Bill is pulling out trays containing the skulls of other Himalayan bears; sloth bear (Melursus ursinus) skulls and Himalayan red bear (Ursus arctos isabellinus) skulls. Their skulls are broader than ours with smaller nose holes and bigger eyes. The only close fit to our skull is the Asiatic black bear. So our skull’s genus is certainly Selanarctos, and these white boxes attest to only one species in this genus: thibetanus.
Bill suggests that teeth are probably critical. Our skull has the Selanarctos configuration of molars, premolars, canines, and incisors. The teeth in our skull are worn, so our bear was mature. But our skull is about 20 per cent smaller than any here in the Smithsonian and its molars are also smaller. This supports a tree-bear hypothesis: a 20 per cent smaller skull for a bear of the same age might correlate to a bear half the physical size. The teeth size of our bear equals Selanarctos specimens from Iran and Japan found on the peripheries of the species range. Our bear must be an adult Selanarctos, but why is it so small? Is it nutrition? Does overpopulation of bears in the Barun produce stunted bears? Or, is our bear an abnormal individual? Or, is there a genetic difference? No skull in this collection comes from Nepal, so there’s no possibility of a direct comparison.
8.2 Our Skull of the Rukh Balu (Selanarctos thibetanus)
Source: Michael Meador
The next day in the Smithsonian mammal library I find little in the literature except for the fact that the species’ 5,000-mile range, extending from Iran to Japan, allows it to live in warm India as well as in cold Russia. On one sheet of paper I list all the references. In five hours I have read all, except for four documents that are not in the Smithsonian library.
The literature says adult bears can weigh from 200 to 400 pounds. But weights even at 200 would be greater than what Lendoop says need ‘two men to carry’. According to our guess, the five-year-old in the zoo weighs 150 pounds. That is 25 per cent less than the weight of Selanarctos from Japan, Taiwan, and Iran. The 200- to 400-pound weights fit with ground bears for which five or six men are needed. But the literature also says that for bears, generally weights have little significance. Mature grizzlies can weigh anywhere between 300 to 1,000 pounds. Small size only indicates poor nutrition in the first year of life.
Then another puzzle emerged. The literature reports that Selanarctos is aggressive across its range. (I know that, for Uncle John once had one of these bears lift off a colleague’s face which then, as this fellow lay bleeding on the ground in the jungle, John had to stitch back on with his sewing kit.) But the tree bear is reportedly not aggressive. Can the tree bear be Selanarctos, as suggested by the skull, yet not possessing this characteristic the genus always seems to have?
Then in a footnote in R.I. Pocock’s Fauna of British India, there is casual mention of a tree-living Asiatic black bear, Selanarctos arboreus. It describes a specimen submitted by Oldham. J.E. Gray, Pocock’s predecessor as the curator of mammals at the British Museum, categorized this bear by examining one specimen that had been sent to the museum in 1860 by Oldham, a naturalist working out of Darjeeling. A small bear living in trees, a bear whose name is tree bear! In this footnote, Pocock outlines his thoughts. In 1860, Gray had also been puzzled by a bear that lived in trees, Selanarctos arboreus.
Eighty-nine years after Oldham presented his skull to the British Museum, Pocock compared it to the other museum skulls and found nothing to warrant its classification as a separate species or subspecies. But in those intervening years Oldham’s field notes and the bear’s skin, which was also given by him, disappeared. Without the notes and the skin, Pocock had only Oldham’s assertions, Gray’s classification as arboreus, and one skull. That skull did not seem dramatically different, only smaller. So Pocock removed the arboreus species designation. But maybe Gray and Oldham were right and Pocock wrong?
The name arboreus means ‘tree’. Did Oldham see the bear in trees? Was he translating ‘rukh balu’? Darjeeling is sixty-five air miles from the Barun Valley with similar altitude and habitat. One hundred years ago an unbroken jungle and this similar dense-forest habitat would have extended from Darjeeling to the Barun.
