Tigers do not know that human beings have no sense of smell, and when a tiger becomes a man-eater it treats human beings exactly as it treats wild animals, that is, it approaches its intended victims up-wind, or lies up in wait for them down-wind.
The significance of this will be apparent when it is realized that while the sportsman is trying to spot the tiger, the tiger is in all probability trying to stalk the sportsman, or is lying up in wait for him. This contest, owing to the tiger’s height, colouring, and ability to move without making a sound, would be very unequal were it not for the wind-factor operating in favour of the sportsman.…
For example, assuming that the sportsman has to proceed, owning to the nature of the ground, in the direction from which the wind is blowing, the danger would lie behind him, where he would be least able to deal with it, but by frequently tacking across the wind he could keep the danger alternately to the right and left of him. In print this scheme may not appear very attractive, but in practice it works; and, short of walking backwards, I do not know of a better way or safer method of going up-wind through dense cover in which a hungry man-eater is lurking.3
LEAVING INDIA, I TRACKED THE YETI from the United States through my teenage years. Its trail was in column-completing stories in the middle of newspapers, reports that had changed from happenstance discoveries by mountaineers to major, moneyed, and scientific Yeti expeditions.
In 1957, 1958, and 1959, the Texas millionaire Tom Slick penetrated the long-closed valleys of east Nepal, particularly south of Everest as well as the Arun Valley. Slick’s first expedition found three sets of Yeti footprints, hair, and excrement. The second used bluetick bloodhounds, trained in Arizona on mountain lions and bears. These canines required jackets to protect them from the cold, and during the monsoon needed lanolin to be rubbed daily into their paws to prevent cracking as well as American medicines that were fed daily to them to ward off exotic diseases. During four months in the field, this second expedition found another set of Yeti tracks and visited four remote monasteries to study two alleged Yeti scalps and a mummified Yeti hand. Slick announced he was on the verge of a major discovery.
He returned on a third expedition. Encompassing nine months, trekking a claimed 1,000 miles, the members trapped two black bears and a leopard, found numerous Yeti tracks, collected droppings, and got repeated confirmation of the animal from villagers. On returning to the USA, Slick suggested that maybe there existed three Yetis: one supernatural and two real. Of the two real, one fit the Tombazi report, and the other with large footprints fit with the prints seen by Shipton and Ward. Wealthy, and not accountable to a donor or museum, Slick would not release his evidence, saying he had to work through the relationships among the three. But before those findings came, he died in an aeroplane crash. Here is Peter Byrne’s account of one of their discoveries:
Ajeeba was ahead, breaking trail and we were deep in a grove of twisted rhododendrons when he suddenly stopped and pointed at the snow directly ahead. Tracks! Tracks that looked like the tracks of a man. Tracks in a place where there were no men but ourselves.
Running diagonally across our route was a set of deep footprints in the snow … I came up quickly with Ang Dawa and Gyalzen and at a glance saw they were not the tracks of a human being, but footprints exactly similar to those that I had now come to regard as belonging to the yeti. …
The tracks were still fresh. They had been made that morning, probably only an hour before our arrival and though I was keen to start following them at once, I decided to await the arrival of the Walung village men and see what their reaction would be.
One by one they came in and dropped their loads. I called them up to see the tracks. As each one approached, I pointed to the footprints and said, ‘Look a thom has been here.’ Thom is the Sherpa name for a bear. Together they examined the tracks and then without exception declared, ‘No sahib, these are not the tracks of a thom. A yeti made these tracks. See, there are no claw marks and if a thom had made these, there would have to be claw marks.4
Yeti hunting was attracting attention even from the government of Nepal which was increasingly having ethical, economic, and national identity issues as expeditions scoured the country’s valleys for this wild man. So Nepal implemented Yeti-hunting regulations. The American Embassy, also taking Yeti hunting seriously, officially publicized these regulations.
1. Royalty of Rs. 5000/- Indian currency (rupees) will have to be paid to His Majesty’s Government of Nepal for a permit to carry out an expedition in search of ‘Yeti’.
