Right Time, Right Thought, Right Speech

All the way back to camp I can feel my brother’s pain. I can also feel his humiliation, the fact that I am able to stay on my horse while he cannot, that this is yet one more instance of Mun being in need of rescue. I want to say something to comfort him, but nothing comes to mind. Right time, right thought, right speech.

Do not speak—unless it improves upon silence!

As we bump and jounce over every rock, every ridge, I can feel the nerves in his wrist on fire.

We ride the rest of the way in silence—Saran on one side of Mun, Little Bat on the other to keep him from falling. Chala rides beside me. There is an air of determination about her, a quality of fixed resolve, as if childhood burns away, a decision reached. Something about the encounter with the lynx precipitates this. Sometimes there are moments in a life where a path is presented, where one must decide which road to take. Chala is not the same girl as earlier this morning. She looks at me and smiles.

When we get to camp, Uncle helps Mun dismount. Inside the house we find the grandmother, who then takes my brother’s wrist in her hands and turns it this way and that for the better part of an hour. Words are spoken, water steeped with herbs and the pink rhodiola that grows on the mountain. And so it is healed. She is a bonesetter. She is the first I am to ever encounter. They are a kind of shaman. Generally the skill runs in a family and is never revealed to outsiders. Somehow, the bonesetter can simply touch a person, turning the injury in their hands, and in time all is healed, the spot perhaps bruised and swollen, but healed absolutely. Mun’s wrist is good as new before the rest of the family even returns.

All during my childhood my father would say that an injury is not a break if it can be healed so easily, but I know what I feel in my brother’s body, the pain like a million suns throbbing under the skin. Afterward, Mun heads to our car to find a bottle of vodka to gift this old woman. It is the least he can do.

Chala’s mind is on other things. When we ride into camp, she dismounts and walks straight into the house, leaving her bird outside on its perch. When she comes back, she is carrying a knife, the kind small but deadly sharp and used in the killing of animals. Please help me, she says. I nod though I have no idea what she intends.

Together we walk up the path toward where the sheep and goats are kept in a small enclosure. Chala walks among them, eyeing each. I think of the little girl near Yatuu Gol with her ash-blackened face, how she knows which animal to select.

Chala picks one and steers it out of the group. It is an older female though something about the animal is still plump, still worthy. Quickly she ties the animal up and together we throw it over the back of her horse. There is nothing for me to do but follow, which I am doing all my life.