Might Gray’s article be here at the Smithsonian? Good libraries are wonderful; an obscure datum sits, dusted regularly, waiting to be read. The skull waited for seventy-two years in England. Pocock looks at it. It waits for another forty-one years on a page in a journal. And one place where that single page might wait is in this room, for 114 years. Data sits in libraries around the world waiting for a century (maybe a thousand years on a pottery shard) to build knowledge, to be used to advance our seek-to-know-it-all species.
High on a grey metal shelf I find the annals of the Royal Zoological Society, bound in black leather and embossed in gold print; there were more than a hundred such volumes. I pull down the 1869 volume. And yes, before me is independent evidence that a field researcher gathered. He reported of a bear in trees and sent a specimen to his museum—1869 is two decades before any published Yeti fancies.
My eyes now race across the yellow pages. There is hardly any discussion of arboreus on the page; all I find is a footnote. Oldham found a small bear that he thought was different. How small? Oldham does not say. Why did he think it to be different? Oldham does not say. He collected the skull and skin and sent these to England. Gray concluded that its different size and coat were important. But Pocock did not agree; he found no unusual features when he focused just on the skull. The annals of the Royal Zoological Society do not say why Oldham and Gray called this bear arboreus. The possibly helpful notes as well as the skin are gone.
But my fieldwork gives a connection: a report, from roughly the same region of the Himalaya, of a bear whose behaviour is life in the trees. Behaviour in trees. Much that is distinctive about the tree bear is behavioural. Villagers do not claim a skull difference; museum curators worry about that. Villagers do not suggest a different genus or species. What affects village life are behaviours—like wiping out a crop in a night. It is behaviour that makes footprints.
Sitting in an armchair by the grey water cooler, I go through Selanarctos articles again. The librarian comes for the second time to tell me that the library is not about to close, as she had said earlier, but is now closed. I keep writing. The majority of information comes from the northern Himalaya. And in reports from Russia, I find a note that when walking in snow Selanarctos sometimes uses submerged branches to support itself. I also find that compared to other bears this genus places hind paw into forepaw tracks more consistently. From farther east in the Himalaya are reports of Selanarctos as an agile and delicate climber.
As I look down from the window to the traffic on Constitution Avenue, new facts and old ideas move in and out like traffic. But the person standing at the end of the corridor tells me that in a few minutes the security guards will be at her side. Near the Washington mall, hot-dog trucks are pulling down their aluminium side walls and away from the curb. For my family that has been away from the gentle hills of home for two months, it is time to drive back.
4 APRIL 1983. THE POSTMAN LEAVES TWENTY-SEVEN BOXES OF SLIDES from Kodak in our big red mailbox. Might flecks of sand have gotten into my camera at the beginning of the expedition and on the film rollers scratching every roll? Will the rolls be black because of a flawed light meter? All day the boxes sit on my desk, one calamity tumbling on another in my mind. That night, after Jennifer and Jesse go to bed, I put new logs on the fire and brew hot chocolate.
It is more than simply looking at pictures—I want to relive the journey. In today’s age of digital photography where you can instantly see what you have shot, it is hard to revert to the earlier mindset of not knowing about one’s photographs. But earlier, when the shutter was pressed what was captured was not known. In 1949, when Dad went on that first expedition permitted into central Nepal, he took only four rolls of film in three months (he bought all the rolls of colour Kodak film possessed in inventory by that photo store in Delhi, India film was so rare), and he had to wait four months aft
er the expedition before he could see his images.
Slides in each box that I am about to open number one to thirty-seven. In selecting a box I do not know whether it is the first of the journey, nineteenth, or twenty-seventh. An expedition that unfolded day-by-day, will reassemble tonight backward and forward. I start projecting the slides; thankfully, the pictures are sharp with good exposure. In box thirteen, in the middle of that roll, the footprints climb out of high bamboo. The next slide shows delicate but perceptible disruptions revealed of moss on the cliff rock.
