Sonam Dorjey, 78, Yulang, Zanskar.

Sonam Dorjey 78, from Yulang, Zanskar, spends nearly three months each summer at a Doksa near the Penzila pass, tending not only to his own livestock but also that of fellow villagers.

Doksas are seasonal high-altitude grazing camps, typically occupied from early June until September, when herders guide their animals up to the alpine meadows. When I met him in September 2024, Sonam was on his way back from Penzila, leading a mixed herd: twenty-five cows, two yaks, six demo, and eight dzo.

According to him, the richest milk comes from the dzomo, the female hybrid of a yak and a cow, but it is the demo (female yak) that yields the finest butter. A demo produces only about three litres of milk a day, compared to nearly five litres from a dzomo. Churning a single kilogram of butter requires at least six litres of milk, the same quantity needed to produce a kilogram of churpee, the hard local cheese. Sonam sells his butter in Leh, where it fetches Rs 750 per kilogram; churpee goes for Rs 550.

The best butter in Zanskar, he claims, comes from the Stod region. Herders believe the secret lies in the rare medicinal plants that grow in those alpine pastures, plants grazed on by the livestock, said to enrich the flavour and medicinal quality of their milk. Besides the yak, demo, dzo (male hybrid), and dzomo (female hybrid), there is also a lesser-known crossbreed called garmo, a hybrid between a yak and a dzomo.

As a young man of twenty, Sonam first travelled to Paldar via the Omasila pass. There, he bought cattle, mostly ageing cows, for Rs 300 each, which he later resold to Balti traders for Rs 600. Later he traded wooden shovels known as khem, purchased at Rs 50 and sold in Zanskar for Rs 100. A person could carry fifteen to twenty khem at a time; larger consignments were loaded onto dzo for transport. He also bought raw wool at Rs 100 per kilogram, which he used to make nambu, a woollen fabric, later sold to local households. In those days, all wool was cleaned by hand. Even simple tools like the balchat (a wooden comb used for carding wool) were rare, making the work slow and labour-intensive.