Independence Day

It all began (this twisted saga of war with cows) many months ago on a backstreet in Vrindavan, when the vile cows of India launched their scheme to subjugate or eradicate the will of the last man who could shatter their tyranny. Little did Ghostface Buddha then know that far away, in the craggy, thunder-echoing redoubts of the Court of the Cow King, an ominous scene was unfolding...

.....

"Could it be?" Flodp, the Cow King asked his assembled ministers.

Borf, High Prophet of the Bovinae, swirled his tongue over the Amethyst Orb and lowed the ancient incantation of the Scarlet Heiffer. Thick, cud-speckled saliva dribbled down the sides of the Amethyst Orb. Borf squinted his dull, egg-like eyes on the resulting trickle stains. The augurs of the drool could not be worse. "Without a doubt, my liege, the Ghost-faced One walks this kingdom's roads."

"Then there is nothing for it but to make battle. Summon the Council of Beasts at once! We shall need every able-bodied cow, buffalo, camel, goat and whatever other minions we may summon to face this threat... and if the beasts do not comply, remind then the price of defying the King of Cows. In the meantime, we will address this 'Ghost-head' threat with... special measures."

.....

His name was Mog, elder by moments of the Assassin Twins of Braj, the most feared cows in Hindustan. He crept silently through the alleys of Vrindavan to where Ghostface Buddha sat on a stoop, eating one of his first ever lunches of rotis and dal. He approached, as delicately as a cow had ever approached anything before. Stealth was Mog's specialty. But, no! A step too far! Before the fatal lunge could be administered, Ghostface Buddha felt hot and heavy breath upon his neck...

"What do you want, you fat fuck?" Ghostface sputtered through his lentils.

The moment was lost. Mog knew he had failed, and this failure would cost him his life. Maybe not today... he was, after all, the most shadowy and ruthless killer in cowdom, but they would get him eventually. The power of the Cow King cannot be defied, except by one... the Ghost-faced. Mog looked with sad envy upon Ghostface Buddha who, though he did not know it, possessed a power and a gift of which Mog could only dream: the power of Freedom. "Well, I won't make it easy for them" Mog said. He thrust his face into Ghostface Buddha's own and with a lunge of his snout spilled the bowl of dal all over the alley pavement.

"You fucking son of a fuck bitch!" Ghostface Buddha exclaimed.

I've warned him the only way I can, thought Mog, and he turned and sauntered off, at cow pace, into the billowing clouds of the village dust, off into the endless fields of India where a cow might wander lost for aeons, and off into Oblivion.

As Mog began his long shuffle into perdition he spared hardly a thought for his twin, Doooo the Deadly. At that very moment, Doooo was closing on his prey, who had returned to the city of Mathura. Doooo never much resembled his twin. In cow-school, when Mog would be lurking in tall fields of corn silently noting and making order of the movements of local goats he planned to visit upon in the night for unspeakable horrors, Doooo would be at the feed-trough, headbutting his classmates in the testicles. Doooo could not be said to have many skills, but what he did, he did well. On the streets of Mathura, as Ghostface Buddha blithely squeezed his way through the sweltering, camel-clogged consumer electronics bazaar, Doooo caught sight of his target. Doooo was impelled towards his mark not by the requirements of his mission or any broad sense of duty, but by pure, blind, ball-busting instinct.

When he connected, the reaction was instant. "Jesus Fuck!", Ghostface Buddha shouted to anyone who could hear him over the market din. With the brutal effortlessness of an action trained into perfection so that it came to him no harder than breathing, Doooo lifted Ghostface Buddha onto his face by the scrotum and rammed his flailing cargo through the crowd, impressing upon anyone in a reflective mood where the word bulldozing really comes from.

What happened next no Indian cow could have foreseen, and Doooo was not a cow oft given to foresight. Using Doooo's horns as handles, the plucky human regained a semblance of balance, turned, and after a moment's pause smacked Doooo across the face with a muttered "Jesus... fuck off, you fat prick." A slap across the face? Inconceivable! Doooo was gripped by the deepest confusion, which admittedly was not all that deep, for let us remember that Doooo was a cow. However, even Doooo saw the writing on the wall, knowing what his brother and every animal in India knew all too well, and fled into the dust and chaos. He left in the wake of his flight nothing but an echo... an echo of the Bitch-Slap Heard Around The World.

.....

Many months passed and many beasts withered in shame. The first great loss was felt by the mercenary camels of the Thar Desert. Before long even the elephants were panicking enough to waver in their unsought alliance, being forced to bring ever larger and more fabulous gifts to stave off the growing restlessness of the Council of Beasts and the murderous glare of Flodp, King of Cows. As the war grew more desperate and the Guardian Cows at the very extremes of India fell one by one, and rumors of cows even being spat on from the roofs of moving vehicles filtered into Flodp's black citadel, a sense of doom washed across the heart of cowdom.

Borf, the Cow-Prophet spoke "There is yet hope... "we have yet to awaken the Beasts of Nubra."

"The Beasts of Nubra? Ha! They haven't been seen out of their valley in nearly a thousand years! I should hardly call that a 'hope'!" bellowed Flodp with a roar of gas and sputum that only a King of Cows can muster. Along with that he unleashed a methaneous tremor so rancid that even the fear-frozen Council of Beasts found themselves taking an involuntary step back.

"Nevertheless, my lord, once the Beasts of Nubra cross the Khardung La, there is nothing even this 'Ghostface Buddha' can do to stop us!"

.....

So it was a real bitch for them that at that very moment Ghostface Buddha was crossing the Khardung La in the other direction, wasn't it?

.....