The next slide: the thumb imprint! The next slide again shows the footprint, the thumb once more distinct from the four digits. Two months ago, those distinct digits were Yeti-proof. Only primates have thumbs. I start over with that box watching the slides cross my screen. Then, as I watch, I see nail marks. Two months earlier—indeed minutes earlier with this same slide—I did not see these. I swore to Bob there were no nail marks. Of course, that day my brain was starved for oxygen, body fatigued from climbing through deep snow. Having proposed that condition for others, why didn’t I see this then?
Even now I start questioning what I see before me. Might I find some slide that shows no nail marks? I stop what I am doing. If I was just now, might Shipton have also selected (though unconsciously) the print with no nails? New ideas collide with old, hypotheses of the tree bear with the Yeti. On the screen, though, footprints tell their tale. What is clear is that my foot has nails. What is also clear is that the other photograph taken by Shipton (of Michael Ward looking at the trail of prints) does not indicate how representative was the one photograph that launched the global Yeti quest.
I return to my slides, seeing now the feature to be looked for. Does this fit my other evidence? Bringing from the attic the paws purchased from Lhakpa, I pull out the small green Bic lighter I had laid in the track to indicate the size when taking the photograph. I move the projector to adjust the image on the screen to the size of the lighter. When 4 feet away, the lighter on the screen equals the instrument I hold.
The left forepaw then fits precisely against the picture. The print in snow is identical to the paw in my hand, nails on the paw matching indents in the snow. The only difference is the snow print is longer. Looking at the image on the screen, I see a faint line two-thirds of the way down the print in the snow. I pick up the other paw, a hind paw. That fits the back end of the print on the screen. Holding the forepaw and the hindpaw together, I observe that they perfectly overlap what is on the screen.
I did not see a tree bear make the print in the snow, but with the dried paws against the image on the screen, there is no doubt left about the maker of the snow tracks. On the screen is what I identify with passion as a Yeti. In my hands are two tree-bear paws.
Will Shipton’s as well as Cronin and McNeely’s prints also fit this way of setting my dried paws over their images in the snow? Photographs of their prints are at my office a mile away. I jump into my old VW van and bounce along the dirt road to the office. On the way back, a flat tyre cools my excitement. The night shines as I step out of the van. Our house is half-a-mile away; the spinning wind generator making our electricity sends a gentle ‘thwup, thwup, thwup’ across the mountaintop meadows. As I change the tyre, spruce trees whisper and the brittle grass of last year rustles with the turns of rusty lug nuts.
Almost an hour after it first walked across my screen, the bear track is alight again. I compare it with Shipton’s photograph. The photograph and dried paws do not immediately match as there are no obvious nail marks. Also, the ordering of toes is not uniform with the thumb placed differently. But as I look more intently at the centre rather than the captivating front, with dried paws over the picture what I see changes. There might be nail marks in the middle. One deep niche is apparent on the left side, and under the rightmost nail of the paw I hold seems to be another mark in the snow. These fit the paw in my hand—and if I slide the dry hind paw further back, the length also approximates closely. The long-standing enigmatic Shipton print has a provable bear explanation if the requirement of front nail marks are taken away, and that might happen if the bear’s weight had not pressed down so hard that these front nails would not show. Two of the rear paw nails do show.
Then I hold up Cronin’s photograph, taken a few miles from where our prints were found. Sizes correspond: our track is 6.7 inches long and 4.8 inches wide; theirs 9.0 inches long and 4.8 inches wide. To explain the differing lengths, as with the Shipton print, again the math works by moving the hind paw back, almost exactly as much as with our print. The thumb-like inside digit on theirs and ours is in the same place. For them, the snow was soft and so no evidence shows in their picture of nails. I would very much like to see their plaster cast, the one Bob once held.
With new logs on the fire, I settle into the sofa—the slide still shining on the screen—and again read their description:
Shortly before dawn the next morning, Howard climbed out of our tent. Immediately, he called excitedly. There, beside the trail we had made to our tents, was a new set of footprints. While we were sleeping, a creature had approached our camp and walked directly between our tents. The Sherpas identified the tracks, without question, as yeti prints. We, without question, were stunned.2
That is all they give. Why is there no discussion of the evidence and its positives and negatives? They had a Yeti print and, after presenting just the fact of it, they, like the animal itself, walked away from it and the questions it raised in the narrative. The answer, of course, is that scientists, especially rising ones, are wary of a serious discussion of the Yeti. Cronin and McNeely are scientists. McNeely now is a highly esteemed one headquartered at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, based in Geneva.
