5.1 A Yak Herder Leading the Author over a 17,000-Foot Pass behind Mount Everest
Source: Author
February 1950. I was five. Grandpa took me hunting one morning, not the usual out the backdoor but deeper into the jungle this time, and we jostled off across the Ganges past Hardwar in his World War II jeep. We spent the night in sleeping bags, awakened in the predawn dark, and I followed as he led me on foot quietly to a bank overlooking a dried-up riverbed. He stuck sprigs into a woollen hat, making his head look like the top of a bush.
I sat then, doing my part, looking through a peephole he had made in the bush, snuggled against the rough wool of my grandfather’s jacket. ‘Watch. Listen,’ had been his instructions. ‘Take the jungle inside as if you’re drinking a glass of water; let the jungle flow through all your body.’ That was the morning I learnt how a leopard stalks the edge of a riverbed. ‘Feel this animal as part of you, don’t be afraid,’ he whispered. ‘A leopard is beautiful; absorb how it walks a courageous and sly trail.’
Leopards are animals of the night. As the sun began to rise after the leopard was out of sight, down the riverbed followed three spotted deer, a wild boar, and finally we sat watching the ebb in India’s rose-laced dawn. Moving to the riverbank, our legs hung over the sandy bank. Grandpa opened a thermos of hot sweet milk. As it washed into me, twigs still bobbing from his cap, Grandpa told me of his encounter with a man-eating tigress a few years before.
It seemed this certain tigress attempted a meal of a porcupine but was driven off by a swat of quills, of which three stuck, then festered, making the tigress so lame she started supplementing her diet with humans. Sportsmen who came trying to shoot her left birdshot in her rump and a slug in her shoulder, making her even further crippled and cagey.
Then one afternoon, two girls—one an excited bride everyone said was rather boisterous—were cutting fodder for their water buffalo. The bride, mocking her friend’s fear of the man-eater, was climbing down the tree. Suddenly the tigress emerged from a bush, seized her, and disappeared into the jungle, her teeth piercing the thrashing, screaming girl’s chest, holding her sideways in her mouth as a dog might carry a bone.
On hands and knees we tracked the tigress through tunnels of thorns and undergrowth. The trail was easy; we could see fragments of torn clothes, plenty of drag marks from the flailing girl, and lots of blood. Your father and uncle worked as though possessed, each day searching for fresher signs of the tigress, returning each night to watch at the spot where we had found the bride’s hair and bones. I told them: ‘Don’t search where the tigress has been. Decide where it will likely come. Be there, wait.’
I thought that sooner or later the tigress would walk a particular trail, and there I tied my cot high in a tree and slept, trusting my feelings. On the fourth morning, I awoke sensing her impending arrival. What I heard were morning’s sounds, but that sixth sense had made me sharp. No birds gave alarm calls. The sense is more than a gut feeling; it’s a developed sense I’ve had a number of times. When it comes I am as certain as if from a smell or a sound. In that cold light that grows out of the jungle night, before the sun pokes over the horizon, the day was stepping alive, like the moment this morning when those wild boar crossed this riverbed. At that time of change the tigress limped down the trail, the first sun rays strong on her golden sides, shadows streaking her black stripes. One shot, and I killed her—it was with my .405 magnum, Teddy Roosevelt’s favourite calibre. That tigress died for that bride.
Such experiences were parts of my childhood training. ‘Watch. Listen. Absorb.’ We went to the jungle for meat, but even more to be with the jungle, often just drinking deeply from being with it. The jungle is a complex world where understanding comes by living with it.
Six-and-a-half years after that jungle morning my Yeti quest began. Several weeks after seeing the picture in the newspaper, it occurred to me to do what we did when hunting other animals. Ask the people. Taking my Shipton book, I walked to the coolie stand below Sisters Bazaar where a dozen hopefuls sat. They were from villages throughout our hills, people who travelled Himalayan trails all year. Like travellers through the ages who move without maps and guidebooks, descriptions of the road are shared at resting places, telling each other of turns, washouts, changes, and dangers. Mental maps become updated.
I showed Shipton’s photograph to a coolie who seemed to be from back in the mountains, jute cloak stained with black streaks from carrying charcoal in 150-pound loads.
