“It requires real effort to accidentally find this camp,” came a simmering voice above him. He righted himself slowly, rising to his knees to find a young Tibetan woman with a wool cap pulled low over her head and a heavy shepherd’s staff raised in her hands. But it hadn’t been the staff that struck him. With a now joyful bleat Tara the goat charged him again, but this time to push her face against him, mouthing his jacket in her usual greeting.

The woman relaxed her hold on the staff. “She acts like she knows you,” she said, question in her voice.

“Animals like me,” Shan said, and slowly rose to his feet. “I was on the pilgrims’ path,” he offered. “Does it continue into the stone field?” He took a step toward the outcroppings.

Tara, however, would not let him avoid her. She leapt up on her two back feet, nuzzling his belly.

“No, she does know you,” the woman insisted, raising the staff again.

Shan sighed and sat on a flat boulder, putting his hat beside him as he rubbed Tara’s head. “Can we perhaps start over?” he asked. “Yes. Last month Tara ate a pair of my shoes, then a shirt she pulled off my clothesline. And she seems to enjoy visiting the cells in my jail.”

The woman stiffened, raising the club higher as she retreated toward the shadows, calling Tara. The goat looked at her with a curious expression but did not leave Shan. The Tibetan hesitated. “She trusts you,” she said in surprise.

“I was there when you took Yankay away from his detention camp. I never liked those reeducation camps. Not really a prison, not really a school. Just one of those limbo hells where souls bide their time for life to begin again.”

“We’ve done nothing wrong!” the woman snapped.

“I am not your enemy,” Shan said.

“You are Chinese! You admit you are a government officer!”

“Officer seems too big a word for what I do. Just a lowly constable. And I am outside my jurisdiction.”

“No,” came an amused voice from the shadows. “Shan is more like the Abbot of Yangkar. And the gods’ valley was always in the jurisdiction of Yangkar gompa.” Lhakpa emerged into the daylight.

“He is a policeman, Uncle!” the woman pressed, alarm in her voice. “And there is no more gompa at Yangkar.”

“No. The gompa remains, just harder to see than it once was. Shan is a policeman who opens his jail beds to half-frozen monks and helps paint the chorten in the town square, always ignoring the Mao at the other end.”

“He was trying to deceive me when he arrived,” his niece pressed.

“In Tibet a wise man learns to test new ground before revealing himself.” Lhakpa turned to Shan. “This is Jaya, my other niece.”

“I can barely tell them apart.”