The children were always looking nervously at their parents to see if they could get away with doing something and were often seen as a nuisance. If they leant on me affectionately they were reprimanded for getting in my way, and if they scribbled on my drawing book, they were told to stop because they didn't know how to draw. I knew that Tsedo and Shermo Donker were trying to make life easier for me, but I didn't mind the children. I tried to encourage them as much as possible, whenever possible. But I was not naive enough to spoil them. I was aware that without discipline a nomad child possesses the innate qualities of a feral beast and will run wild through the vast grassland unhindered: I knew that Shermo Donker loved them. She was always telling me how good it was to have children and how Tsedup and I should have one soon. I had been thinking about it a lot. I had never spent so much time with children before and I had discovered they made me happy. I thought how good it would be to have my own family.

Sanjay giggled and chewed his dirt-encrusted finger as he surveyed his creation. The snot dribbled from his nose.

'Marger! I can't do it,' he said.

'Warger! You can do it,' I replied.

He was a tiny boy for a six-year-old. Tibetan children were generally much smaller than their western counterparts, but even among his nomad peers Sanjay was small. He was an excellent mimic, copying Tsedup when he sang English songs and making the whole family laugh. Now, bored with drawing, he went outside and ran around pushing a small wheel fixed to a metal rod. He reminded me of a Victorian child with his simple toy.

I gave Dickir Che the pen and asked her to draw something, but she hesitated. Although bossy, she was the least confident of the three. I could feel her desperation for affection in the way she clung to me. Unfortunately, at eleven she was too old to be sweet, and her attempts to attract attention meant that she still spoke in a baby voice and recounted any random piece of information to the family, no matter how mundane, to entertain them. Consequently, she was largely ignored. But she was my great companion, and I loved her.

Dickir Ziggy snatched the pen from her elder sister and went to sit in a corner, where she aimed, no doubt, to draw better pictures than any of them. As she drew, she talked incessantly to herself in a hyperactive babble. I felt that if any of the children should go to school, Ziggy should. She was amazingly quick with numbers and had so much energy and enthusiasm that she didn't know what to do with. She was also very affectionate and would often spontaneously take my hand or hug me.

Afterwards we sat outside in the sunshine and made clay animals, which we painted with water-colours. The children were pleased with the results and lined them up on the window-sill of the hut to dry in the sun. Then Shermo Donker shouted something to them and they scurried off. I watched them from the house as they ran across the far hill in the morning sunshine chasing a stray yak. They called to me, 'Ajay Shermo, Ajay Shermo! Aunty, Aunty!' and I called back across the flat plain, my voice carrying to the depths of the deep shadow at the foot of the hill where they now stood, like matchsticks in a row, waiting for my reply.

That afternoon I saw two distant figures hunched over a hole in the ice of the frozen stream. Dickir Che was helping her father, Tsedo, to wash his clothes. They were scrubbing furiously and occasionally rubbing their hands together for comfort. Shermo Donker had refused to wash them. She had found them filthy in a rice sack and had quickly folded them up and put them away again, giggling with me. Was this nomad feminism, or just common sense? Obviously Tsedo was proud enough of his appearance to risk losing his fingers from frostbite, and Dickir Che would do anything to help.

That evening, when the children had gone to sleep, Tsedo, Shermo Donker and I washed our hair together. The iron stove was well stoked and we sat around in our T-shirts in the stifling heat and took turns to pour warm water over each other's heads from the kettle. They were very impressed by my shampoo. 'Our hair is so soft,' they said, after using it -sounding, ironically, like an advertisement. I laughed. Tsedo and Shermo Donker insisted on regular beauty sessions, and I loved the intimacy of these evenings. With Amnye and Annay away, the atmosphere in the house was far more relaxed, and we laughed and joked outrageously sometimes. Dado, a young man from the tribe, dropped by on his way to hornig and we teased him about not having a wife. He was only twenty-three, poor fellow. Luckily he could take a joke. He asked for a hairwash too, then rode off to impress some girl.

The skin on my hands had become ingrained with dirt and had cracked open in places. I realised that I now had the hands of a nomad woman. At least part of me was like them. I guessed it was because of their exposure to such extremes of temperature and that it was impossible to keep them clean; no matter how often I washed them, they were dirty again within minutes. The winter dust was everywhere.

Going to the loo was now something of an endeavour since, on bad days, the wind gusted through the valley, bringing small cyclones of spiralling dust and billowing clouds of grit. We often went in twos for comfort, and that night I pulled up my kirchi as far as I could when Shermo Donker and I braved the night. We crouched next to each other in the darkness on a slope of dried grass and rocks at the side of the house. The wind was howling eerily and a shape was moving in the blackness. I began to feel uneasy. The nomads were firm believers in ghosts and I was becoming influenced by their fear. I had always been afraid of the dark and this land had been the site of much bloodshed. And Tsedup had told me that people had been abducted by ghosts. I had been sceptical, but as I felt the cold fingers of the frosty night air on me, I wasn't so sure. 'Did you see it?' I whispered to Shermo Donker. She shuffled over and gripped my arm. We peered anxiously into the ebony night as the sound of panting got louder. Then, in desperation, I turned on the flashlight and two eyes shone back at us. It was the dog. Cherger began to jump all over me in greeting and to lick my face, threatening to push me over. I laughed and stroked him. He was warm and his thick fur crackled with static and lit up in magical, neon-green flashes under my hand.

There was no threat of me being mauled any more as, under Annay's supervision, I had spent many days in the summer offering him scraps of dried meat to befriend him. Now he was my good friend. I was part of the pack. He even preferred me to Tsedup. When we pulled up on the bike outside the house and the dogs raced out to attack, Tsedup asked me to call to them, to pacify them. Because he was often away they weren't sure how to treat him. The dogs were fiercely territorial: even Rhanjer, who visited the family every day from his own home, was attacked regularly by the bitch, who seemed to have a personal vendetta against him. There were always fights outside between them, as she lunged at him and he beat her off with a stick. He didn't live in the family so he was not part of the pack. The rules were simple. I felt honoured that I had been accepted.

The next day, I climbed up the foothill of the mountain behind the house with Sanjay and Tselo, Annay Urgin's little daughter. They ran ahead of me, like goats over the rocks, as I puffed my way to the top, feeling the full weight of my tsarer. We sat in the tall grass on top and surveyed the land. Below, the house looked minuscule and isolated within the enormity of the arid landscape. The valley floor stretched away from us down to the glistening river and the blue mountain ranges. Beyond, the tips of the powder-white snow mountains flecked the horizon. Above our heads, hawks spiralled on the warm thermals in the sunlight. We played for a while, then the children scrambled back down the hillside, as I paused to watch the last light sinking behind the silhouette of the Ngoo Ra, Mount Silver Horn.