2. In case ‘Yeti’ is traced it can be photographed or caught alive but it must not be killed or shot at except in an emergency arising out of self-defense. All photographs taken of the animal, the creature itself if captured alive or dead, must be surrendered to the Government of Nepal at the earliest time.
3. News and reports throwing light on the actual existence of the creature must be submitted to the Government of Nepal as soon as they are available and must not in any way be given out to the Press or Reporters for publicity without the permission of the Government of Nepal.5
The most noteworthy thing about these regulations was that the government of Nepal did not really have an idea whether the Yeti existed. Might it even be one of their people, a lost tribe? The implication, though, is clear: governments of both Nepal and the United States recognized that the Yeti might be real. In a sense, with such government regulations, the Yeti had acquired citizenship. The expeditions were bringing back evidence, but also big questions.
Then the most-publicized-ever Yeti expedition departed. In 1961, World Book Encyclopedia funded Sir Edmund Hillary and a multidisciplinary team to spend a year doing high-altitude research. The National Geographic sent Barry Bishop. An endeavour sponsored by World Book Encyclopedia, involving a staff member of the National Geographic and led by Sir Edmund Hillary said to me that my search was not a ‘fringe’ endeavour. Although the expedition’s quest went beyond the Yeti, and members specifically downplayed that aspect, it was the possibility of finding the Yeti that fired news stories (and seemed to have motivated World Book Encyclopedia to pay the bill). World Book Encyclopedia had never sent any other expedition to the distant valleys of the world—and a further sign of credibility was shown in their assignment to spend a year in the field. Specifically, seriousness about discovering the Yeti was shown in that Michael Ward—Shipton’s former partner—was a member. As Hillary himself was to describe:
The search for the yeti created tremendous interest in the United States. While everyone agreed that little was known about the supposed creature, there were some rumors that it was half-animal and half-human. One newspaper in Chicago humorously suggested that if the yeti were brought back to that city a decision would have to be made whether to put it in the Lincoln Park Zoo or check it into the Hilton.6
The evidence the expedition brought home, though, did not support such conclusions. The revered scalp from Khumjung Monastery was borrowed, and then sent for analysis to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Evaluation concluded that the scalp was a piece of serow (goat antelope) skin stretched into a pointed cap. While they did not bring any physical evidence, their cultural investigation was perhaps more damning, stating that the misunderstanding of the Yeti came from Westerners not properly perceiving how Sherpas view the Yeti. To the expedition’s dismissals of the Yeti, sceptics responded that the team had approached that inquiry inappropriately; no anthropologist was on the team and none of the researchers spoke the Sherpa language. But Hillary directly addressed the cultural factor in his book:
To a Sherpa, the ability of a yeti to make himself invisible at will is just as important a part of his [the yeti’s] description as its probable shape and size.… Pleasant though we felt it would be to believe in the existence … the members of my expedition—doctors, scientists, zoologists, and mountaineers alike—could not in all conscience view it as more than a fascinating fairy tale … molded by superstition, and enthusiast
ically nurtured by Western expeditions.7
I found Hillary’s conclusion interesting. Like so many mountaineers, conviction in the presence of the Yeti had been his starting thought. In 1953, after ascending Everest with Tenzing Norgay, he had mentioned to the media ‘mysterious large footprints’ found in the snow. Tenzing had added, in the press and later in conversations with Bob Fleming, how his father had seen a Yeti twice while out herding yaks. Now Hillary was being cautious, as was Tenzing in his republished, slightly edited new edition of his autobiography, Tiger of the Snows.
