Near the Pakistan–China border, the Batura Glacier laps at the immense Karakorum mountains like a cat’s tongue. The only way up the glacier is a trail blazed by the women of Passu. Every spring, while the men stick to their town jobs and fields, these women, some of them very old, drive herds of yaks, goats and sheep up the valley. The herds belong to the entire village, each family’s animals marked with distinctive horn-painting and ear-notching. The women move steadily up the slanting pastures through the season, turning and heading slowly down just ahead of the snows. They spend the spring and early summer in Yashpirt, a steep meadow filled with a dozen rough structures, made of whole tree trunks, rough timber and unworked boulders, insulated with a thick layer of mud. Every morning, after milking the flocks and driving them off, they make yogurt, butter, cream, and cheese. In the evenings, they hike up to bring the flocks home. They call to each species with its own whoop, bark, bellow or whistle. Amazingly they all, from tiny newborn goats to enormous shaggy yaks, bound down impossibly-angled scree slopes when called.