Windswept Barley Fields in the 1970s: The Watch Post on Yak Slope 6

On the Western Sichuan Plateau in 1968, Lisen, a Tibetan boy from Qingke Village, meets Wang Luoke, a city girl who has come to the countryside with her parents, on Yak Slope. He is as silent as a mountain, yet can direct six strays with a whistle. She is as lively as a stream, bringing a sketchbook and candy wrappers from the city into his world. Lao Huang shields her from the yaks, Huihui fetches herbs for him, and Baimei’s four eyes reflect their silhouettes leaning together at a commune screening. The pawprints of six dogs trace the first bond between the mountains and the city.

When they part in 1975, she leaves him a red-cord bracelet, and he weaves Lao Huang’s fur into its knot. At an abandoned church in 1976, he gives her wild roses with every thorn carefully smoothed away. Beneath an oil lamp, as the college entrance exams are reinstated, he pores over the textbooks she sent while Xiao Hei curls up beside him to warm his feet. From rope sandals on Qingke Slope to boiled eggs outside the county exam hall; from Tibetan wedding blessings at an earthen-wall home to standing side by side on an anti-trafficking charity campaign, the red-cord bracelet wears thin and is mended again, the wild roses bloom and fade, and a sea of flowers grows over the graves of the six dogs.

Forty years later, Lisen, now white-haired, still whistles for the dogs on Yak Slope. In Luoke’s sketchbook, beside the final page’s drawing of “six dogs surrounding two children,” she has added a line: “The wind remembers every story, and the stars are dogs blinking.” This is a love story from the 1970s, awkward as a cord braided from dog fur, resilient as a flower in a crack in the stone. Over time, it has become a long poem about protection and growing up, about how two souls, like wild roses, twined their roots together in barren years and made them eternal.