Commander Pigeon is a collector of lost and exiled men. The quietest soldier once belonged to the Taliban. He had been captured by local police, escaped, and having heard about Commander Pigeon, walked miles to reach her home. He fell to his knees and begged for protection. She made him swear loyalty. I asked how she knew he wouldn’t rebel. “I’m watching him closely,” she said. “I’m converting Taliban to normal people.”

She said the Taliban had killed two of her brothers, three nephews, two nieces, and five other relatives she didn’t name. On a Sunday, the first day of Eid, the Muslim holiday, a few family members, including her son, were offering evening prayers at the local mosque when a Talib strapped with explosives walked inside and blew himself up.

She hated the Taliban more than the Soviets, but the Soviets marked the beginning of jihad. Summertime, she remembered, about noon. The watermelons were ripe. She had been in her bedroom, talking and drinking tea with the women. Her son was cutting grass and her uncle milked the cows. Her whole family was outside tending the farm when the Russian commandos landed on the hill. They shot her son dead. She had no weapons and so she picked up a scythe and killed the commando who did it. She killed for hours and stole weapons from corpses. There were bodies everywhere. They hung from the trees. No man questioned her.

Commander Pigeon has bragged that she cried when Massoud died, but she did not cry over the bodies of her sons.

Then I said, “I need to use the bathroom.”

The Harry Potter kid showed me where to go—up a dirt trail, near the back of the compound. A thin veiled woman sat in a chair by a bucket of rocks. She didn’t look like a fighter. She handed me a rock and I put the rock in my pocket. The kid ran off. The woman showed me to a wide dirt area. I was peeing when Commander Pigeon came up behind me. She leaned over and watched me, and then left as quickly as she came.

When I returned, she pretended as if nothing had happened.

Commander Pigeon flicked her wrist and the men scattered: “Go. Kill the Taliban.” They followed her fingers toward the hill. The ex-Taliban soldier crawled on all fours, aimed his AK-47, and pretended to shoot his old friends. The others sprinted across the snow. A few fist-pumped the air with AKs. One of them sat down and smoked a cigarette.

“This is it?” I said.

“It’s a desert,” Commander Pigeon said, “but I live here.”

“Where are the women?”

She pointed to a small house separate from the compound. It’s customary in Afghanistan for women to stay hidden from foreign men, but I was surprised Commander Pigeon allowed for it. The hierarchy in her compound didn’t seem that different from that of a male warlord. “They make the food,” she said. “They do a good job cooking and shooting.” The rest were in town living with their husbands.

I asked if I could see her weapons stash, and she said she couldn’t tell me anything. She nodded at the intelligence officer. “I have plenty of grenades,” she said. “If the Taliban come, I just pull a grenade and throw it. I just keep throwing. It’s a great location for grenades.” She boasted about going to Hamid Karzai’s guesthouse, eating pomegranates with her fingers, receiving bags of cash to bring back to her mountain to trade for grenades, goats, and turkeys, so she’d be strong to kill the Taliban.

Years ago, General Abdul Sayedkhili, chief of Baghlan Province, and his troops tried to forcibly disarm her, but a doctor in the village tipped her off and she had time to hide her weapons. It was winter, she said, one of the coldest nights in January. The sounds of a barking dog penetrated her sleep. Outside a troop of policemen on horseback were coming down the mountain. She and Wazir sprinted outside. Wazir hid beneath a blanket, and Commander Pigeon in the shadow of a rock face.

The policemen knocked on the door. No one answered. The general walked inside, searched the rooms and told the policemen to break everything made of glass. When there was nothing more to break, the general stepped outside, took off his gloves, and yelled the commander’s name.

They searched the yard and quickly found Wazir. “Where’s Commander Pigeon?” the general said.

“Over the mountains with the horses.”

The general slapped him. “Liar,” he said. “You have seventy men.”

Commander Pigeon loaded her rifle. She wanted to kill him, or at least a few of his men. “Seventy?” Wazir said. He asked him to feel for heat in the rooms. To search for the food that would feed these men.

The general returned to the house. He ran his hands along the cold pipes. He discovered a single box of cookies.

Commander Pigeon pulled the trigger and the bullet hit the ground. The general and his men thought it came from far away, from over the mountain among the horses. They gathered their weapons and left.

Commander Pigeon called police headquarters: “You son of a bitch. You idiots. Did my father kill your father? You came to my house and started breaking shit for no reason? You’re really stupid. You bastard men. You are former mujahedin. I’m former mujahedin. This is not good.”

She walked to Pul-e-Khumri and stayed with her sister and brother-in-law, who advised her to flee. They gave her some money and a goat, and then her nephew handed her off to a doctor who would take her to Kabul.

So it was the group of them—the doctor, the goat, the nephew, the driver, and Commander Pigeon—packed into a car, heading south on Highway 1. The police eventually found them and began to shoot. The car spun into a rock face. Commander Pigeon lost consciousness and woke up alone in her car with the goat. She had blood on her hands and wounds on her legs. The doctor must have fled. Commander Pigeon wrapped herself in a blanket, slipped out of the car, and walked until she found a dry ditch. She collapsed, too tired to move, and slept on the frozen ground where she lay. A large white animal appeared by her side. It watched her. It wanted to eat her, she knew. Commander Pigeon continued on. Then a man called her name. It was her nephew, but she was delirious and couldn’t see.

