Free Beyond the Summit by Linda Leblanc Page B

he took off at full speed and Beth didn’t see him after that. Thirty minutes into the walk, her thighs and calves were burning. Feeling slightly nauseated and with a pounding headache, she collapsed against a boulder and watched the barefoot porters pass with a steady gait, eyes to the ground, no surfeit of breath for conversation, but a shared rock joke that turned up the corners of their mouths. Perhaps that’s what kept them going. She was still exhausted when Dorje arrived with Ruth and Helen.
     
    “You two are incredible,” Beth said, wiping her brow with the bottom of her shirt. “I didn’t think it would be this hard.” As soon as she uttered the words, the last porter bearing rocks trudged past. She just shook her head in disbelief. “How much do they get paid for this torture?” she asked Dorje and found the answer unfathomable: six rupees a day for 60 kilos. 2
     
    More notes for her journal. Porters are supermen. Ashamed and feeling like a whiner, she pushed off the wall and plodded on up the trail.
     
    “Most porters are farmers,” Dorje explained walking beside her. “They cannot grow enough to feed their families. So when tourists come, they leave home to work.”
     
    Beth was embarrassed. An educated woman who traveled the world, she had come here with a mindset that was quickly unraveling. “Is it worth leaving their families?”
     
    Staring at the ground, Dorje rolled both shoulders inward with a kind of shrug. “Most go back with very little. Every day, they must pay for food and a place to sleep. Their only hope is to get tips from trekkers.”
     
    “Were you ever a porter?”
     
    With a defensive glance out of the corner of his eye, he replied, “Yes, at sixteen when I came back to Namche and spoke no English.” As if she had criticized him, he left and walked with the non-judgmental ladies. Damn. Her offending tongue had struck again. She’d better get control of it soon because Dorje was an important element of what she’d come for. She’d sensed that from the first moment in Lukla.
     
     
     

CHAPTER 7
     
     
     
    Dorje dropped back to Ruth and Helen because walking with Beth was too stimulating and uncomfortable. When she wiped sweat from her forehead, the top of her shirt had ballooned out giving him a full view of her breasts, soft and white like fresh nak cream. Even discussing the plight of porters hadn’t provided enough distraction and he had to erase her from his thoughts. Her question about whether he’d been a porter opened doors he couldn’t shut now anyway, so he hauled images from the corners of his brain that had to be dealt with eventually.
     
    Climbing the Namche hill reminded him of returning home at sixteen. After fighting one more monsoon flood that washed away their crops and destroyed the terraces, he couldn’t face starting over again and had to leave the Solu even though it meant being separated from his mother who refused to go without her new husband. His brother Nima was like his other half and could not be left behind. Together they simply headed north and slept in the woods, hungry and cold, with no destination in mind.
     
    “Back to Namche?” Nima exclaimed when Dorje suggested it one night.
     
    “Haven’t you ever wondered about father?”
     
    “I was only three when we left. I don’t even remember him.”
     
    “And I was six but I remember everything, like him promising to come to the Solu and see us as often as he could.”
     
    “Maybe he couldn’t for some reason.”
     
    “What could have been more important than his sons? You’re too soft and forgiving like mother. The truth is he simply didn’t love us enough.”
     
    “If that’s how you feel, why do you want to see him?”
     
    Rolling onto his side away from Nima, he answered, “Because I have to.” He moved his hip off a stone and pillowed his hands under his head. “Because I have to.”
     
    As they headed north the next day, Dorje pondered Nima’s idea