North of Leh and the Indus Valley, at the very extreme of what you could conceivably call India, lies the Nubra Valley, a fork-shaped sliver of rubble and sand trapped between the Ladakh mountain range and the mighty Karakoram in the heart of Asia. A treacherous journey in one direction might lead you over the Himalaya to the riches (and rices) of India; another over glaciers and desert to reach the fabled road to China; and yet another to the ever-remote Central Asian mountain chiefdoms of the Karakoram, the Tian Shan, the Pamirs, and the Hindu Kush. The Beasts of Nubra are a herd of of long-abandoned high-altitude, two-humped Bactrian camels formerly used on the Silk Road, for fuck's sake. This is a place so damn far into nowhere that even the camels haven't wandered off in the last several centuries. It's as far north as you can go in India and even still it would be damn near impossible to reach if the Indian Army hadn't built a ludicrous road through here to supply its battle posts on the Siachen Glacier, the world's highest, most treacherous, and most utterly fucking ridiculous battle line. And to get to this marvelous little patch of desert between its walls of rock and ice you have to go over said army road, the highest in the world, over the Khardung La.

As Ghostface Buddha rocked, restricted area permit in hand, in his jeep seat while the vehicle climbed the staggering 5600 meters of the pass, he could feel the air grow thin and the road ominously icy. A heavy snowstorm coated the windows with white blots and the abandoned hulks of cargo trucks that never made it over that top were a vivid reminder that his luggage would be very heavy if he had to hump it down the mountain on foot through puddles of ice water and 60% oxygen deprivation. At 5600+ meters after a short trudge uphill from the road, Ghostface Buddha found himself standing in the snow at an altitude higher than all but two peaks in North America, all but one peak in Africa, and any point in Australia, Europe, or Antarctica. Thousands of feet below, yaks grazed on alpine moss and eagles fidgeted awkwardly as they flew from the deeply unsettling feeling of having humans watching them from above. Seeing Ghostface Buddha descend the snowfields on the far side of the pass, a light bulb may have lit in the yaks' heads and they may have thought "Oh, shit." On the other hand, yaks are not very excitable so they may have just thought "Hrrmmmmmm... wonder what that's all about? Ah, who gives a fuck? Where some more moss at? I'm a yak."

.....

Contrary to the expectations of the Cow King's baffled court, Ghostface Buddha once again wandered about a deelpy cow-critical area, apparently at his leisure, visiting the desolate Panamik hot springs at the northernmost civilan access point in India and dispatching the Last Cow In India posted there with little but a cursory slap on the belly and some choice words about forcing him to cross a big fuck-off 18,000+ft. mountain for the privilege. He then hobbled about the Diskit and Surmur monasteries, which he thought were alright, and killed time by chatting up the traditionally-clothed Tibetan village girls. This time he had the unsolicited "assistance" of his friend Sandeep, who was translating the Ghost's speech into Hindi, a language native to nobody for 500 miles.

"What is he doing?" The Cow Wizards mumbled in their cabal. "Are we really to be undone by this... fool???"

All day and night as Ghostface Buddha crisscrossed the Nubra Valley he left its camels in peace. He opted instead to scour the village of Hunder for a television on which to watch what became Germany's epic World Cup drubbing of Argentina and the final melting of Diego Maradona's last curdling, runny reserves of dignity. Much contented by this sight, GFB and Sandeep returned to their tent.

The summer sun rose early on that next, fateful day, July the 4th. And what did Ghostface Buddha see by dawn's early light? The entire herd of Nubra Bactrian camels.

"WHO DARES DEFY US, IN THIS, OUR ANCIENT VALLEY?!?" a massive camel groaned, its two empty humps flopping to either side like smelly sweatshirts slowly falling off the back of a couch. "HOW DARE YOU ENTER THE NUBRA VALLEY WITH THE FALL OF BEASTS IN YOUR MIND?!?"

.....

"How indeed dare I?" Ghostface Buddha began...

"How dare I tread so many miles on the soil given to all creatures great and small? How dare I pimp-slap the cows that aggress upon me so far and wide? How dare I stand before this double-humped magistrate of wickedness and assert that I was born a free man, beholden to neither man nor beast, and owe nothing to account to any ruminating quadruped armada or its spit-slinging desert lackeys?

"This, gentlefucks, is the Fourth of July, a day when free men in wigs affirmed what I tell you now: that even Man shall not rule over men, and that by extension men most certainly can not -will not- be ruled by crude mercenaries-for-hire whose principal occupation is stirring clouds of sand with their farts.

"I hold that all men are created equal, and that notwithstanding certain mystical revelations of greater venerability than validity, cows, goats, camels, mules, buffaloes, and all their like are in fact not equal but merely a bunch of trife bitches. I hold these truths to self-evident to anyone whose cerebral lobes outnumber their stomachs. And so that government for the people and by the people might not perish from this Earth, I have had to bitch-slap a few dumbass animals in my time.

"How dare I defy you? The question, I think, is how dare you challenge me? No, not 'How dare you?'...'Why dare you?'. Though the sweet language of Liberty may fall upon ears deaf to its subtle harmonies, the delicate curl, glide, and stop of the tongue as it utters the word Freedom, it should be at least clear to any beast high or low that you have chosen, of all possible candidates, the absolute worst bastard to fuck with.

.....

Falling upon the Nubra camels like an ice-hemmed boulder in the spring thaw, Ghostface Buddha left not a one without memories of the back of Ghostface Buddha's hand and a grave insult to its soul. Casting his gaze over the defeated, collapsing bodies in that sandy valley floor at the very ends of the Indian world, he gave the Nubra Bactrian camels, the Cow King's dark wizards, and all Indian beasts some final words, never to be forgotten.

"This is Independence Day."

"...And FUCK cows.