A fire-breasted flowerpecker dashed overhead, sparkling from the rain, iridescent in the slanting shafts of the ending day. On its blue-green breast a red dot blazed like a Christmas-tree light. The bird settled into a clump of mistletoe on an oak down the hill. When mistletoe berries are ripe, the flowerpecker will eat them and perpetuate the special cycle it shares with its host. Botanists have named the plant Loranthus viscum because after passing through the bird these berry seeds exit in a sticky form. To get those seeds off, the flowerpecker rubs its bottom against a tree bark. Seeds that fall to the ground do not grow for the parasitic mistletoe seed needs the bark of a broad-leafed tree to germinate, preferably a bark with moisture-laden moss. Rooted in that, the mistletoe grows to feed another fire-breasted flowerpecker, or perhaps the rarer scarlet-backed flowerpecker.
ONE DAY, WENDING MY WAY HOME from the bookseller where we spoke about jungle cabbages and kings, and whether pigs have wings, I stopped at an overlook. White cottages flock these Mussoorie ridges, perching their homes like birds on the branch-like Himalayan ridges. A generation before my grandparents, the British had this town built by the labour of coolies. Women and children were sent here for protection to escape the heat of India.
As I watched, a cloud ascended from the plains below, and from inside it came a bird with white stripes flashing the underside of its wings, an adult Himalayan griffon. Stolidly it coursed, turning, climbing, skimming a ridge, peering into the valley below. It seemed to be studying something in the valley, but was wise not to descend to this possible carcass, for in narrow valleys the griffon leaves the dead for smaller carrion such as crows. Perhaps a young griffon, not yet having developed its wing stripes, might descend, but it would soon learn that it cannot take off on a valley floor without a slope, especially when filled with pounds of just-eaten meat. Stuck in the valley, the bird can be overtaken by a predator. To gain height to glide from, hopping uphill, hoping to avoid being eaten, such a learning bird will climb the slope fifty feet or more, then run downhill, searching for an updraught to carry it out beyond the ridges.
The literature that day the bookseller and I had been discussing circled around Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Book, Just So Stories, and Kim) and Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan of the Apes). For most children these books are fiction. For me, they were life-scripting, and the bookseller was learning this. Mowgli and Tarzan both grew up in the jungle as orphans, and for three generations the jungle had been where my family lived, where we went for meat. What for others was a world of writing was the life edge I ran to school.
In that jungle world, Mowgli also found animal friends. Am I wild, Mowgli wondered, or am I human, bridging both and fitting with neither. A prior night’s dinner conversation revolved around how a child might live in the jungle. The possibility was real because Dad, when a three-month-old infant, just like Mowgli, had been lifted from his cradle into the jaws of a she-wolf who had lost her pups when villagers discovered her den.
My grandparents had come here from Kansas, ex-cowboys turned medical doctors, and each year for six months the family travelled through the jungle by an ox-cart, living in tents, dispensing medical care. Jungle camps were not just a bridge to the wild, but like Kim, they connected identities of white skin and brown. A youthful Kim had showed me that language helped cross the colour line, telling us white kids who wanted to blend in to get behaviours as well as accent right if we wanted to move in this land of India. Other dinner discussions were about how Mowgli could communicate with animals that had no language. During my talk with the bookseller, he kept reminding me that language is more than words; it is first a respect for those with whom one is talking, something I must give him since he was a Brahmin, and a trait for India he was showing me that Kipling had. Kipling’s language sensitivity showed with words that people who bridged both languages would catch, as in Gunga Din’s ‘Hi Slippy, hitherao! Water get it!’ (‘Here’ in Hindi is idhar, which bastardizes nicely through hither to ‘get it’.)
Tarzan, like me, was a child of privileged parents. But people were not available who could teach him. He was raised by apes who had killed his parents. It was an intriguing idea: to be swinging from vines, learning from and by being part of our prehuman family, but knowing at the same time that one had to also be careful. Then in the jungle Tarzan discovers his parents’ cabin and his father’s knife. With a growing brain Tarzan struggles to grasp whether he is a human or a creature of the wild.
