A few of the other girls in the tribe also wore rawa. The headpiece was handed down from mother to daughter throughout the generations. The girls would wear them for a year or two, then abandon them and begin to braid their hair in the style of the older women, with two plaits joined at the back. Until not so long ago the women wove their hair, in the traditional fashion, into 108 tiny plaits. That is a Tibetan's auspicious number, the length of their prayer beads. Tsedup remembered his mother having such elaborate hair, but today, although this hairstyle was still worn by some of the women I'd seen in Machu, it wasn't in our tribe, except for a special occasion, such as a marriage. It was considered too laborious a task.
Dolma and Sirmo were best friends. They were related too. Dolma's mother, Annay Urgin, was a real character. She had seven daughters by five different men and had never been married. This was not a problem in the tribe, although for Annay Urgin it was sometimes difficult because there were no men in the family to slaughter her animals. At these times she had to rely on Tsedo to help her. She lived next door to us with Dolma and her youngest daughter, Tselo, as all of her other daughters had married into other tribes and one daughter, Dado, was at school in Gannan. But despite the harshness of her existence, Annay Urgin never stopped laughing. She was the warmest and most earthy woman I had ever met. She was often in town visiting her sister, which left the tent empty for Dolma and Sirmo to have their sleepovers. I had often heard them giggling long into the night, though exactly what they got up to was a mystery to me. If anyone knew about 'the beautiful one with the earring', it was Dolma. I asked her if she knew Sirmo's lover's name.
'Chuchong Tashi,' she said, tittering, as if she had betrayed a secret. 'He's very beautiful.' We laughed.
I was clearly becoming as fervent a gossip as the other tribeswomen. 'Does he have a good heart?' I asked. The nomads used this expression to mean 'kind'.
'A very good heart,' she confided.
I was satisfied. I had Dolma's testimony and was one step closer to uncovering the mystery, since Sirmo was not forthcoming.
That afternoon we made dung mountains. The children made round pancakes of dung and spread them out in rows to dry in the sun. Then we collected yesterday's, which were now biscuit crisp, and stacked them methodically, artistically too, on top of each other, like overlapping dominoes, twisting round and round until we had made a large cone. This ensured that the dung inside would stay dry and protected from rain during the winter months. When it was required the fuel would eventually be transported to the winter house in the valley, and also to Annay and Amnye's house in the town.
The rest of the day was devoted to felt-making. Amnye was spreading sheep's wool on to a plastic sheet beside the tent and sprinkling it with water. He rolled up the sheet as he went, until he had formed a long cylinder with all the wool wrapped inside. His job done, he retired to the tent to smoke and play cards with his friends. I joined Annay, Shermo Donker, Sirmo, Dolma and Dickir Che and we formed a line on our knees in front of the trunk of wrapped wool. We rolled up our sleeves and began pummelling. Like all nomad tasks, it looked easy and, like all nomad tasks, it wasn't. The idea was to push the cylinder forward with the length of our forearms and let it roll back, rhythmically, with an even distribution of weight. Within a few minutes, I had developed a rash from the friction of the wool's coarse fibres on my work-shy, soft skin. But I laboured without complaint and accompanied the others as Annay led us in a counting song:
Little Dickir Che looked up at me and laughed as I started them all singing in English:
Even Annay was cackling and pummelling and struggling to form the words.
We continued in this fashion for an hour or so, until the welts on my arms had formed welts of their own. My face was stinging from the heat of the afternoon sun. Their familiarity with the outdoor life had given them naturally ruddy cheeks, but I resembled a lobster. They urged me to stop and go and rub on some butter to soothe my skin, while they saw the job through until nightfall.
The autumn heat had not only fired the women, as I had seen the day before, it seemed to have brought about a rise in activity among the teenage boys of the tribe. I was beginning to notice a pattern to each evening. On one particular night after dinner in the tent, a few boys turned up. They had come for Gorbo. They sat with us and ate as they waited. One was Wado, a tall lad with a permanent gormless grin. He was a bit of a clown and looked far more clueless than he was. His father, Athung, had been brought up with Amnye, and Gorbo and Wado were cousins. Tonight, under his tsarer, he sported a garish, silky, flower-patterned shirt that he had instructed his mother to make for him from a scarf he had bought in town. He felt rather special, but his new look caused an uproar in the tent. Tsedo and Tsedup teased him and slapped his back. ' Yucka!' they cried, choking and spluttering on their noodle soup. He continued to grin gormlessly.
Accompanying him was Rinchen, Shermo Donker's youngest brother and a real Artful Dodger. He stood sniggering and hanging on to the tent pole by the fire. His head was covered in stiff stubble with bald patches where the razor had gone too far. He sniffed intermittently and wiped his nose with the back of his grubby hand. He had the same wide mouth as his sister and a huge silver hoop hung from his earlobe. He was fourteen but looked about eleven, such was his diminutive size, and this was his first night out with the older boys: his initiation. He was nervous. Tsedo and Tsedup gave him beer then spent the next hour teasing him as he reeled drunkenly, guffawed loudly and puffed on a cigarette, attempting to look grown-up. Meanwhile, Gorbo rummaged around quietly in the drawer under the altar and found what he had been looking for. He knew that Ells had given some perfume to Sirmo and, rising awkwardly from the corner of the tent, he moved among us in a pungent cloud of Chanel No. 5. This produced more laughter from the family. The boys were really going for it that night. They were on for a serious hornig.
Hornig was the nomads' dating game. I had laughed when I had first heard the word as it sounded strangely familiar. These boys were indeed horny as hell. Their task was to set off into the night on horseback or on a yak and seek out young girls in their tents at night. They often travelled miles under the stars if they had heard of a particularly beautiful young girl who lived in another tribe. Or they might have glanced at her in town or on the open road. The trick was to find one who was not 'locked in'. If a girl was locked in, it meant that her parents were in the tent with her. She could not be wooed. I had heard tales of boys being chased away by fathers wielding knives and throwing cooking pots. It was best to be careful. But the real art to entering a tent was to get past the mastiffs, a potentially life-threatening task. The boys each carried a chukgor, a steel weight on the end of a long leather thong, which they swung round threateningly in huge arcs as they approached the dogs on horseback, creating a path as the animals snapped crazily at their heels. When a dog got too close, its strangled cries rent the night sky.