Pastoral Life & Mountain Shelters

1. The migration you will join

To balance the pasture and the herd, the herders of Manigango and the surrounding grassland move seasonally, giving the grass time to grow. There are usually two large migrations in a year. In early July, when the grass is at its richest and the water is plentiful, the animals leave the winter pasture and move up to the higher, cooler summer pasture. In late September and early October they make a brief stay at the autumn pasture, and in late November, when the temperature falls and the grass thins, they move again, in force, to the winter pasture.

Migration is the most important thing in a herder's year, and the scale of it is enormous — and full of life. The men go first, carrying tents, the iron stove, pots and pans, bedding and food, to set up at the new camp. If a vehicle can reach it, they go by tractor, pickup, or motorbike; if the road gives out, they take the luggage as far as the vehicle can manage, and then carry it on foot. The old black tents are fewer now; what the herders use is mostly the white tent issued by the government.

A day or two later, the whole family moves: by motorbike, on horseback, or on foot, driving a hundred head of yak and horse out of the home valley and up toward the high meadows, the side gorges, the glacier valleys, slow and enormous — the same journey their great-grandparents made.

There are also the closer pastures, only a few tens of minutes on foot from the village. Even at that distance, the view keeps changing. The grass on the slope, the tents, the cattle — that sense of living in a city of the sky, pure and peaceful, is for the herders themselves another way of being, quite different from the winter and the spring.

2. The herding you will experience

In Manigango, time is set by the sun, by the frost, and by the pace of the yak.

In summer the days lengthen. The first milking is at five or six in the morning, and the herd is driven up to the meadow at the cloud line. The second milking is at five or six in the afternoon. By eight or nine, before the dark, the herd is home. The new calves and the smaller animals stay close to the tent, tethered at night against predators. People love to play with the calves — embrace them, stroke their soft fur, kiss them, run with them across the grass.

In autumn, to build the yak's winter reserves and protect the pregnancies, herding starts later in the morning, around nine, so the cows do not eat grass that is still touched by frost. They return at five or six in the afternoon as before, and the herders deliberately guide the herd toward the shrubby pasture that is rich in nutrition.

Winter herding is an outdoors life at its hardest. The herd has to range further and higher, even onto the high barren ground. In those days you will be alongside the herders, picking up and sun-drying dung, filtering the winter milk, cleaning the pasture cabin, fetching spring water from the mountain. The rest of the day is your own — sit by the stove, talk, drink tea, write in your notebook, play with the herders or their children. Around four in the afternoon you set off with the herders to bring the cattle home, crossing the snow slope or climbing up the ridge to find them. It is as if you have stepped into a world of ice. What your feet touch is a piece of land that is, in its own way, primitive, raw, and forceful.

Before the sun sets you will help drive the hundred-odd yak back, threading the cows into the corral ropes, while the calves find their own mothers and lean against them. If the next day brings heavy snow, the yak have to stay in the pen, and you will feed them with the hay you have set aside.

All in all, here, you put yourself into another time. There is no signal, no modern convenience. What you wear, what you eat, where you sleep — all of it touches the ground. That is what makes a person feel how small he is — and that, in turn, is what makes him devout.

3. Summer butter, autumn dung

Making butter and gathering and processing dung run through the herder's four seasons, but they belong most of all to summer and autumn.

The butter-making you will go through —

Summer (July to September) is the high season. The yak are at their richest in milk, and the butter that comes out of it is a deep yellow, and sweet. At around five in the morning you will be alongside the women of the household, milking the yak, pouring the fresh milk into a pot and warming it gently over a low fire to thirty or forty degrees. The old way, by hand, is to pour the warm milk into a wooden butter barrel and churn it up and down with the whole body, nearly a thousand times, so that the fat separates and floats to the top. These days the herders mostly use an electric separator, which is faster and easier on the body. The butter that comes out is fished up, patted into a round or a square, and set in the shade to cool and set. In the past they stored it in cowhide bags or sheep-stomach bags; now it is mostly plastic. In winter, when the milk is less and thicker, the butter that comes out is a paler "white butter," lower in fat, said to moisten the lungs and ease a cough, and is what the elderly and the children eat.

If you want to try the making and gathering of dung —

Yak dung is called "the treasure of the high plateau." It is the fuel the herders cannot do without, for cooking three meals a day and for warming themselves through the winter. Well-made dung has no smell at all, and its ash returns to the dust; it is an extraordinarily eco-friendly kind of cycle. The herders mainly use the dung that the yak drop in autumn — at that time the parasites are coming to the end of their breeding cycle, and the infection pressure is much lower. The autumn plateau has little rain, plenty of sun, and strong wind; the dung dries fast, does not go mouldy, burns hot, gives off little smoke, and has no smell. It is the best possible fuel to lay in for the winter.

If you want to try the gathering and the making, you can take a wicker basket and a small iron-shovel with a wooden handle and, while you are out herding, scoop the fresh dung into the basket. This is not only for the fuel itself — it also has the side effect of keeping the pasture clean and reducing the parasites. Then you spread the wet dung out on flat, sunny, well-ventilated ground, take a handful, and pat it into a round cake on a stone. The cake form gives it a larger surface area, so it can take in the sun and the wind, and stacks firmly without being blown away. After one to two weeks of sun, the water in the cake has all gone, the color has turned a pale grey-brown, and the texture is hard and light.

Once it is fully dry, the herders gather the dung cakes into bags and carry them home. If the mountain shelter is nearby, they lay them up outside the tent or against the courtyard wall, brick by brick, into a tall "dung wall." This is not just a distinctive feature of the herding landscape; it is the warmth that will carry the whole family through the winter. A zero-waste ecological cycle, turning what the land gives into winter heat — that is the quiet wisdom of how the high-plateau people live alongside nature.

4. The mountain shelter at night — or a tent

Both winter and summer, the pastures are sometimes close at hand, and sometimes set into a gorge that is hard to reach. Some are near a town, some are out in the wilderness as if on another planet — no vehicle can get there, and you can only ride a horse, ride a motorbike, or walk. And that is a different kind of experience altogether: a glacier valley in winter, a wild hot spring in summer…

If you would like to stay, you can sleep in the herder family's tent, and spend a real pastoral evening alongside them. Perhaps there is a barrier of language, but there is no barrier of heart.

Or you can pitch your tent beside theirs. You may find yourself in a hot spring pool, watching an entire sunset unfold, the sound of yak-bells, the slow pace of the yak; the herders may come back from the mountains with herbs, or with plants for the fire, and invite you into the home for tea, for a meal. When the night comes, you will see an enormous moon rise from somewhere below the horizon — bright, taking the central place in the sky. Or the whole Milky Way will surface out of the dark, the stars so dense, so clear, so near and so far at the same time. Between the whole of the earth and the whole of the stars, it can feel as if there is only you.

What you can do

• Join the seasonal migration: early July up to summer pasture, late September to autumn, late November to winter — animals and household move together.
• A day of herding: milk at dawn, drive yaks up the slope, return the herd at dusk — spend a full day with one herding family.
• Make butter: peak season July–September — milk, warm to 30–40°, churn the wooden barrel nearly a thousand times, separate, pat into rounds.
• Collect dung: in autumn, take a wicker basket and small shovel, scoop fresh dung, pat into rounds, sun-dry for one to two weeks into fuel bricks.
• A night in a mountain shelter: wood, butter lamp, wool blanket, dung-fired stove — one night of real pastoral life.
• Camp beside a herder's tent: soak in a hot spring at sunset, watch the moon rise above the ridge, see the Milky Way appear.

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