For an adolescent, the worlds I lived in were stacked one on top of the other—what is real and what is read, and what is true among that which is read? Like many adolescents, I tried to fit with the stories I read. Other American boys were playing cowboys and Indians; cowboys were what my grandparents had been, and Indians were the children with whom I played and whom my grandparents and my father cared for in their clinics. I was bridging worlds and finding my life propelling me towards a manhood with the wild. To quote Kipling:
If you can dream—and not make dream your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster;
And treat those two imposters just the same …
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man my son!
Watching the griffon soar, I pondered over my grandparents’ early years. What was it like in the India of King George V? Most missionaries found their callings in colleges, hospitals, churches—a calling of changing others’ allegiances. Doing so then was a lonely life away from their distant American homes. Living in the jungle must have been especially lonely, but it also gave us security and helped us get closer to the people and place where we lived. Many of those were years of the Great Depression, and money promised from America sometimes never came; the gun was useful then, and also my family ate food from villagers’ fields brought in gratitude for the medical services rendered.
It took five months for a letter, carried by a runner, a rail, and a steamer, to make its way to the brother in Kansas or the sisters in Cincinnati, and months more for a reply to return to the jungle. Now in 1956 it still felt lonely, even though I could send a telegram to my other grandparents in Pennsylvania—where the switchboard in town would call them out on the farm and read over the party line with neighbours eagerly listening of news from India.
As the griffon soared on to other ridges I walked up the hill to our home. Entering adolescence, a white among browns, in a family that identified itself with a mission, questions of identity rode the storm currents of youth. The Brahmin had mentioned another Kipling line: ‘If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.’ It is easy to get stuck in valleys, hopping and trying to get lift, eating the carrion of others’ lives, believing the lies of our forefathers when told sincerely. I would later find out that in America for most who were my age, the questions were not of racial identity but of sports and girls. But I was caught between a culture not mine and the jungle which felt like it was mine.
Halfway through the school year, as it happened, came the big assignment of fifth grade: we had to write a paper on any topic we wanted. At first I thought I’d do tigers—tigers were the ultimate quarry for Taylor boys—but I decided to write about Yetis. A paper that rang with this ending: ‘Just one set of footprints need to be found. A thousand Yetis do not have to be found. All we need is one!’ That paper began a lifelong research project.
THE YETI MADE ITS FIRST PUBLIC APPEARANCE in 1889 when an energetic British army physician, Major L.A. Waddell, returned from a hunt on the high Himalayan glaciers. He brought a trophy more sensational than the mountain sheep or bear he had gone seeking. Out of the Himalaya, Waddell brought sightings of footprints that ascended a glacier, then disappeared over a ridge—hominoid-like footprints. With those prints the Yeti first walked into the Western consciousness.
This end of the nineteenth century was also the beginning of the reign of science, the reign al
so of Queen Victoria when gentlemen explorers spanned the planet. Lands were being ‘discovered’. Science and exploration moved together, uncovering mysteries throughout new territories. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had revolutionized the understanding of how animals came to be, a theory that after its publication was more credible each year and became a defining vision for the Victorian man. So by the time of Waddell’s report of the mysterious footprints, a global search had been underway to find the ‘missing link’, to explain, in the oversimplified perception of the time, how monkeys evolved into humans. It was appropriate that the missing link might hide in the most remote high snows.
New truths were being articulated about relationships with nature. ‘New peoples’ were being brought to the ‘civilized’ world. Fantastic postulates of the hypothesized were being proven. Indeed, science fiction was gaining respectability as a literary form. Anything seemed possible. Anything might not be fiction—even the Bible that at first seemed to contradict evolution, for other people had its inconsistencies newly understood with stone-written facts of archaeology. Informed people were learning to turn around earlier biases. For the open-minded, religion, too, was having misunderstandings of forefathers re-understood, joining the scientific age. In a world of discoveries, the missing link, while yet undiscovered, seemed ever more probable.
