By April the worst of winter is over, and the goats no longer need what winter made them grow: an underlayer of down so fine a human hair looks like rope beside it.
This is when the combing happens. Not shearing; combing. The herder works a wide-toothed comb through the coat and the winter down lifts away from the guard hairs that stay. The goat loses what it was about to shed anyway. A practised hand gets a few hundred grams from each animal, and a family's whole spring gathering fits in a few sacks.
Those sacks are the entire foundation of what the world calls cashmere. There is no plantation, no factory farm, no shortcut. The quantity is set by winter, the quality is set by cold, and the fineness that mills brag about is simply what forty below does to a goat with somewhere to be.
The same is true of the yak down in our field jacket and the wool in the journey scarf: gathered from animals that live outdoors all year, from herds that move with the seasons the way they always have.
The fibre is the opening chapter. But it is a chapter worth reading slowly.
