Indeed the School’s stick-fighting contingent made use of that by mounting a fake attack (Major Raju, a walking thesaurus of military jargon, called it a "demonstration") shortly before the sun was due to rise over the opposite ridgeline. Laks stayed behind, prone on a sleeping bag just behind the ridge crest, watching his red-turbaned fighters descending through the fresh powder on snowshoes. They did that slowly, awkwardly, and obviously. But the fact that they were doing it in the hour before dawn, on the last campaigning day of the year (more snow was expected tomorrow, followed by more snow), made it look a hell of a lot like an attack to the Chinese sentries peering up at them through binoculars, as well as to various drones that soon took to the air.