With the caution befitting a Victorian man of science, and careful not to overstep as an officer in the British army, Waddell did not categorize the footprints. Instead, he brought what he presented as another fact, the legend: ‘[O]f hairy wild men who are believed to live amongst the eternal snows, along with the mythical white lions, whose roar is reputed to be heard during storms. The belief in these creatures is universal.…’2 With those words in the colonial conquest of the unknown, the Yeti stepped forward.
In 1915, a letter had come to the Royal Geographical Society addressing these discussions. The letter was sent by the forestry officer J.R.P. Gent. It described the existence of
… another animal but cannot make out what it is, a big monkey or ape perhaps.… It is a beast of very high elevations and only comes down to Phalut in the cold weather. It is covered with longish hair, face also hairy, the ordinary yellowish-brown color of the Bengal monkey. Stands about 4 feet high and goes about on the ground chiefly. …3
Unexplained fact after another was being newly understood, and so evidence was produced from an idea. Somewhere out there in the snows, the reports kept postulating, roamed the kin to humans. Some reports of the Yeti that were sent in, the gentlemen in their clubs discussed, were assuredly fabrication. Others must be mistaken identity, they told each other thoughtfully. Gentlemen formed learned societies to discuss these matters. The common characteristic of all these reports, though, was that they were only reports. Yet the reports kept mounting. Could all these reports from reliable, well-educated gentlemen be wrong? Were the stalwart villagers in valley after valley lying?
The name ‘abominable snowman’ was coined in 1921 when the Royal Geographical Society sent a well-equipped expedition to reconnoitre an ascent route for Mount Everest. Led by Lt Col C.K. Howard-Bury, the group approached Everest from Darjeeling, over the Cho La, and went into the spectacular Kama Valley. As they crested a pass they saw strange dark figures crossing another snowfield. Then later, they came across elongated, human-like tracks in the snow. Expedition porters claimed that the distant figures were metoh kangmis and the new-found tracks were made by these ‘men of the snows’.
As this expedition was returning to England, in a public interview for the Statesman (the same newspaper where thirty-five years later I saw the footprint), a Statesman writer, Bill Newhouse, (who used the pen name Kim) saw a story in this discovery in addition to the Everest quest, and he translated metoh (which exactly means ‘bear’) first as ‘filthy’, then, not liking that, as ‘abominable’. (Kangmi is indeed ‘snowman’.) Moreover, Newhouse later confessed, ‘The whole story seemed like such a joyous creation that I sent it to two or three newspapers.’4
4.3 A Yak Caravan Crossing the Same Pass in 1990 Where the 1921 Everest Reconnaissance Saw metoh kangmi or the Abominable Snowman
Source: Author
From 1921 until thirty-two years later when it was climbed, conquering Everest became a British fixation, and a discovery to accompany that, especially for the failed expeditions of the 1930s, was often the Yeti. As my father once quipped, ‘If an expedition found their peak abominable, it was then proper to sight a Yeti.’ Dad was a scientist. He drew my attention to one particular early piece of evidence, the only Yeti sighting made by a scientist. In 1925, an animal was seen by a member of the Royal Geographical Society. On the Zemu Glacier of Sikkim, N.A. Tombazi noticed his excited porters: ‘Two to three hundred yards away and down the valley to the East of our camp. Unquestionably, the figure in outline was exactly like a human being, walking upright and stopping occasionally to uproot or pull at some dwarf rhododendron bushes. It showed up dark against the snow and, so far as I could make out wore no clothes.’5
Tombazi was applying the newly developing tool of photography to his scientific work. While he was attaching his telephoto lens (in the way that plagues so many ‘almost-made’ discoveries), the animal walked out of the camera’s view and into the dwarf rhododendron. Disappointed, Tombazi rushed to the spot where he:
… examined the footprints which were clearly visible on the surface of the snow. They were similar in shape to those of a man, but only six to seven inches long and four inches wide at the broadest part of the foot. The marks of five distinct toes were perfectly clear.… The prints were undoubtedly of a biped, the order of the spoor having no characteristics whatever of any imaginable quadraped.6
Over the years these dimensions would be the most common with the huge one-foot-long prints found by Shipton being the other size.