‘Yes, I know what made that footprint. That is a man’s. Don’t be confused by round toe marks or toes together. In snow a man’s toes look round, not long as in dirt or mud.’
‘The print cannot be a man’s,’ I said. ‘This picture was taken on a snowfield no person had travelled across for many months.’
‘You are still a boy. You do not know that in these mountains, even high up, people always travel. Never think no one has passed. Maybe the maker was a holy man on pilgrimage—pilgrims are always roaming our mountains. Sometimes people also travel in secret, carrying things they do not want others to find. Maybe this person worked for a government and was going north into Tibet? In these mountains unknown tracks are found.’
‘But coolieji, look at how big the footprint is. That axe-head beside it shows the footprint is more than 12 inches long.’
‘Ah, I did not know the footprint to be so big. So that means an unusual man. Unusual men walk in unusual places.’
‘Coolieji, have you ever seen a Yeti’s footprint? Is this the track of a Yeti?’
‘What is a Yeti?’ he asked.
‘The Yeti is a wild man that lives in high mountains,’ I replied. ‘It has long hair and a pointed head.’
‘Such men don’t live in our mountains.’ While the charcoal porter and I were talking, others had crowded in and began examining the picture. Nods followed.
That was the first day I had actually asked any villagers about the Yeti. And all had said ‘no’. Why did they not admit knowing about it? Was their lack of admission similar to what they said when asked about evil spirits, beings I knew villagers also believed in but did not discuss. That was the day I first learnt that my Himalaya were not Yeti-land. Mussoorie is in the India Himalaya. The land of Yetis is 600 miles away, over a hundred Himalayan passes in eastern Nepal.
That conversation with the charcoal carriers at Sisters Bazaar was twenty-seven years before I would find my footprints in the Barun snows, but I had begun exploring valleys and ideas. Grandpa had taught me the patience of the hunt and that I must learn the hunter’s skills. The greatest hunter of our jungles was Jim Corbett, whose books my family studied as textbooks and not just thrilling jungle stories; his home range was adjacent to where our family roamed. It was he Grandpa was quoting when speaking of ‘the sixth sense’. Here’s an excerpt from his Man-Eaters of Kumaon:
I have made mention elsewhere of the sense that warns us of impending danger, and will not labour the subject further beyond stating that this sense is a very real one and that I do not know, and therefore cannot explain, what brings it into operation. On this occasion I had neither heard nor seen the tigress, nor had I received any indication from bird or beast of her presence and yet I knew, without any shadow of doubt, that she was lying up for me among the rocks. I had been out for many hours that day and had covered many miles of jungle with unflagging caution, but without one moment’s unease, and then, on cresting the ridge, and coming in sight of the rock, I knew they held danger for me, and this knowledge was confirmed a few minutes later by the kakar’s warning call to the jungle folk, and by my find the man-eater’s pugmarks superimposed on my footprints.1
Or, in another reference of sixth sense from the same book:
As I stepped clear of the giant slate, I looked behind me and over my right shoulder and—looked straight into the tiger’s face.
I would like you to have a clear picture of the situation.
5.2 Grandpa in 1923 with a Leopard He Shot as It
Had Leapt at Him
Source: Taylor family archives
The rifle was in my right hand held diagonally across my chest, with the safety-catch off, and in order to get it to bear on the tigress the muzzle would have to be swung round three-quarters of a circle.
The movement of swinging round the rifle, with one hand, was begun.… Only a little further now for the muzzle to go, and the tigress—who had not once taken her eyes off mine—was still looking up at me, with the pleased expression still on her face.
How long it took the rifle to make the three-quarter circle, I am not in a position to say. To me, looking into the tigress’s eyes and unable therefore to follow the movement of the barrel, it appeared that my arm was paralysed, and that the swing would never be completed. I heard the report.… For a perceptible fraction of time the tigress remained perfectly still, and then, very slowly, her head sank on to her outstretched paws.2
MONTHS AFTER I DISCOVERED THE YETI IN A NEWSPAPER, Dad received a grant from the Upjohn Pharmaceutical Company to search for a plant, nusha bhoota, meaning ‘the hair of the ghost’. In the Kulu Valley, when the flower is in bloom during the monsoon, shepherds pass carefully through high meadows, for at these times the nusha bhoota’s blossoms emit vapours that allegedly anaesthetize passing travellers who then collapse. Upjohn thought the plant could be used to make a new drug. Uncle Gordon sceptically said one night at our dinner table that maybe the travellers fall asleep because after carrying heavy packs on a sunny day, lying for a while in a warm pasture is pleasant; then when monsoon clouds blow in and the rain hits their faces, the sleepers awake.
