. Each of us had to do the best he could. I thought about telling old Kundu that the Americans were gone, never to come back, that he should stop the transmissions.”
Yates fingered the worn wooden handles on the portable generator.
“But he didn’t?” the American asked.
“Not for years.”
“What would he say?” Shan asked after a long silence, “when he transmitted on the radio?”
“The first few years, he stayed on the run, using a sleeping bag from the Americans, saying his mission now was intelligence, whatever that meant. He would watch the highway, watch the Chinese army, then come up and report the movements, like in the days of the fighting. For a while he decided the Americans had changed the codes, or frequencies, and so he would turn the dials and repeat his number, announcing again and again that he was a sergeant in the Tibetan resistance army. In the end he would talk about the weather or read sutras.”
“Sutras?” Shan asked.
“Eventually he realized it wasn’t the Americans he was trying to reach. He said it was something people didn’t always understand about radios, that even if the Americans stopped listening the heavens always heard.”
Yates extracted one of his old photos, of Tibetans lined up with parachutes and packs, ready for a jump, and pointed to his father, standing with the aircrew.
Dakpo responded immediately. “He was a good man, your father. Kundu, the two-legged one, was with him in that camp in America.”
Yates seemed to stop breathing for a moment. “How-how did you know he was my father?”
“The first time you took your hat off in Tibet, the mountain knew,” Dakpo said enigmatically. Then with new enthusiasm he took the photo and began pointing to the men, reciting each name in turn. Not until he had finished and looked up did he see the dumbfounded grin on the American’s face. “Once, I remember at the end of your year, in our eleventh month, your father taught us some of your festival songs in English and we sang them around a fire eating sweet biscuits he had saved. Songs about snowmen and bells and the birth of his lama on that cross. Jingle bells, jingle bells, we would sing. He laughed a lot, your father. He gave us strength.”
“How many of you were there?” Shan asked. “Survivors.”
“A few,” Dakpo said in a wary tone.
“You said each found his own way to survive. Not everyone became a hermit.”
Dakpo nodded. “I had been a novice at one of the little monasteries they burned down in the first campaign. I saved most of the old books, brought them here and tried to concentrate on them the way my teachers had taught me before they died. But eventually I realized I had to fight before I could study.”
“Gyalo went to town,” Shan said. “Ama Apte went to her village and became a fortuneteller.”
“She couldn’t very well stay in the mountains. She needed to be with her family.”
“Was it one of them who betrayed the rebels?”
“There was always going to be someone. It was the way the Chinese worked.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“They each think the other did it. I don’t know. All trust was gone after that day. I thought about it, for years I thought about it. There were others who could have helped the Chinese. Shepherds who knew us. Maybe one of our own band who slipped across the border. Who’s to know what makes a bird wake up and decide to change its song? It was written that our world would change, and it changed.”
Shan pulled away a piece of felt covering a stool by the radio, revealing more military equipment, a compass, a bayonet, a small set of binoculars. He paused, looking back at the stacks of old books at the far side of the cave. Both the equipment and the books were well maintained.
Dakpo saw the query in Shan’s face. “The more one understands the world,” he declared, “the harder it is to obtain Buddhahood.”
Yates began to fire off questions about his father. After a moment Shan held up his hand. “There is no time. The slopes are crawling with people searching for the monks.” He turned to the hermit. “Can you take us there, to the hidden place where they are going?”
Dakpo pointed to his sandals. “With these, no. I gave the only boots here to the monks. “But,” he added, rising, “I can guide you for the first hour and point the way from there. It is difficult,” he warned. “Not even the wild goats can do it.”