I couldn’t decipher the photographs at first.

They arrived linked in an e-mail from a friend, with a tagline that read: Amazing. They were color portraits, shot recently, seemingly of old men who’d lived a little. At least that’s what the evidence suggested: They were dressed as old men, and the camera seemed to regard them as old men, if from another time, like the ’40s or ’50s. But there was something in the eyes, and sometimes the hands, even the carriage of bones—a softness that made me wonder.

The more I gazed upon the photographs, the more I noticed something else. In image after image, the faces possessed an otherworldly quality. That’s as close as I can come to it: Their eyes seemed to look steadily, unabashedly at the camera—or up at the sky, as if they might float away.

These were burrneshas, the text read, or women who dressed and lived as men, in isolated regions of northern Albania, a land of ultraconservative mores. There were strict rules and reasons for this transformation, ones that had been established some 500 years earlier, as part of a medieval canon of laws known as the Kanun. Today possibly only a few dozen burrneshas still exist—and the tribe is fast dwindling.

In the pictures, the burrneshas posed and gazed dreamily, disappeared behind clouds of cigarette smoke or sat erect in a chair, surrounded by family, smiling beneficently. Their vulnerability seemed a strength. And it occurred to me that perhaps I was looking upon the rarest thing of all, complete actualization. Or transcendence. If so, how had they pulled it off?

I stared at the photographs for so long, pondering these questions, that I lost track of time. Until I heard a cow moo. And then, standing before me was Haki.

It was a mild November afternoon, and Haki stood in the bright light of his garden, smoking like the Penguin, with a cane and a cigarette holder, the embers of his Karelia butt burning angrily. He wore a leather jacket, slacks hiked high, and a plaid shirt. He possessed a gray mop of hair, and his eyes resembled those of Charles Bronson. Even though he was 71 years old, he seemed boyish and lithe, if a little humped. Uncurled, he still would have stood only five feet tall.

Haki’s house was made of stone, as was the barn with the calf inside, all set in a lost valley. There was no straight road to reach this place. So along with my translator—a husky bear of a young man named Ermal, who, though a fine navigator, drove with all the subtlety of Beethoven’s Ninth—I’d traveled north on Albania’s recently completed highway from the capital of Tirana into Kosovo, where we were stopped at a midnight checkpoint by bored soldiers bearing AK-47’s, then looped back into a northerly, mountainous pocket of Albania.

As it turned out, it was damn hard to find these burrneshas. We’d driven up switchbacks and down dirt tracks.

"What is it?" Ermal had demanded. "You’re disappointed?" He’d proven to be an intuitive companion.

"It’s like searching for unicorns," I’d said.

"Yes," he’d said, accelerating until he almost rammed a car in front of us, then jammed the brake. "But burrneshas are real," he’d said, our heads whiplashing in unison, "and unicorns are not."

Now here was the real thing himself, spitting venom. Other journalists had visited Haki in the past, sometimes asking questions that he viewed as impertinent. A number had wanted to know if he was really just a lesbian in disguise—and this had triggered a deep hurt.