NICK RETURNS FROM NEPAL A WEEK LATER. From the tone of his voice on the phone call it’s clear he has more to share than memories of a month in the jungle. He knows nothing of the Smithsonian skulls, of arboreus, or the slides. Minutes after entering the house, he’s talking.
‘The prints I found in the Langtang Valley were like those we saw on the ridge—thumb-like marks too. In Tarkegaon, I found the skin of a black bear about the size of the zoo bear. The man who owned the skin had killed the bear, so I questioned him. On his own, he used the words ‘rukh balu’. Yes, rukh balu. The surprising thing is villagers also claim the presence of a large bear, bhui balu! Another villager showed me the skin of a ground bear. I took pictures of everything.’
Do two bears exist not just in the Barun but across the eastern Himalaya? In how many valleys? Is Nick’s Nepali good enough for his reports to be trustworthy? Two months later, a letter arrives from Bob: ‘Since we were together in February, on three treks I picked up village reports of tree and ground bears: the southern slopes of Himalchuli, Rowaling Valley, and Sikkim.’ As I had been trying to put the pieces together, I’ve written to Cronin twice asking if he and McNeely had found two bears, but he hasn’t replied, and I’ve called his phone. I’ve also sent letters to McNeely in Switzerland, but there is no answer from him too—did they find reports about tree and ground bears?
Working from field notes, I pull together the known fragments.
1. Reports of the tree bear come now from the Barun and four regions (Fleming found three of these). These reports cut across ethnic groups that have little contact with each other; yet, despite their cultural differences, tree- and ground-bear descriptions are consistent.
2. A small bear lives (and has lived for two years in the Kathmandu zoo) and has not grown. It fits the description of tree bears. Of particular interest about this zoo bear is a dropped inner digit on its front paws.
3. We possess an apparently mature skull and two paws from another such small bear; this bear being Lhakpa’s Barun bear.
4. In 1869, Oldham reported the existence of a similar bear in Darjeeling, sixty-five air miles from the Barun Valley, and called it arboreus.
5. Nick photographed the skin of another such tree bear in the Helambu Valley and s
aw the skin of a larger bear alleged to be a ground bear.
6. The photographs we took in the Barun indicate that this tree bear makes tracks that are primate-like. It seems to have a hallux and the ability to walk bipedally, thus fitting the Yeti stories—yet we know the prints have been made by a bear.
7. Nail marks and hair suggest this bear (the hair sample collected from the nest matches Selanarctos hair in the Smithsonian) is dexterous at climbing trees and makes nests breaking bamboo one-inch in diameter at uniform heights. It also seems to make nests in oaks, and this suggests superb tree-climbing ability.
8. Some of the aforementioned traits are reported for Selanarctos but not all. But it needs be noted that Selanarctos has never been described scientifically. Most Selanarctos evidence has come from hunters before World War II. The Russian evidence, not yet studied, appears to be more scientific.
Is the tree bear a subspecies of Selanarctos? Are there genetic differences not visible in the skulls? Are tree and ground bears the same? Might tree bears be female and ground bears male? Or, could the tree bears be juveniles and ground bears adults? Also, could tree bears be runts and ground bears normal?
What is particularly puzzling about the Cronin or McNeely evidence is their descriptions of aggressive bear behaviour (Cronin spent half-an-hour telling me on the phone and told the same to Fleming). Those reports indicate ground bears. How could Cronin or McNeely spend two years in these jungles and never discover nests? That they missed the tree bear may not be that surprising; I missed it too, and we found it only when we knew what to ask. It seems incredible that a bear should remain scientifically undetected. But maybe it is not. The era when scientists were looking for new animals ended in the mid-twentieth century; Nepal was closed then.
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 15