So I slid the knife toward me to lacerate a chunk of yak flesh and embedded the blade in my thumb. Blood oozed down my wrist.

This made me cagier about the next step according to table manners - licking the meat off the blade.

We'd eaten yak ribs the night before heading to Azhub's camp.

One guy - nicknamed Obama, because of his resemblance to said US president - snapped bottle caps off beers with his molars. Another painted his protracted pinky nail black.

The next afternoon, our truck juddered off road and splashed through creeks toward Ahzhub's summer camp.

Antelope cavorted. Tiny owls peeped from burrows bored into a bluff.

Grasslands squirm with pikas in Qumalai. Stare at any patch of prairie, and it'll seem to swim. At any given second, dozens of the critters dart among tunnel entrances that pock the terrain.

Over the years, we've encountered such fauna as wolves, wild yaks, foxes, marmots and vultures, stabbing beaks into shredded carrion.

Summertime flora looks like a rainbow shook off its pollen to dust the grasslands.

We transported animals the first year I joined nomads for such off-roading.

I was in the back of a pickup truck cab, and a ram a passenger purchased was lashed by its horns to the back window behind my head. It bleated and its brow clacked against the glass millimeters from the back of my head for the next eight hours.

The ruminant's exhalations created clouds of condensation that rained down the glass pane.

In 2013, I spent 12 hours with a monk, being shaken like dice in a cup along choppy roads and praying for a seatbelt - less for fear of a crash than to strap me to the seat, so I'd stop cracking my crown into the ceiling. (Best part was, the monk gave me cookies.)

The following year, I broke my glasses when a particularly violent thump shoved my temple into the passenger window.

Qumalai's hinterlands aren't an easy trip for everyone. They're a journey of discovery for the daring.

That is, a sojourn sometimes best completed on yak-back.

erik_nilsson@chinadaily.com.cn

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