I was pressing to join this expedition because earlier Uncle Gordon had said to Dad with a very sincere voice, ‘Carl, keep your eyes open. Those high pastures in the monsoon could be Yeti habitat. You might have more luck finding the Yeti than nusha bhoota’; if jungle-savvy Gordon thought the Kulu Valley was Yeti-land, I wanted to go.
Arriving at those high meadows in a different part of the Himalaya, what we really found was rain. Wind-driven rain slammed in sideways. The higher we climbed, the thinner the rain turned, but there always was rain. No matter how high we climbed—10,000 feet, then 12,000—we could not climb out of the rain. In evenings we stood in clammy clothes trying to dry ourselves off by smoky fires, or lay in our tents in soggy sleeping bags. Moisture from our breaths struck the cold fabric in those early alpine tents, then condensed, and caused it to rain inside the tent.
Each morning before the scientists left we shared tasteless oatmeal and sweet tea by the fire. After they left, I would clean the cages and feed the white mice and guinea pigs we used to test the anaesthetic qualities of each plant. Afterwards, there was not much to do. One morning, sitting under an umbrella by the cookfire, smoke swirled in, mimicking the clouds over the ridge. The smoke swirls then re-spun, heading on over the ridges.
Life that unrolls flat on the plains gets reshaped in the mountains where earth and clouds fold over on top of each other. The sky sometimes lies below the earth, and the ground lands above the sky. In that world we stand in the sky with clouds below and clouds above, but we stand on land. Distance opens with views across mountain ranges, then the clouds coming in bring vision very immediate with the land on which one stands feeling like an island in the sky. Ideas come in like the clouds, embrace our understanding very closely, and then dance on. Ideas dancing with sky; the land dancing with clouds. In that miasma something happens to the mind, especially at altitudes. World and Air dance as partners, dancing closely as Earth and Sky. Mountains lose their rockiness. It is to seek such oneness joined to otherness that sages go to the mountains. And young boys, too.
A Tibetan shepherd stopped by the camp that morning carrying two heavy sacks, and on arriving let them slide off his back, whistling. Then, with a fast twirl of an oiled canvas, he covered them from the rain.
‘I carry supplies into the Lahaul Valley,’ he replies to my question, but when I ask what is in the bags, he falls quiet. Our cook hands him a mug of hot sweet tea.
I point to my mice and guinea pigs. ‘My job is to care for those animals. Are there dangerous animals on this mountain that might attack mine?’
‘Yes. Leopards could, bears also. After the monsoon bears dig for wild mice. Bears look into the ground for little animals. They will smell the ones you have.’
‘Any other animals?’
He wasn’t interested in possible predators for my mice, but the cook refilled his mug; that reminded him that our camp was more interesting than the trail. ‘Martens and weasels, maybe you should be careful of even an eagle. It could see through the wire of their cages. You should cover their cages with cloth.’
‘Are there manlike animals, wild jungle men?’
‘I do not understand. What do you mean by “jungle men”? What would men-animals eat here on these empty ridges?’
‘Maybe they feed on grass in meadows such as this. Maybe they eat animals like my mice. Do you know of the Yeti?’
‘I have never heard of such men. We do not have any around here. Do not fear wild men. But watch for bears.’
And so in a second region of the Himalaya, as with every other person with whom I’d inquired of on that expedition, no one knew of the Yeti. Why were mountaineers and explorers finding Yetis? I thought more on the food question. Could the snowman be a grass man? For half of the year the high slopes are covered by snow; at those times what would a Yeti’s food be?