But this caution from the conqueror of Everest did not persuade a still hopeful world. Primatologist William C. Osman Hill, from the Zoological Society of London, then issuing an authoritative multivolume series on the comparative anatomy and taxonomy of primates, termed Hillary’s denial ‘rather hasty’, and offered the alternative that the Yeti was a ‘plantigrade mammal capable of bipedal progression’, refocusing the hunt out of the high snows. According to him, ‘Searchers for the snowman have been looking in the wrong places.… [The Yeti’s] permanent home is undoubtedly the dense rhododendron thickets of the lower parts of the valley and it is here that future search should be directed.’8
IN 1961, I ALSO RETURNED TO THE HIMALAYA, finally to Nepal, the home of the Yeti. Mother was making a movie on Nepali women; my job was recording the soundtrack. Our location in central Nepal was the first place I’d been in the Himalaya where I could not speak the language. Finally, I found a schoolteacher who spoke Hindi, and he told me how he learnt about the Yetis. He had picked up a book on Nepal written for tourists and while reading it, he had wondered what that author meant because there was no such animal where he lived in Nepal. He explained to me, ‘Our word for Yeti is bun manchi [jungle man].’
The following week, a group of Hindi-speaking traders entered a tea stall where I was present. Their home was above the Marsyangdi River on the north side of Annapurna. They had been working in India as watchmen and were now headed home. I asked if they had bun manchi in their villages. And they said yes; bun manchi were in the jungles below their villages, and sometimes came even into their villages, but usually they stayed in the jungles.
I was making progress. Knowing the language was important, and knowing things about the culture, too, was essential. I recalled that Hillary’s team was using translators. My Nepali language skills did not exist then, but I was getting information using Hindi, and I asked the Marsyandi men what their jungle men looked like. Their description was perfect. Adult bun manchi are shorter than people, with much hair. They never travel in the day. They like coming into cornfields. When they come, it is often possible to hear them screaming; they apparently have a high-pitched, long scream like that of an eagle. But these traders had never seen one of these. They were adamant that it was best to leave the bun manchi alone, for if you bother them they steal your children.
NEPAL WAS STILL A SOMEWHAT CLOSED COUNTRY THEN. The valleys of Yeti discoveries lay along the border with China. Foreigners could go to Everest, but not the adjacent valleys because of fears from Cold War game-playing. American CIA operatives were active along this border, so were the Indian CID. They were supporting Tibetan guerrilla fighters who were working for the Dalai Lama fighting an insurgency. Because of this, the high jungles where Hill suggested the search should concentrate would stay locked off for years. And being locked off, absent new discoveries, Sir Edmund’s conclusion dampened the continuing efforts to answer the puzzle.
But in 1969, entry into even the restricted valleys became possible for me. I returned to Nepal as a member of the US foreign aid programme. My job was to criss-cross the country in the family planning programme. I had a permit that allowed me to visit all seventy-five districts of the country. I even had a helicopter when on official business, so I could get in and out of remote places. Any valley where there were people had potential family planning need–giving me permission to enter them.
Again, I found language an important tool in Yeti hunting, and living in Nepal, I was learning Nepali. Usually when I mentioned this mystery to people, they would respond, ‘Yes, the Yeti is here.’ When I asked for a list of animals without mentioning the Yeti, the villagers never mentioned the one I wanted. Most lists, though, mentioned the bun manchi. Some ‘thing’ was eating real crops in their real fields. This come-in-the-night animal especially loved cornfields.
Easily accessible from Kathmandu was the Gosain Kund Ridge; it was a five-day trek one-way, but a twenty-minute helicopter ride. Short flights were a personal extravagance my salary allowed. When periodic Nepali holidays piggybacked with a Western weekend I would be dropped in one valley, with four days and five nights to cross to an adjoining valley for an early pickup, a quick shower, and being at my desk a couple hours late, fresh from a high-altitude sunrise, figuring out how to motivate men to adopt condoms or vasectomies.
On one trip I bivouacked at 16,000 feet. As a tent added weight, my practice was to use a nylon bivvy bag into which each night I stuffed a sleeping bag, boots, a water bottle, a flashlight, and myself. That night’s bivouac was under a dramatically overhanging rock, my pack outside.
