“But she hated it,” Lhakpa continued, “and ran away every two or three months to come back to us. Then her parents died. She had no one left but me and my brother. The next time she escaped and came back I told her it was her destiny to go to the Chinese university, that there was nothing else left for her. It was her chance to make a new life, away from the suffering in Tibet. She got angry, yelled at me for the first time ever, said she knew who she was and she was not a Chinese puppet. Then she left in a rage. It was the last time I ever saw her. She sent a letter saying she was sorry, that she was coming home to give me a proper apology, asking if I could just try to consider that she and I might make some kind of new Tibetan life for our family, maybe start a farm. It was a five-day trip over the mountains to reach our village. An ice storm struck on the third day.” Lhakpa sipped at his tea again then spoke in a whisper. “A herder found her body, where she had fallen off a slippery trail and over a cliff.”

“I’m sorry,” was all Shan could say.

“It’s one of the reasons I decided to become a snow monk,” Lhakpa explained. The Tibetan had made it clear weeks earlier that he was preparing to become a hermit monk but he never told Shan why. “After she died, I needed to get away, to confront the world in solitude for a year or two,” Lhakpa said, referring to one of the Tibetans who chose to be unregistered monks or nuns, living a solitary life high up in mountain hideaways. “Six months after she died I was walking down a road and heard this urgent bleating. This young goat came trotting up to me. There was no herder, no farm nearby, though I kept trying to make it turn around since I was certain it must have escaped from somewhere nearby. But she stuck close, and that night when I camped she sat in front of me and stared at me. And at last I really saw those eyes, those deep, energetic eyes that I had only ever seen on my niece’s face.” Lhakpa drank again and shrugged. “I told Tara to stay outside. Deputy Choden took her all the way across town this morning. But an hour later here she was, butting her head against the back door.”

“I’m surprised she hasn’t wound up in someone’s stewpot.”

“No, no. No one would do such a thing. Tserung at the garage tied the red on her last month.” To the Tibetans the red yarn tied around the goat’s neck meant she had been ransomed, that someone had gained significant spiritual merit by paying money to keep her from ever being butchered.