When Dad returned to the camp that evening, he wondered: ‘Today I saw a valley of rose-pink primulas. Yesterday I was in the valley east of it; the primulas were dark purple. The two colours must mean that they are two different species, for the purple primulas have that powder, farina, on their blossoms, and the rose-pink lack the white powder. Why do two species exist as monocultures in adjacent valleys but are not intermixing? Both valleys are at 13,000 feet. Both appear identical in soil, face north, and are similarly moist. Why does one have pink flowers, the other dark purple, and each valley have none of the other?’
Possible explanations were well along as we ate our curried carrots and cabbage. Each evening the last to join dinner was Vaid, one of our botanists, who had to interrupt his day’s pressing of plants. ‘Carl, the rose-pink is Primula rosea, and the dark purple is Primula macrophylla. I have been seeing these too. One explanation for why you found monocultures is a theory advanced by Kingdon-Ward in the far eastern Himalaya. After walking one valley and finding flowers of one colour and, like you, walking the next day in another valley and finding a second colour, he dismissed soil type and slope exposure as an explanation, noticing two features. One is the colour difference you noticed; the other is that the flowers are so abundant in the first place, for pristine meadows should show relatively fewer flowers as untouched meadows are so thick with grass that it chokes out flowers. When a valley is lush with flowers, it speaks of being grazed by domestic animals. And I am sure you’ve noticed that all the meadows we’ve been searching have their grasses chewed down.
‘So, when you see a valley with a carpet of flowers you know you are not the first to visit this season. Because flower stems grow more quickly than grass, meadows with flowers were prepared for your viewing pleasure by shepherds weeks earlier. Recognizing then that grazing brought the flowers, Kingdon-Ward linked this to the colour difference. One colour dominates when grass is grazed earlier, another when grazed later. It remains a hypothesis, but it is a wonderful option.’
In my ardour in which I nearly revered the wild, I had never thought people could make Nature more beautiful than when it pristinely grew. This suggested that domestic goats, which I had thought to be rapacious eaters, were in fact causing splendid wildflowers to grow in profusion.
New ideas were coming to me. Growing up with scientists and villagers, talking English with one, Hindi with another, questions flooded my mind. Why did my native language, English, which my culture claimed to be more civilized, not use honorifics, but the Hindi of the people who, as mi
ssionaries, we were supposedly teaching not only had elaborate honorifics but also embellished salutations. Some months earlier Dad had punished me for using the familiar thum when I addressed an older woman. Impertinently I had then asked, after one of my few life whippings, ‘What honorific should I use when telling a snake to get off the trail?’
The next day after learning that people made the wild more beautiful, Vaid and I were talking. ‘Vaidji, some plants we collect are valuable. Are they hard to find?’
‘People here have experimented for centuries; experiments that worked became plants that are hunted. Do you know a plant that looks like a coffee plant? You’ve seen it around Mussoorie; it is called Rauvolfia serpentina. Dark-glossy, green leaves with red flowers found in sandy gravel where there is forest cover. Its power is in its roots, long tubers which the local people grind into paste.’
‘What do they use it for?’
‘Madness, but also for a snakebite, birthing pain, and grief after a death. Scientific tests have shown a positive effect on hypertension. It works so well that drug companies are buying wild Rauvolfia. In many valleys, in slack parts of the agricultural season, people are digging up the bushes. Losing the bushes across many valleys may, of course, exterminate the wild Rauvolfia.’
‘Why don’t the companies just grow the plants in fields?’
‘Growing one bush takes years. Then to harvest it must be killed. It is cheaper to pay villagers to harvest jungle Rauvolfia.’
‘Well, villagers are making money. They are poor.’
‘How much really? Maybe on a good day they triple their income over a day in the fields. When the bushes are gone, the villagers, who developed the knowledge over generations, will not be better off; then income is gone as well as the plant. That is why we are here; your father has convinced a drug company that maybe the nusha bhoota could be grown as a medicine.’
Two weeks later, our expedition left with a plant whose vapours killed one of my guinea pigs and three white mice, a plant the Upjohn Company could never get to grow in Michigan greenhouses. Back in school, the biology we studied held much less interest than Saturday and holiday trips that took me into the field, and the readings I spent time with were Jim Corbett, teaching me the languages of the wild, not those of memorizing names where an interesting animal was described with a Latin name.
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 9