Black Flame Read Online Free Page A

he was doing.
    For the past few days, every time Kelsang woke from a deep sleep he could feel a mysterious impulse rising in him, like an ever-punctual, unchanging tide. He seemed to be searching for something. He wanted to bring something back to its proper place. This impulse plagued him, and he had no way of restraining or releasing it.
    He had watched Master send out stones to warn sheep straying from the flock, or else walk out himself to drive them on to lusher pasture. If Kelsang had had an older mastiff to show him what to do, he would have understood more quickly. But he was just a puppy. How could his young brain know what to do simply by looking at what lay before him? Yet even without a guide, the shepherding instinct that thousands of years of mastiff blood had instilled in him propelled him forward. It was an instinct that couldn’t be suppressed.
    His first attempt turned out to be a failure. He ran through the flock of frightened sheep, scattering them far and wide. Only afterward did he turn back, running in wide circles to the left and right, barking as loudly as his young throat could. The sheep, unaccustomed to this circling tactic, were about to run all over the place again but quickly discovered that they were no match for this rough young dog. Kelsang even nibbled one straggling sheep in order to gather it in.
    This was his first time, after all. He couldn’t be expected to round them up flawlessly like an experienced sheepdog. The sheep, as was their way, acted like beads of spilled mercury, sliding here and there with no structure or reason. Kelsang spent twice as long gathering the flock as an experienced sheepdog would have done, but he managed it in the end.
    When the young dog bounded up to his master, he was disappointed to find Tenzin sitting just as he had left him. This was Tibet’s northern plateau. Mastiffs were born to herd sheep, just as sheep and yaks were born to provide milk, meat and hides. It was just as God had planned it. Tenzin had not been worried about Kelsang’s hesitancy with the sheep. He knew that one day the dog’s instincts would take over. This ability to accept everything as it came, and to do so calmly, was what enabled the people of the grasslands to hold on to life so stubbornly despite the harsh conditions.
    A stony stillness came over Tenzin’s face. As the sheep began to draw close to the hillock again, he made a “Shh!” sound to the dog at his feet, and Kelsang shot up like an arrow.
    Once again, Kelsang gathered the sheep together and came back to lie at his master’s feet. It already felt natural to him. The first time, he had been driven by instinct, but the second time, experience guided him. He lay down on the grass and looked out at the sheep in the distance. It felt as if he had been looking after this flock for a very, very long time. Without any kind of training, he had begun his life as a shepherd dog on the northern Tibetan plateau.

3
    FARTHER AND FARTHER AWAY TO PASTURE
    IT HAD BEEN a perfectly ordinary day. As evening approached, Kelsang and his master gathered the sheep and brought them back to camp. Kelsang searched for a place where he could lie down to watch the smoke curling into the air from the roof of the yurt.
    Dusk on the grasslands teems with life, especially in summer. In the distance, a herd of gazelles were climbing along a steep, bumpy ridge, their shadows flashing across the landscape like flapping wings. The grass was golden in the light of the sunset.
    Every day repeated the one before, and Kelsang’s first birthday passed before anyone realized it. During that year, the young mastiff followed his master’s family to their winter pasture before returning to the same stretch of grasslands for the summer.
    That spring he had killed his first wolf, an old animal almost deranged with hunger. He hadn’t wasted much energy killing it. The wolf was so weak it could barely move its