“Just as well,” Yara replied as she tossed her pack onto the seat and climbed behind the wheel. “The headmistress gives me suspicious looks whenever I get a call from the constable.” She glanced up at the steep slopes above the town, which had begun to show the long shadows of sunset. “It’s just that my grandmother won’t want to sit in the back in the dark.” Yara was taking the old woman up to her grandfather’s camp, where he was watching over their tiny herd of sheep and yaks, waiting for the passes below the summer pastures to clear of snow.

“Of course, she can sit with you in the cab,” Shan said. “Just ask her not to use the siren this time.”

“But you know she’ll smoke her cigar all the way. You’ll smell it for a week.”

Shan acknowledged her warning with a small bow of his head. “My penance for being late.”

Yara smiled again then extracted a folded paper from her shirt pocket and handed it to Shan. “While I was waiting I wrote a letter,” she said. “I’ll leave the truck behind the station as usual,” she added and then sped off to the rug factory where her grandmother worked.

As he walked the five blocks from the cinder block school to the town square, Shan studied the squat, windblown houses on either side of the street. Nearly all had lotuses, conchs, fish, or other auspicious symbols painted by their entries. One, that of the new Chinese barber, had a poster of the Chairman tacked to its door. An old man on a bicycle, a terrier in his handlebar basket, gave Shan a nearly toothless grin as he sped by. A woman kneeling at the small chorten shrine at the edge of the square nodded in his direction. A pigeon landed on the oversized bust of Mao the Great Helmsman at the opposite side of the square. As he turned toward the police station, a goat ran out the door, encouraged by a boot flung in its direction.

Shan sagged for a moment, then straightened his uniform and walked across the dusty street into the station. Two Tibetans were in the outer office, locked in brisk argument. As Shan loudly pushed the door closed behind him, they abruptly stopped and gasped in surprise. The older man darted through the adjoining door. The younger man, in his early thirties, stood up straight and tapped his forehead in a gesture that may have been a salute.

“Constable Shan,” his deputy ventured, with a nervous glance at the goat droppings on the office floor.

“Deputy Choden,” Shan coolly acknowledged. “Is that your boot out on the street?”

“A winter boot, I am taking them home,” Choden said uneasily.

“But what will you wear when I assign you to the sheep counting station in the high passes? The snow may be deep up there.”