Descent

by Roland Smith

“We were a little late leaving the monastery,” I said.

  One of the men offered us bowls of yak butter tea, and we all sat down around the fire. The tea was delicious. I asked the green monk where Shek was.

  He pointed to the north. “Three kilometers. They are sleeping. It was a hard day for them.”

  “What kind of shape are they in?”

  “They killed a takin yesterday morning. I would guess they are feeling well, considering what they have gone through to get this far.”

  “So you think they will find the monastery.”

  The green monk nodded. “They have been on this course for three days now. I believe they will continue on it unless they are diverted.”

  “I guess we’re the diversion,” I said. “How’s this going to work?”

  “They will reach this camp tomorrow afternoon. We are the first people they will have seen for weeks. We will tell them that you stayed with us for several days, but left in the morning headed toward India. The rain will have obscured your trail somewhat. I believe they will ask for assistance in tracking you. They do not have that skill. I will volunteer to help them for a fee.”

  I took out the map and showed it to him. He followed the route with his index finger. “I have been some of the way, but not all of it.”

  “How long do you think it will take to get to the border?”

  “A week. Maybe ten days in this weather and at the pace you will have to travel to keep them close. It is not nearly as difficult a path as you took to get here. Do you have a compass?”

  “Yeah, and a GPS watch, which doesn’t work without a sat signal, but Tashi said I’d get one when I got closer to Arunachal Pradesh.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that, but you will be in the trees most of the way to the border, because the route is through a pass, not over a mountain peak.”

  “There are some open areas,” Duga said. “I was on the route three years ago. I intended to go to Itanagar to see where I was conceived and perhaps meet some of my relatives, but I was stopped by the rockfalls and other obstacles, which could not have been there when my mother crossed into Tibet. There is a very big wall to climb. I am not a climber, and even if I had been, I did not have the equipment.”

  I wasn’t worried about the rockfalls and walls. Yash had packed plenty of rope and hardware. But I was worried about Duga and Norbu’s lack of climbing chops. Shek might not be able to spot the deception while we were strolling through the woods, but if we were climbing, he’d know they were not Josh and Zopa.

  I looked at Norbu. “How are your climbing skills?”

  He shook his head.

  “Just when I was beginning to think this was going to be easy,” I said.

  “A problem?” the green monk asked.

  “Potentially, a big problem,” I said. “We can’t climb if Shek is watching us.”

  It took him a couple of seconds for the green monk to figure out what I meant, then he nodded and said, “Ah, I understand. He will know these two are not Zopa and your father.”

  “Yep. Any ideas?”

  Instead of answering, he stood up, cupped his hands around his mouth, and emitted some kind of birdcall. It wasn’t very loud, but within a few seconds, two green-clad monks came running into camp without a sound. Both of them had coils of rope slung over their shoulders with grappling hooks. One of them was a woman, maybe thirty years old. The other was a man at least twice her age. The green monk talked to them quietly for several minutes, then they ran back into the woods and vanished. The green monk sat back down next to the fire.

  “One will travel with you, the other with me. They will run back and forth and keep us apprised of what each group is doing.”

  “I don’t think Shek is going to allow someone to run off from his group,” I said.

  “He will if he doesn’t know the person is there to begin with. They will be watching us unseen.”

  “How do we get in touch with them?” I asked. “I can’t duplicate the birdcall.”

  “There is no need. One of them will be watching and listening to you, just as they have been watching and listening to us around this campfire. All you have to do is to call them in.”

  “Do they understand English?”

  “Yes, and several other languages, like all the watchers.”

  “What are their names?”

  The green monk gave me a broad smile. “To make it simple we will call the woman Walkie, and the man Talkie.”

  I could have sworn I heard laughter coming from somewhere in the forest.

