“Yes. Yankay is many years older and as the first son had gone to a monastery. He was still a novice when the Chinese army came. He had always felt he would be a hail chaser, for even as a boy something inside him stirred at the coming of storms and earthquakes. His gompa had two of the most celebrated hail chasers in all of Tibet, who had begun to teach him. But they died when the Chinese came, and he fled into a cave with some of their books. Once when I was seven or eight I saw a demon dancing above our barley field, dressed in twigs and grass, with a long white horse tail fixed to a staff. My mother said, ‘That’s no demon, that’s your uncle Yankay.’ He would come like that every few months, and my mother would have me take a sack of barley and leave it at the edge of the field for him.

“Then after my parents died, I lived with neighbors and he would still come, though my new family had little to spare. I would save half the barley I was supposed to eat and give it to him. Once there was a letter on the rock where I left his food. It simply said, Jaya, I will try to be near, but I cannot be at your side, for your own safety. After that, he would leave letters each time he came, and when I was twelve he wrote that I must go to school and bloom into the flower I was meant to be.” She grew melancholy for a moment, then brightened. “He didn’t know I was going to be a prickly rose,” she said and urged her horse down the trail.

When they reached his truck, he expected her to quickly ride back up the mountain, but instead she dismounted and tied the horses to a gnarled pine. At first, she walked cautiously toward the truck, watching the surrounding outcroppings, but then she abruptly gasped and ran past him.

Shan stared in some chagrin as she excitedly pointed to half a dozen pockmarks on the hood and roof of his truck. The storm from the night had brought hail to Ice Ball Alley.

“Look!” Jaya exclaimed, pointing in turn to each of the dents, which looked like they had been made by hail the size of ping-pong balls.

“I should have parked lower on the slope,” Shan said.

“No, no! You don’t understand! The water from the melted hail is in each of the dents! The old ones claim such water is very powerful, straight from the hands of the earth gods. They soak charms in it. We must save it!”