In the 1930s, Wing Commander E.B. Beauman had found hominoid-looking tracks on a glacial snowfield at 14,000 feet. Ronald Kaulback came across tracks at 16,000 feet. On a glacier in the eastern Himalaya, Shipton came upon his first set of tracks. In 1937, Yeti discoveries surged. H.W. Tilman encountered tracks on the Zemu Glacier just east of the closed land of Nepal (and the Barun Valley). On a snowfield at 19,000 feet, again on the Zemu Glacier, John Hunt (who would lead the successful ascent of Everest in 1953) discovered his Yeti tracks, prints similar to those seen by Tombazi.
So by the end of the 1937 climbing season, two expeditions had claimed to have seen the Yeti, seven had found its footprints, and many more descriptions had come in based on what local hunters and guides reported. Many of these reports mentioned Yeti hands and scalps in Tibetan monasteries. And Sherpas who climbed with westerners on the Tibetan side of Everest told especially of relics and sightings in Nepal’s eastern valleys. But no westerner in the 1930s was permitted to enter Nepal.
These reports from the southern rim of Tibet confirmed stories emerging from Tibet’s eastern side that described human-like animals in the bamboo. Were the Chinese ‘wild men’ the same as the mysterious soft skins, mostly white but with peculiar black spots, which had been showing up in China since 1869? Some animal wearing a white-and-black robe roamed the Tibetan Plateau. That animal’s identity was revealed when Teddy and Kermit Roosevelt shot a specimen on one of their epic post-presidential expeditions: the giant panda. But people in China’s mountains said that the panda was not the wild man. That was yet to be brought in—a man, they said, with skin, not an animal with fur. Through the 1920s, on both sides of Tibet, the search went on.
To explain the mystery, a discovery came from a back alley of Hong Kong. In 1934 a Dutch paleontologist, Ralph von Koenigswald, walked into a chemist’s shop looking for fossils that were sold as ‘dragon’s teeth’. From the jars in which they were kept, he poured all sorts of fossils out on the counter. There, among the fossils, was a human, lower third molar, like no human tooth science had yet recorded—five or six times too large. It appeared to be the tooth of an extinct race of gia
nts. For five years, von Koenigswald searched the China coast. In 1936, he found another, and in 1939, a third. Molars were hard facts; with these he could build out a skeletal description, and based on the teeth, Gigantopithecus was proposed. Giants 11–13 feet tall, they were fantastic omnivores who stood their ground in an ecosystem of sabre-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths. Von Koenigswald’s teeth were the basis of Heuvelmans’s Yeti hypothesis.
Then Frank Smythe made a discovery. Finding Yeti prints in a snowfield at 20,000 feet, Smythe pursued them, and although film was expensive, he photographed extensively. Back home from the high altitude, he analysed the prints using his field notes and comparative samples:
On the level the foot marks averaged 12 to 13 inches in length and 6 inches in breadth, but downhill they averaged only 8 inches in length. The stride was some 1½ to 2 feet on the level, but considerably less uphill, and the foot marks were turned outward at about the same angle as a man’s. There were well-defined imprints of five toes.7
At a high altitude, Smythe had concluded the tracks being so human-like that they must be made by a Yeti. But his analysis after recovering from fatigue and oxygen deprivation showed the tracks were by the Asiatic black bear Selenarctos thibetanus. He then presented a scientifically grounded Yeti option: quadrupedal bears could overprint hind paws into forepaw tracks and create bipedal-appearing tracks that vary in size—larger tracks when the hind foot fell back as the bear went uphill, and sometimes on the flat, and shorter tracks when the foot came forward on the overprint when the bear was going downhill. The larger prints fit Shipton and Ward’s discovery, the smaller prints fit Tombazi’s.
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Yeti Expeditions
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 8