Autumn is Here

It starts with frosty mornings and frozen flowers. Soon the bushes turn red and yellow, and the pasture goes from green to golden with all the shades in between. The oats, the only crop grown by nomads, used to feed their yaks in winter, are cut and strung into bundles. Once collected, the harvest is loaded onto trucks or three wheelers to be stored in the sheds of the winter houses. Unlike many areas that have been fenced and individually allotted to nomad families, Ritoma’s families use their pastures in common, having divided large areas on which they rotate with their herds according to season. Once the harvest is collected in October, the animals come down from the higher, depleted grassland and are joyfully let loose on the fields which yield the left overs of their winter feed.