  Pursuit

  We left the hunting camp at one in the morning after downing two bowls of takin stew, which tasted a lot better than the monk bars. The rain had increased and the wind had picked up, making the trek through the dark forest challenging. The green monk led the way without the benefit of a headlamp, which meant that his night vision was right up there with that of an owl. Yash, Duga, Norbu, and I were all wearing headlamps and managed to slip and stumble every few feet. But pretty soon I got into the forest rhythm, or present intense, where time and thought ceased to exist. Before I knew it, we came to a stop in a small clearing.

  “This is where you will make camp. Build a small fire. You can sleep in. Leave around noon, which should give you a three- or four-hour start on the soldiers. I will stay in touch.” He turned around and was gone.

  I woke up sweating under my plastic tarp. It was a little after nine o’clock. The rain was still making its way through the thick canopy, but the wind had died down. Across the smoking fire from me, my tarped team was lined up, looking like giant grubs. I choked down half a monk bar, then got out my map and compass to try to figure out which way to go. A difficult task when you don’t know where you are. I figured we’d stumbled five or six miles before we reached our crude camp, which didn’t put us very far along the thin red line. I got up, put more wood on the fire, then started to the north to see what lay ahead. It wasn’t encouraging. I was glad that Yash had thought to pack our machetes. We were going to need them, but we decided that we should use them sparingly. I didn’t want to blaze a jogging trail for Shek and his men. When I got back to camp, Yash had the water boiling for tea, and Norbu and Duga were chomping down monk bars and drying out the tarps next to the fire.

  We started off at eleven-thirty because I was too nervous to wait around until noon. It was up and down through rough country, but it wasn’t nearly as hard as our initial journey to the crater. We continued on until well after dark before we made another crude camp. Judging distance was impossible, but I figured we had maybe traveled fifteen miles. Just as we were wrapping ourselves up for sleep, Talkie appeared out of nowhere, scaring us half to death.

  He said that the green monk was guiding the soldiers and they were ten miles behind us. He suggested we slow down a little the following day and make our trail easier to follow.

  “Do you want some tea or something?” I asked.

  He shook his head, bowed, and slipped back into the darkness. He hadn’t been very talkative. I wondered if that had been part of the green monk’s joke when he named him.

  The next day we didn’t slow down, but we stopped more often. The rain had been replaced by a dense mist. It was like walking through an insect-infested steam bath. At the bottom of a steep ravine, we found a good-size stream with several deep pools. We washed our clothes, dried out our gear as best we could, and went for a swim, which helped relieve the itch and sting of our scrapes and insect bites. That night Yash and I gave Duga and Norbu a climbing lesson by showing them the hardware and explaining how it worked. They tried to rig their harnesses, which was impossible for Duga because he was wearing a monk robe. Yet another problem. Zopa would be able to free climb in a robe, but that was way beyond Duga’s skill set. If we didn’t have him harnessed, he would fall off whatever he was climbing. We were debating how best to cut a hole through the front of his robe for the rope when Walkie came walking into camp.

  Unlike Talkie, she was very tal
kative. She accepted our offer of tea and a monk bar.

  “I had forgotten how horrible these are,” she said as she tried to get it down.

  “What do you normally eat?” I asked.

  “Whatever the forest offers us. There is always plenty of food. The abbot has given us permission to take and eat animal flesh when necessary. Otherwise we would starve. Personally, I like birds. They are delicate to watch and delicate to eat. Many do not like them because they are difficult to skin and feather and the reward is small, but I don’t mind. My favorite bird is the dove. Have you eaten them?”

  None of us had. I wouldn’t mind eating one, but a big plate of steaming spaghetti with a quarter pound of freshly grated Parmesan sprinkled on top sounded better.

  “You must try it someday, but I am not here to talk about food. I have instructions for you. Even with all your lingering and swimming today, the soldiers have fallen further behind. They are getting discouraged, including their leader. He is wondering if you are the men he is after. Tomorrow you must let them see all of you from a distance. I will scout ahead and find the perfect spot for this to happen and mark it for you. You will need to wait there until you are clearly seen.”

