4 ideas
Nihao, the clan's last shaman, learns that each time her ritual saves a life, the spirits take one of her own children in exchange. She keeps performing the rites for anyone who asks, including outsiders, and buries child after child. Her final act is a rain dance to put out a forest fire, which brings the rain and kills her, and the clan's shamanic line ends with her.
Herders drift back into the mountains. The aged narrator refuses to go at all and stays in the forest with a grandson and a few animals. Policy designed around the people fails because the herd's ecology was the real unit of the way of life.
The narrator tells a century of Japanese occupation, civil war, Communist rule and industrial logging without framing it as political history. These events enter the story only as intrusions measured by their effects: conscripted men, missing trade goods, the sound of chainsaws, lichen and animals disappearing. Told from the margin, state history loses its own chronology and shows up as weather that happened to the people.
The clan gives its dead wind burial and places them in the forest, so each loss is tied to a specific tree, riverbank or ridge the survivors pass on their migrations. Memory and mourning are therefore stored in the landscape, not in written records. Logging the forest and moving the living into town cuts a family off from its dead as well as from its livelihood.