A bowl of goat’s milk with rich yellow cream.
Yak kidneys, fried a golden yellow in fat.
Marrow from yak bones, toasted over the fire.
Small, delicate pieces of tender, juicy meat from the vertebræ of the antelope, laid before the fire and slowly browned.
Antelope head, held in the flames with the hide and hair on till it is blackened with soot.
Their taste is in general very different from ours. When they have killed a wild ass, they cut it up and keep the pieces in the tent, piled up around it as far as possible from the fire. The longer it has lain there, the better it is supposed to taste. The Changpas prefer to eat their meat raw, hard, dry, and old. They take out from the recesses of their fur coats a yak’s rib, which looks more like a piece of blackened wood than anything edible. Then the knife is brought out, and the hard meat is removed in strips or lumps from the bone. Chinese brick-tea is their greatest luxury, and the thicker and dirtier it is, the better they like it. They stir it up with a piece of butter.
Like the wild geese, they have learned by traditional experience where the best camping-grounds are. One may be sure that their tent is always pitched at places where there is little or no wind; that there is good pasture at hand for their tame yaks, sheep, goats, and horses, if they have any; that good hunting-grounds are to be found not far from the tent, and that water is always to be had. At the Gomo lake they have excellent table-salt cost free. When their domestic animals have eaten up the grass around, and the game has been frightened away, they transfer their camp to another district. The tents are set up at the same spots where their forefathers have pitched them for innumerable generations, and where frequently old votive cairns have been erected of loose stones to propitiate the spirits that rule over mountain and dale.
To the Changpas, or “inhabitants of the north,” who spend the winter in the north, the chase is the chief resource, and cattle-breeding is of secondary importance. The Tibetans in Gertse and Senkor, on the Bogtsang-tsangpo, or in Naktsang, who own large herds, do not move northwards in winter, for with them hunting is an occasional occupation. The hunting tribes pursue the yak, the kiang, and the antelope. In hilly country they stalk them against the wind. Constant life in the open air has wonderfully sharpened their intelligence. They know the peculiarities and habits of the yak as well as he does himself, and know how far they may go without overstepping the limits of his acuteness. They know that his senses of sight and hearing are not particularly well developed, but that he soon scents the huntsman, so that the attack must be made from the lee side. Though he goes on the chase in his thick fur coat, the huntsman creeps as noiselessly and as lithe as a panther till he approaches within range of his prey. Then he lays his gun on the rest, strikes fire from the flint with his steel, catches it in tinder, sets light to the end of the match, and sees that the hammer brings the fire at the right moment into the touch-hole. All is done so quietly, so deliberately and carefully, that the hunter has every prospect of bringing down the game.
Another time he watches for hours together behind a wall which he or his forefathers, perhaps his great-great-grandfather, has built beside a spring, and waits with angelic patience for a troop of wild asses, which come at sunset to quench their thirst. But the antelopes, wild sheep, and gazelles are too wide-awake to be caught by the most skilful hunter. Yet the antelopes do not always succeed in escaping his cunning toils. He lays nooses for them on the old established antelope paths; among the hunting nomads in the interior of Tibet, the quantities of antelope meat garnishing the sides of the tents are astonishing.
| 87. Smoking Camp-Fires in the Heart of Chang-tang. |
| 88. Our Yaks, bought from the First Tibetans. |