“Don’t tell. Don’t tell,” she said. “You’re a coward if you turn a woman into the government.”

“Just keep walking,” he said, “walk on through the ditch. There’s a house up the road, and they’re going to take care of you.” The nephew had a friend in a house down the road, and called to arrange for Commander Pigeon’s visit. When she arrived, they let her inside. The dogs howled and howled and the neighbors woke and the police arrived. But because they were all men, they couldn’t touch her. They had to wait for the policewomen to arrive from the station at Pul-e-Khumri. So Commander Pigeon escaped through the window. She walked home in the dark.

Dinnertime. Wazir arrived with the turkeys and rice cooked in oil extracted from the trees in the mountains. Commander Pigeon sent the men, everyone but Wazir, to a room across the courtyard. Three young women arrived carrying plates of flatbread. The women sat on their knees and folded their hands together. These were her supposed fighters, wrapped in pink and turquoise veils, smoothing rice into slick golden mounds on silver-colored platters. They moved in unison, stacking plates, scooping rice, folding bread. Commander Pigeon tore at the meat. She gripped the breast, and spread the leg until the skin broke and released steam. She broke ligaments, tendons, and a blue tangle of vein. She raised the meat to her mouth and tasted a curve of dark thigh. The meat cleaved between her fingers. The steam curled our hair.

Wazir and the women carried plates to the men. Commander Pigeon continued to pick meat from the carcass. She pushed a plate toward me and I began to eat. She tossed the leftovers to the children. They ate it off the floor.

I wasn’t eating the meat because Commander Pigeon kept grabbing it with her hands, covered in saliva and dirt, and because I had watched the turkey die and bleed. Commander Pigeon pointed at the meat. I politely ate a few pieces. I said I was full, and she slid over to me and pried the meat between my lips. She wouldn’t stop. The snow was climbing up the window. She made noises and mimed a hand touching her face. She mimed digging and crying. “Sharif,” I said. “Sharif!” I thought maybe the others were dead. My stomach ached. Her fingers slipped in and out of my mouth. She fed me. It was a kind of terrible nurture. The quiet soldier who used to belong to the Taliban opened the door. The wind came inside and carried snow with it. He squatted, held his AK, and watched.

Hours later, when Sharif and the others returned, I was collapsed against the wall. I told him what happened. “Don’t leave me alone with her again,” I said. But he did. Men were not allowed to sleep in the same room as women, Commander Pigeon said. If we all wanted to stay together, we could sleep in the barn without heat. The temperature was ten below zero. Sharif said he would be OK with it, but I didn’t want us to freeze to death in the barn.

Sharif suggested that we keep one of the policemen on duty outside.

Commander Pigeon slapped the ground: “I told you not to worry about Taliban. I have my guys on patrol now. Thirty days we’ve had peace from the Taliban, otherwise I’d be out on the mountain, too. This is my kingdom and when they die, this is the reserve force.”

She flapped her hand at me: “Just go to bed as if you were in America.”

“How many are on patrol?”

“Thirty,” she said. Outside the hills were bare and bright.

“She’s lying,” Sharif said. “There’s no one out there.”

Sharif sat down next to me. He said he had something he needed to say. “Did you know Commander Pigeon followed you to the bathroom?” I nodded. He said afterward she came back and announced I was a virgin.

“What does it mean?”

“No clue,” he said, and then he left to go to the men’s room. I was alone again with Commander Pigeon.

The women cleared plates stacked with apple cores and bones. Commander Pigeon and the women tucked me into a bed on the floor. They dragged two comforters over my body, wedged the fabric under my arms, and slipped a soiled pillow beneath my head. Hours later, in the dark, she unrolled a sleeping mattress next to mine and slept close to me. She buried her face into my shoulder and snored. I kept my eyes open. The warlord twitched from what I imagined were terrible dreams.

The next day, on the way home, the policemen started shooting vultures out of the sky. One wearing fake Oakleys had the best shot, taken from the back of the Corolla. The bullet went through one bird and out another. It was strangely beautiful, I admit, to see them die. He stepped out of the car and stood over the birds. I asked if he wanted to eat them. He said he didn’t. He just wanted to kill them.

Sometimes writers get the best of their subjects—but sometimes they get the best of you. Commander Pigeon was an old decrepit warlord, a broken-down woman. Lonely, she survived on attention, on her ability to inspire fear through the power of her own myth. In Afghanistan, the ability to create a mythology is powerful, maybe even more powerful than military prowess.

One winter, she had told me, a barefoot man appeared just beyond the gate and stumbled to her door. Commander Pigeon was alone. He wanted bread. Commander Pigeon told him she had nothing: “Who do you think I am, an American?” But the beggar wouldn’t leave. “I need you,” he said. “I don’t have a man to search you,” she said, “and how do I know you’re not a suicide bomber?” The beggar looked at the ground and left. He disappeared into the snow. All night she tossed and turned, worried he would return to murder her. Later that night, a dead soldier appeared in her dream. Even in the dream she knew he was dead. He comforted her and said, “That man won’t hurt you.” Commander Pigeon asked to see the soldier’s wounds. He opened his shirt and she recognized gunshot wounds. The dead soldier was a little kid she’d raised up. Now he lived as a ghost on her mountain.