Cat on a String

65 Cat on a String as told to Sarah Messer This I have heard. Inside the nomad’s small stone house, someone had tied a white cat to a pole with a string. The string looped around the cat’s neck and extended a few feet so that the cat could walk around the pole, which was painted red and located in the center of the room. The house only had two rooms—three if you counted the dark entryway that led from the shed to the courtyard outside. From outside, the house was small and plain: square stone with the flat wooden roofs typical of Golok, eastern Tibet. An eight-foot wall of seemingly haphazard stones enclosed the small courtyard. The only entrance: a wooden gate that one passed through like yet another doorway. The wall’s top stones sat arranged with a fish scale pattern of dried dung patties, and the top beam of the gate was painted with a row of white circles, full moons. The courtyard itself was just scrub grass and dirt, a path leading to the shed around which a few wooden stumps had been placed as seats or workbenches. The shed entrance gaped doorless. To the left, a pile of long black human hair coiled on one of the stumps. Someone—a corpse or a living person—had just been shorn. Possibly though, the hair had been cut to rid its owner of head lice. The house was a nomad’s house, after all, which meant it was hardly lived in. Only in winter’s coldest months. It meant that the householders actually spent most of their lives in tents sleeping on top of each other, circling around one small fire beneath the square smoke hole in the tent’s roof. Made of woven black yak hair, these tents were continually unstaked, rolled up, and moved as the animals grazed their way farther up the mountains, and there wasn’t much time or place for bathing. Nomads usually took one bath a year—on Losar, the Tibetan New Year.Thisday,whichusuallystretcheditselfintoaweek,involveddrinking Chang and hard liquor, renewing vows, tearing down and replacing 66 Ecotone: reimagining place prayer flags, and tying a new tree limb onto the roof of your house. The men usually did this. Wood was scarce (there were hardly any trees on the Golok plains, and limbs were often brought in by travelers from other counties), so the men helped each other, going from house to house in great drunken groups, lifting the six-foot limb up to whomever had climbed there to throw last year’s branch down. After the tree branch was secured, they laced it with small, multicolored prayer flags. Across town, the tree limbs vibrated on roofs like old TV antennas. Last year’s prayer flags were burned or buried. It was like the death of an old friend—the prayers written across their face unreadable now, their color all gone. By nightfall, the men were drunk and filled with emotion. They built fires and stomped in circles, screaming high-pitched whistles, their arms flung over shoulders. And at some point during all these festivities, they took their yearly bath. And it was after this time that they put away their tents and returned to their winter houses. Stepping through the nomad’s doorway, you had to lift your feet over the threshold built up from the bottom; you had to bend your head down low, stepping like a goose. This was a protection against the Rolang, a breed of local zombies who were taller than normal Tibetans but found it impossible, in their rigor mortis, to bend their torsos or knees. Anyone else stepping into the shed would feel the narrow walls, the rows of nested dung clumps leaning like a tower of cordwood. Boards laid down formed a pathway around the weaving mounds and stacks of wooden buckets. Each dung clump was the size of a small plate but light as paper. When burned, proper and well-dried yak dung gave off a very fine white smoke that smelled faintly of burned grass. It was almost sweet. Pushing aside a blanket nailed in a doorway...