High in the shadow of Dhaulagiri they are bleeding the yaks. Two Tibetans hold the curved horns of the shaggy beast and a third man uses a wooden bowl to catch the bright red blood that pulses and spills out a hole in the Yak's neck. The big oxen struggles to escape the hobbles binding its legs, then quiets and stands peacefully, submitting to its fate; the Tibetans believe that bleeding a liter or two of blood from a mature animal's throat makes the Yak stronger and that drinking Yak blood cures humans of intestinal ailments.

Across the deepest valley in the world the monsoon clouds billow then part revealing immaculate snowfields falling off the western shoulder of Annapurna. These high summer pastures lie slightly above the tree line at about 14,000 feet. Clumps of dwarf juniper cling to the hillside and a sparse cover of late summer grasses carpet the gentler slopes. The clouds drift in and out, now uncovering a huge ice field on the steep northern slope of Nilgiri. The light is crystalline.

I am here with two friends, biologist Dennis Sizemore and British climber Alan Burgess. We are the only Westerners. The other four are Sherpas, a local man from the Village of Marfa six thousand feet below, and three young men from the Makalu area west of Everest whom Al has hired as porters. It is the off-season for trekking and these people are the last humans we expect to see as we climb on up to the high valleys north of Dhaulagiri. We want to explore this area for wild sheep and goats, snow leopards, wolves, and maybe bears and Yetis. These valleys fall off into deep gorges and are separated by high peaks but with a bit of technical scrambling you can get from one to the next and follow them north all the way to Tibet. We have heard more Himalayan blue sheep live in these wild basins between Dolpo and Mustang than in any other part of Nepal. There may also be rare Marco Polo sheep and wolves in the area. Al's friend Bhahti, who runs a tea house in Marfa and who accompanied Alan to the summit of Dhaulagiri, has seen the tracks of four different snow leopard in Hidden Valley, that lies just above us, beyond the 17,000 foot pass.

If you glance at a map of Nepal, which is all I did before going there, you will see that the more or less uniformly-spaced village names thins out or disappears when you reach the rain-shadow of Dhaulagiri, in the empty borderland between Dolpo and Mustang. This land runs north-northeast in the lee of Dhaulagiri over the high plateaus of the Mustang Himal into Chinese-occupied Tibet. It is uninhabited high country, mostly 16,000 to 19,000 feet, generally above the range of trees but with alpine plant communities that support wild goat and sheep. Accordingly, our journey will not be the usual ecotour or ethnographic trek; we plan to leave the trails and villages behind and travel without permits into forbidden and uninhabited country.

I came here in my fifties to walk myself into good health: to walk off the roll of belly-fat around my middle-aged gut, to walk away from war, to walk up and on in defiance of my hereditary gift of high cholesterol and blood pressure into a dimly perceived better world and maybe a new beginning. I wanted more life and more out of the living I had left.

To our backs, the dark gorge of the Kaligandaki slices a 10,000-foot swath between the Dhaulagiri and Annapurna himals; fresh snow has softened the rugged face of Nilgiri and Khangshar Kang. Now the last sunlight radiates the high snowfields, which hold their brilliance long after the sun sets. I watch the inner flush of the mountains against the dark sky, a dull pearly luminosity that glows until the stars come out.

During the night I lie in my tent with a mild altitude headache and nurse a chronic cough that has kept me awake much of the past two months. The distant roar of another avalanche off Dhaulagiri rolls over the foothills and down the valley. I listen to the silence then rummage through my backpack and dig out two codeine tablets to suppress the cough. I smile as I remember how my old friend, the anarchist writer Ed Abbey -- after he had to quit drinking -- looked forward to his legal codeine fix each evening in the year before he bled to death from ruptured veins in his throat. 

Ed passed on to me a great tool for survival. He died dreaming of "great walks." I was in my forties then and began to realize that I too wasn't going to be around forever so I'd better take those walks and trips while I still could. Not long after Ed died, I began to travel with deliberation, walking beyond the familiar and outside the bounds of my own culture.

I followed the Abbey method (less a technique for thought and meditation than an opportunity for new possibilities and combinations): go to the wildest place you can, alone if possible, open your mind and walk. The journey that led me here began on a desert island in Mexico just before Abbey died. I attended that death, clinging tightly to my funeral duties. After burying Ed, weary from that vigil, I disappeared into the canyon country of southern Utah Abbey had so loved, searching for a sign. Even years later, my Vietnam experience returning with a fury, my domestic life completely unraveling, I used old Ed's experience as a guide, descending into the rugged barrancas of the Tarahumara Indians in Mexico's Sierra Madres, visiting native peoples living on the corners of the continent, places Abbey had also visited, seeking insight. That search has now taken me back to Asia for the first time since my days as a Green Beret medic in Vietnam, to the salmon rivers at the edge of Siberia, following tiger tracks along the Sea of Japan, and here in the Himalayas. In all these travels I intend to walk off the beaten paths, hike off the trails, bushwhacking in body and mind to see the world anew -- it was the way I decided to live the rest of my life.  I needed to get out in order to look back in. I believed that walking off your stale entrenched life and into a new beginning could succeed no matter what your age, that it had everything to do with living well each day. Ed's death was a wake up call, and since his death I lived with a growing conviction my life is racing towards metamorphosis, maybe even death, hurtling into the fires of transformation.

By morning a light snow covers the ground down to about 17,000 feet, just above my tent. Snow partridges cluck on a nearby ridge line then flush, disappearing into a gully. We leave Kalipani and start up the faint trail, crossing a few patches of steep snow and treacherous scree. Pemba, the head Sherpa, uses his knife to cut steps in the hard snow of the gullies. I gasp in the thin air, my mind fuzzy, walking in a mental and literal fog that hangs in the passes and drifts down the trail. After about an hour, I seem to get a second wind. My mind slowly clears. By 16,000 feet I feel great, like a bull yak, striding with ease up towards a bench below the pass. Above, the grasses disappear and a landscape of scree and bedrock closes in on all horizons. On the steep path approaching 17,000 feet, I wonder how old Ed would have fared here. He felt weak (he was low on blood) on his last trips to our beloved Cabeza Prieta desert the winter before he died. He knew that with esophageal varices he was living under a death sentence (the medical book said: "Esophageal varices are a grave prognostic sign; about 60% succumb to death within a year.") and he thought "one's death should mean something." By the time Abbey died he had the clearest eyes I ever encountered--an image that still haunts me.

Death is no stranger to me; I lost many a comrade on the road that brought me here. For over three decades, I had flirted with death, even courted it. I lived on the edge in Vietnam and later for over a decade with grizzlies, on snow-covered mountains and raging rivers or, as much as I could, among polar bears, jaguars and tigers. Yet, I think somehow Ed's death is the closest I may get, until my own turn comes around. With Ed, I walked a long way into death. I saw in those eyes another universe; he died so well. In a world where no one gets out alive, living among a people for whom death often arrives as an unexpected shock and is seen as an abortion of life, his dying was the bravest and finest of all the gifts he gave me.

Doug Peacock