Mr He has nut-brown skin, burned like the Tibetans by the hot sun in the thin air of the Himalayan foothills. He is wearing the ankle-length scarlet robes of a Dongba shaman, and a five pointed cardboard crown decorated with visceral images of deities and animal spirits. There is a long necklace of coloured beads around his neck. He carries a sprig of mountain fir, a tambourine-like shamanic drum, a necklace made of bones and an ancient book of Naxi spells, written in tribal hieroglyphs. He is sitting in the back of the Buick, next to another Mr He, who is also nut-brown but with a dark, piratic moustache, clad from head to foot in army surplus camo gear. He is wearing a single leather glove, and perched on it is a hawk… which is also in the back of the car, occasionally flapping its wings in the shaman’s face.

Mickey is crammed into the passenger seat with all his sound gear, including a large fluffy boom mike that the hawk keeps mistaking for an otter. Luckily for us, there wasn’t enough room in the car for the three hunting dogs, because it already feels like I am driving down a bumpy mountain path with the cast of a Fellini film in the back. All we really need is a couple of dwarves and a pantomime horse’s head protruding from the sunroof. The glassy lake beneath us is called Yuhu, and we bump and jostle along a track that is usually reserved for ponies and quadbikes. It is the oddest and least enthusiastic session of carpool karaoke yet devised, as Mickey starts to sing Bohemian Rhapsody.

Just as a confusing week with the Kam was ultimately saved by a mud fight, our lacklustre showing with the Naxi is pinning all its hopes on a day on the mountain heaths with a bunch of falconers. Mack the fixer has asked Big Li to fix something up, and Big Li has reached outside the Li circle to the He family, who have rustled up some men with birds of prey and Swiss army knives, and a wizard. The idea is for the Dongba shaman to perform a ceremony to the gods of mountains and hunting, and for us to then go looking for pheasants among the rock-strewn meadows beneath the snow-capped peak of Jade Snow Mountain — original inspiration for Shangri-La and alleged home to the many couples from Naxi history who have committed double-suicide rather than submit to the pressure to marry their cousins.

But somewhere in all the fixers fixing with other fixers, something has been lost in translation. We wanted the hawking party for the whole day, preferably with a menagerie of spare pheasants we could release into the meadows for their own little version of the Hunger Games if the wild ones wouldn’t cooperate. For some reason, the bunch of dodgy-looking Naxi have shown up armed with little more than excuses. The hawk isn’t hungry enough. There are too many people on the hillside. The hawk is scared of Mickey’s boom mike. And they have only turned up with two spare pheasant-like birds as possible prey.

The hawk resolutely flies in precisely the opposite direction from any wild birds that the dogs faithfully root out, and is literally unable to grab a pheasant when one is held up in front of it. The director glumly gets some footage of me holding it (its talons remarkably gentle on my wrist, as if it is afraid of leaving a mark), and of Mr He the army-fatigues guy blowing his whistle and largely failing to get it to return. After half an hour, the pheasants have caught more prey than the hawk, and He the Hawker has resorted to using his GPS locator, which beeps angrily whenever it works out where the transponder on the back of the eagle is.

Daniel the cameraman is in a filthy mood. The director says it is because he has a cold, but I suspect it’s because of the crushing weight of wasted opportunity. Today’s set-up, if the fixer’s fixer’s fixer had got his ducks in a row, would have offered any cameraman a shot at an international award — wizards in the forest, and hawks coming out of the sky. But the prey won’t run, and the hawk won’t hunt, and the rare moments when there’s some action or chasing, Daniel invariably has the wrong lens on his camera, or ends up focussing on the wizard having a fag behind a tree. Then the hawkers reveal that this last half hour is all they have scheduled. Far from spending the day on the mountain, they have another hawking party to go to, and are ready to pack up and run off, observing with something of a hungry glint in their eyes that maybe we can come up with something better the day after tomorrow. The hawk has been so hapless at chasing the pheasants that we still have both of them alive, staring at us with what only can be described as avian sneers. We have barely seconds of footage, which causes Sohkiak to suggest that before the hunters go, we set up a scene where I drive the Buick across the mountainous landscape, with a camera stuck to the front of the car for a good view of our mad passengers.

The hunters all bugger off to a more interesting hunt somewhere else, and we are left with the Dongba shaman. He is as friendly as any wizard might be when offered a week’s wages to set fire to some twigs on a hillside, and gamely talks me through the career path of an exorcist and sometime children’s entertainer. He lights a pile of fir branches and intones dour prayers in Naxi to the gods of the mountain. He is much too polite to suggest that we might have avoided a lot of palaver if he had asked the gods’ permission before we started chasing a couple of pheasants around a lake, and that in terms of prioritising wizardry, we might have got what we deserved.

Jonathan Clements is the author of A Brief History of China. These events featured in Route Awakening (S03E05), 2017.