In 1994, the year I turned thirty, I settled into a Himalayan village to do research in anthropology and folklore. I knew that I would be living with a family I had met ten years before; that I would be immersed in a world of oral poetry, myth, and song; that I would live without electricity, plumbing, and outhouses; and that I would go weeks or months at a time with no communication from home—I was ready for all that. What I didn’t anticipate was that I would fall in love, conceive a child in a cave above a river, and be forced to make choices that would change everything I thought I knew about who I was and who I would become. 

In The Tiger’s Paw Print, I tell this story—and as I do so, I find that the myths that I heard throughout my time in Nepal seem to tell my own story as well, paralleling the themes of my life—from family rupture (the daughter who turned into a bird and flew away) to impossible love relationships (the feral female yeti who failed to keep her human husband). 

The village (foreground), c. 1994