  “How will we know the spot?” I asked.

  “Oh, you will know, but if you pass it, I will tell you.”

  She stood up and held out half a monk bar.

  “You can keep it,” I said. “We have plenty.”

  “I will just throw it away. What if an animal ate it and died?”

  She walked away laughing.

  * * *

  We broke camp early the next morning not knowing how long it would take to wherever Walkie wanted us to go. By late afternoon we were beginning to worry that we had embarked on a completely different trail from the one she had chosen. Why she couldn’t have just come with us and faded away once we were set up, I don’t know. We were halfway up a rather steep tree-covered grade when Yash came across a set of small sandal tracks in the mud. Duga was convinced they belonged to Walkie. I wasn’t sure about that, but he was a guide and the tracks belonged to someone, so we followed them, or tried to follow them, because the prints only showed up every thirty or forty feet. It was as if whoever they belonged to was leaping ahead, not walking.

  We were surprised to find the top of the ridge relatively open with a clear view of the hill we had descended about a mile away to the south. A windstorm must have come through and knocked down several hundred trees. Whether we had found Walkie’s spot or not, it felt great to be standing beneath an open sky for the first time in weeks.

  “Over here,” Norbu said.

  I joined him. He was standing next to a pile of wood. All it needed to turn it into a small campfire was a match. Sitting next to it was a stack of small pieces of red meat on a piece of bark with flies buzzing around them. Yash picked up one of the pieces and gave it a sniff.

  “Dove meat,” he said. “Fresh. I’ll light the fire.”

  “Let’s figure this out first.” I pulled my binoculars from my pack and scanned the southern ridge. Just down from the top was a small outcrop we had walked by before we started our descent. If Shek stepped out onto it he’d have a perfect view of us, provided he knew we were there.

  “Light the fire,” I said. “Make sure it’s smoky.”

  “To keep the insects at bay?” Norbu asked.

  “No,” I said. “To make sure Shek sees us.”

  Norbu and Duga sat with their backs to the south ridge. Yash and I sat across from them with our faces clearly showing. It took me a bite or two to get past the idea of eating a dove. For the others it didn’t take any time at all. We pulled the sizzling meat from the skewers with our teeth like we hadn’t eaten in a month. I guess we were protein starved. In short order, the little pile was gone.

  “How long do we stay here?”  Yash asked.

  “Until after they spot us,” I said. “How long did it take us to get up here from the south ridge?”

  Yash shrugged. “Maybe five or six hours. It could take them longer if they push on during the night.”

  “Once they see us, they might,” I said. “I know I would. I wish I knew what was up ahead.”

  “I might know,” Duga said. “I can’t be certain, but I think there is one more small ridge beyond this one. The rockslide that turned me back is on the other side of that ridge.”

  “We sure don’t want to be climbing that with them coming up behind us,” I said. “How bad is the slide?”

  “Very bad. Loose rocks.” He drew a picture in the ash with his skewer. “It is a narrow ravine. Maybe three hundred feet across at the top and three times that at the bottom in the shape of the letter A. On either side of the A are sheer walls at least a thousand feet tall. I tried to climb over the rockslide, but it caused more rock to tumble down. My only choice was to try to climb the walls, but as I told you, I did not have the equipment. And even if I’d had climbing equipment, I may not have been able to scale it.”

  “You may get another chance tomorrow. We don’t have time to find a way around it.” I looked at Yash. “What do you think?”

  “When were you here?” he asked Duga.

  “Last year around this time.”

  “There is a chance that the slide has settled and stabilized,”  Yash said, and got to his feet. He put another armload of wet wood onto the fire, sending a huge plume of white smoke up into the air, which nearly choked us to death. When my eyes stopped watering, I looked across to the outcrop and caught a flash of light.

  “Don’t turn around,” I said. “But I think they’re here.”

  “You can see them?” Duga asked.

  “No, but I think I caught the sun off their binocs.”