Snow started during the night, in thick heavy flakes. It seldom snows in early October in that part of the Himalaya. Maybe an inch, I expected, would dust the valley the next morning, ideal for tracking animals. But snow fell throughout that night. At dawn, from the overhang of my rock snow loomed from the ground to the rock’s ceiling. Punching out into the snow, I found myself in a blizzard that was ending. My watch said ten o’clock. Ploughing to where I thought my pack was, I groped back and forth, probing. Could a Yeti have carried it? Hundreds of dollars worth of Nikon cameras and lenses were in that pack.
The helicopter was due shortly after dawn the next day. I had to hasten on to that site, for it would never find me on this side of the pass. Stuffing my sleeping bag, bivvy bag, empty water bottle, and stove into the pillowcase, and tying it with the parachute cord from my pocket, I started off. I would come back after the snows melted to collect the cameras. Two strides up, I stumbled into my pack. After a can of sardines in mustard sauce, I pressed on.
At three o’clock, I topped the pass. Descending into the other drainage, spying a high, flat-topped boulder, I spread my bivvy bag in the sun to dry and got the stove going. Sitting on the rock, swirling hot tea, I knew animals had their homes under the snow. For them, snow gave a blanket that kept predators away. Thermometers in tunnels they burrowed out register 60°F when temperatures above were below freezing. This subnivean world is filled with life: insects, especially spiders, and voles chasing the insects. Mice eat the vegetation. Pikas are the big beasts in this system, sleeping a lot under the earth, but when they need to eat in their snowy world they look for caches of stored food, covered from the eyes of searching hawks.
Might William C. Osman Hill be wrong in asserting that Yetis must live in the jungle because food exists only there? He worked in hot, steamy Ceylon. Do Yetis know about these snow denizens? Polar bears live in snow and ice. Might Yetis have found ways to harvest the reclusive larders of pika food, maybe eating the pikas also? And in some Himalayan valleys there are also marmots.
Under the earth is another world of even smaller dimensions. Worms twist and burrow. Beetles chew. Ants scurry. In their daily quests, none of them know about the animals above. The reality of each of these is the world before their noses. Inside each of these—beetles, worms, ants—are smaller eco-worlds, and life grows smaller as bacteria burrow through tissue. Microbes thrive in systems seemingly so small as to be without dimension. Even the more minute DNA holds characteristics. We deny consciousness to these life forms, but we could also be simply not yet informed.
Smaller than us, it is clear that we live in worlds stacked on worlds. Why not then do these worlds extend up higher? Or, to engage this from the other direction, what is reality beyond us? To think that there is none is conceit. People create our burrows and airways tunnelling through the cumuli of our lives
. We think this to be the whole world, not giving consciousness to others where, in some cases, we know that consciousness exists. Consider the elephant and its intergenerational mindfulness. It is a mammal, not all that dissimilar from us—except that it keeps its nose in its own business and not in reshaping the planet.
On top of our world could be other worlds. For if smaller worlds exist, why cannot there be larger; that is, if we admit our ignorance. Paul Tillich talks about the ‘ground of all being’, awareness of the great that is so much more than ourselves, being sensed by our existential dynamics inside? As we believe ourselves the most enlightened of beings, might not our human limitation be limited like that of the parasite in the bowels of a pika? Might we be being affected by a larger being but can have no appreciation of that organism. Could there not so be a ground of all being? One name for it is infinity—we know such exists, but we cannot define it. Our universe expands to what we know not, but we know it is expanding. That we know not does not mean that there is not something out there. What might the mysteries of life animate into as they leave the present?
Another parameter for this, of course, is wildness—the world beyond our domestication. I have been searching for a man in the wild now, for a decade-and-a-half. It will be another decade-and-a-half before I discover the Barun footprints, nests, and two bears. But it is already clear that the Yeti is more than a wild man, even if it is not that. The Yeti is also a calling. How much of it is the wildness inside people questing for a connection with the wild that is calling from where our species once came? This would answer Hillary’s claim in a more positive way that the Yeti is a Western creation. The quest that is driving our seeking could be to understand that great beyond.
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 10