A decade or so ago, i wrote a TV pilot (that i still love) about a police precinct recovering from a 9/11-type incident (a local druglord used an Exocet missile he got from his SAmerican connections to blow up a police station in an attempt to spring his brother from jail and everything went super wrong). It gave me an excellent opportunity to explore the aftermath of tragedy, of what heroes are made and how PTSD can lay the best people low. One of my characters was a total jackhole star detective who kinda got Serpicoed by co-workers and was shot up pretty bad. When the physical recovery from his wounds was complete, this guy decided to go to the Himalayas to find peace in his soul. He found a passion for hiking and had stopped in an inn below the Pamir Mt range (in the conjunction between Tajikistan, Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan, Laurelstan, whatever) when he saw his old police precinct in flames on CNN and returned home to help.
Point is, i did some research on the very bleak & difficult area where he went hiking and found that that area has a number of tribes that have kept their own company for centuries, some of whom who could well have still avoided western contact. I had been fascinated by the concept ever since reading Kipling's
The Man Who Would be King and it was reinforced when i lived in NM 40 yrs ago and a small enclave was discovered in the Sangre de Cristo Mts between SFe & Taos that had kept to themselves so long that they spoke Cervantan Spanish, the equivalent of Shakeperean English, so i did a lot of reading trying to give my character the most dramatic backstory.
What drove me nuts is that i kept reading rumors that one of these tribes above the Hindu Kush had kicked the Taliban's ### soooo badly during their drive to conquer the region 20 yrs ago that the mullahookahs gave up at a time when they didnt give up to nobody. But i couldnt nail the story down. However, i used that and the discovery that chasing the strange
markhor mountain goat & the snow leopard was a common rite-of-passage in the area to create my own tribe for the story. The Hemli (scramble of HLime) tribe had combined scraps of Buddhist/Hindu techniques with the necessity of running cliff faces at the same pace as goats & cats to entirely conquer fear and used that to vanquish invaders, but had adopted a lone hiker on holiday from America. Dang, i rrrrreally wish i'd sold that show cuz it would have been so fun to work on.
) in January.
