As a result, brutal winters now alternate with ones that are too warm, while avalanches fall where avalanches never fell before. Such behavior is said to upset the spirits of place. The newcomers, so the thinking goes, break unwritten laws, abuse pastureland, pollute streams, and cut shrubs and trees where none should be cut. Many Nepalis, especially urban youth, look to science to explain the perplexities of climate change, but in Dolpo and similar regions, yarza gunbu hunters often get blamed for the disturbed weather and chaotic hydrology afflicting the region. Their market includes a large swath of Asia, especially China. Gathered and dried, these rather unappetizing avatars of the male principle sell at cocaine prices as a remedy for impotence and a general tonic for health. Crawling on their hands and knees or shuffling stooped across the damp heights, they stare intently at the ground, straining to spot the phallic structure of their quarry.

As the snow recedes in the spring, yarza hunters pour by the thousands into the high country. The fungus then consumes the unlucky caterpillar and erupts through the thin soil to produce a miniature tower, only a centimeter or two high, that (with a certain amount of imagination) can be seen to resemble an erect penis. In the case of Dolpo, the vast majority of outsiders invading the region are hunters of a weird fungus, yarza gunbu, that invades the head of a particular caterpillar soon after it hatches in the tundra grasslands. You also see the increased mobility of humanity expressed in legions of outsiders flooding into formerly isolated districts, much to the consternation of longtime residents. You see patterns of rural-to-urban migration that are common throughout the world, with young people leaving the family farmstead to seek their fortunes in the city. You see the same controversies over grazing and the same mistrust of land вЂњmanagersвЂќ that preoccupy the American West. Nowadays, the far Himalaya is less a model for the future than a mirror of the present. Yaks enabled people to inhabit the wintry attic of the world, where today an Ice Age climate still lingers, even as it begins to fade away. Its cynosure animal is less the snow leopard than the yak, a source of food, fiber, hide, bone tools, transport, and tractor power more essential to the Tibetan settlers of the region than even the bison was to AmericaвЂ™s Cheyenne or Sioux. The trails we followed led us into the past in the sense that the high Himalayan world-SanskritвЂ™s вЂњabode of snowвЂќ-is a relic of the Pleistocene, a land of glaciers, vast spaces, stony rubble, and frigid rivers. (The story of that walk provides the backbone of my new book, The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss. I hoped that a long walk-about 150 miles in this case-might cure the resultant moral ache. Their ceaseless argument soured the taste of life. My delight in the beauty of the world had been joined to sorrow at its destruction, and the two emotions were like cellmates who refused to get along. Mine is to make peace with the anger and grief that have dogged me since finishing a pair of books, one on climate change, the other on extinction. As pilgrims, our purposes are as varied as our individual identities. As a medical mission, our purpose is to provide primary health care to people who rarely, if ever, see a clinician.

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