  “What do you want to do?”  Yash asked.

  “It’ll be dark soon. Let’s get an hour or two of sleep to convince them that we’re staying here for the night. When they get here, we’ll be long gone.”

  On Our Own

  My three teammates were sound asleep on their tarps within minutes. I stayed awake, tending the fire and scanning the opposite ridge for lights. I didn’t see any, but I was certain Shek and his men were on the move and having a difficult time of it in the dark unless they had night-vision goggles, which would not have surprised me. A breeze had cooled the air and thinned the mist and clouds, revealing a bright moon, which was nearly full. That might help us if the light managed to make its way through the thick canopy on the way to Duga’s infamous landslide. His crude drawing was still visible in the ash. I stared down at it, trying to visualize what the slide might actually look like. I dumped the contents of my backpack onto the ground to inventory everything I had, hoping to find some inspiration for what I hoped was a scramble over loose boulders and not a climb up a massive wall with two inexperienced climbers. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

  The last thing I pulled out of the pack was a pair of cargo shorts Alessia had gotten for me last Christmas. I’m sure they had been expensive, and she was very happy with them. Me? No so much. But I kept them because she had given them to me. I’d taken them with me thinking I’d like them more if I broke them in wandering around Yangon. The problem was we left Yangon right after I got there. The shorts were too big for me now. If I put them on, they would be around my ankles before I took a step. I looked over at Duga. They would be a little big on him too, but not if he tucked his robe into them, which is exactly the kind of thing Zopa would do, since he didn’t give a damn what he looked like when he was climbing, or any other time. Harness problem solved. Duga was going to get some scrapes on his legs, but he wouldn’t hit the ground.

  An hour later, I shook my team awake. We didn’t switch on our headlamps until we got below the ridge on the other side. Walkie joined us halfway down the steep grade. She said the soldiers were following and making good progress and that we should keep moving while we talked. Her moving was more graceful than our stumbling.

  “Do the soldiers have night-vision goggles?” I as
ked, just as I got whacked in the face by a large tree branch.

  “Yes, they can see in the dark. The goggles look silly.”

  But they’re practical, I thought.

  “Thank you for the doves,” I said. “They were delicious.”

  “You are welcome.”

  “You have been running back and forth between us and the soldiers. Do you ever sleep?”

  “We sleep when those we watch sleep, but this situation has been a little different.”

  “I bet. So how close are the soldiers?”

  “The soldiers are three hours behind you. They have discarded many of their supplies so they can move faster.”

  “Did they keep their climbing equipment?”

  “Yes, and their guns.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “You don’t mean that,”  Walkie said.

  “Sarcasm,” I said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Duga thinks that the rockslide that stopped him is one ridge over from the next ridge.”

  “He is correct. Arunachal Pradesh is not far beyond the second ridge.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “No, but I know where it is. Watchers are good at explaining how things look and where things are.”

  “Do you ever get lost?”

  “Every place is somewhere.”

  This was a Zopa answer. I wasn’t alert enough to figure out what she meant by it, and I probably never would be.

  “We would like to know what your plan is,” she said.

  “We will either climb up over the rockslide, or climb to the top of a wall. In either case, but especially if we have to go up the wall, it would better if the soldiers aren’t there to watch us. I already talked to the green monk about this.”

  “You call him the green monk?”

  “I don’t know his real name.”

  “Neither do I, but I will give him your message. When you reach the wall, you will be on your own. No more watchers.”

  And with that she was gone.

  We stopped at the bottom of the ravine to fill our water bottles. We didn’t linger, but the vicious insects ate us alive. The uphill side was steep and treacherous, but not as long as the downhill side. We topped it a little before noon, dripping in sweat, out of breath, and bleeding from scratches and bites. Three hundred yards in front of us was Duga’s rockslide, a river of boulders the size of basketballs and school buses. The tail of the slide was at least a thousand feet across. The walls on either side were monsters.