Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery

by Daniel C Taylor

  ‘Suddenly one of them slipped—the other girls who were watching them from above couldn’t tell whether it was my daughter or the other girl. The rocks there are always wet with the spray. Both girls slid into the white foam, heads not even popping up once from the water’s tumbling teeth.

  ‘One afternoon a week later, my wife learnt from women on the trail that a body lay on the riverbank downstream between the Num and Hedangna villages. I walked all night to reach that place. I found bones, only bones, flesh eaten by jackals. And yes, I thought them to be the bones of my ten-year-old daughter. And so, with a blessing as well as a gift to the gods, I sent her bones into the Arun’s current.’

  I sat quietly, waiting.

  ‘Doing that caused many problems. Across from our Shyakshila is the Shibrung village. One week before I found the bones, a thirteen-year-old boy from Shibrung went through everyone’s fields. Finding ears of corn missed by the harvesters, he collected these in a basket. Looking to make some rupees, he carried the corn to Khandbari Bazaar, which was three days’ walk away from Shibrung.

  ‘After two weeks of absence, his father set off to search for his son. Above the gorge between the Num and Hedangna villages, the father found the boy’s empty basket behind some bushes. He asked around. No one had seen the boy. But they told him of the bones I had sent into the river. The father accused me of killing his son and stealing the corn. The police arrived in Shyakshila, and I was taken to Khandbari in chains. After spending thirteen days in jail, I was finally cleared. But now I owe 4,700 rupees as legal fees and fees to the judge. I have never had that much money, so the money lender in Khandbari will come next year and take my fields.’

  Lendoop paused, but his story started again. ‘Two weeks after coming home, my cow slipped and fell off a cliff. I borrowed another 1,000 rupees from the moneylender to buy a calf so that my family could feed on milk. I have sold my gun to make the first payment to the moneylender, so now I must earn my money from farming.’

  For Lendoop the spiral of the Third-World indebtedness had begun—debts people like him would never be able to repay. Lendoop, who was one of the wealthier men of Shyakshila six months earlier, might now be indentured for life. Without his gun that allowed him to use his jungle skills, his remaining option was trapping animals. Would it be bears for their gall? Musk deer for their scent? But maybe high wages and a generous tip from our expedition might save him (which I later would give).

  12.3 A Now-Older Lendoop in a Tree He Spent the Night in

  Source: Author

  He looks deeply at his daughter in the photograph. I reach across to brush off tears from the picture’s surface, and then slip the photo into his shirt pocket. A few minutes later, he and I rise, and like Nepali boys at play; we lope the slope to reach our camp. The scientists have eaten and are writing notes in their tents or under trees. Pasang has saved some supper for us.

  THE DAY IS 23 NOVEMBER 1984. My watch alarm chirps at five o’clock; it is still an-hour-and-a-half yet before daylight. Today our team will climb the ridge on the southern side of the Barun Valley. Two years earlier, we failed in our three attempts because of waist-deep snow. So we never ‘binocular walked’ the warmer south-facing slopes for ‘the something’ hoped to be caught exposing itself in the sun. In the shaded snows we found tracks, nests, and stories. This morning I shall climb up to that ridge. Yetis are always found on pathways where their tracks show them crossing one valley to another.

  For a few minutes, I listen as Pasang brings up the fire on which breakfast will be made. Lying in the dark my mind starts the climb. Any ecosystem is complex, but here in the Himalaya, with life layers stacked one on the other, our earlier visit had shown us how complex these dynamics are. Now satellite radiographic images and high-altitude photographs show how the valley runs, where deciduous trees become coniferous, where conifers turn to alpine meadows.

  But the satellite images lack the ‘feel’. It is feel that gives this valley its huge sense of the wild. The feel can be touched when one lies in the dark, listening and smelling and filling in oneself with imagination. In darkness, understanding probes where sight cannot.

  Last week in the lower jungle I climbed to a lower crest of this ridge. I couldn’t see out even on that crest for the jungle was so dense. Climbing an oak, from a fork near its top I got a view of the mysterious Mangrwa Valley, whose drainage starts at a pass at the Tibetan border and tumbles from the north into the Barun. Lendoop reports big meadows there and a torrential waterfall. ‘Imagine a river urinating from the middle of a cliff!’ Indeed, an image to ponder over from the world’s fifth-highest mountain.

  As a spotted scops owl bids farewell with a few final calls to the night, I unzip the sleeping bag. Pasang and one helper sit by the fire. Aware that I prefer hot milk and honey, Pasang offers that. ‘Pasang, I’ll skip the drink. I need walking time now.’

  He hands me five oranges, a pack of biscuits, and a stack of chapattis made the evening before. I smear peanut butter and orange marmalade on the chapattis, rolling each and stuffing them into a plastic bag. I apologize again for not taking his milk, feeling worse as I realize the insensitivity I’ve shown since he must have gotten up for me earlier than planned. Guided by my flashlight, I push through the nettles on the edge of the camp. While climbing, my mind stays with the two waiting for others to awaken so that they can do their job. I walked away from the camp to be alone. Colleagues, like family, are fires in the camps of our lives, and we deeply recognize the warmth they give. But the wild, especially this place where so few have walked before, is discovered by being alone.

  Above the treetops of this jungle, the sky tinges grey. The night retreats, compressing towards tree trunks. In between the trees is where morning opens first. The trees remain like towers of darkness. As sight comes, the darkness is pushed back evermore. An awareness of distance expands along lines that could only be felt earlier. Maybe an hour still before darkness truly leaves, but as I climb now my world extends beyond the flashes of my light that allowed sight to pierce the dimensionless night. When night yawns to dawn, my beam clicks off.

  As I crest where we found the ‘Yeti’ tracks, I find that the ridge is now snow-free. I see the rhododendron branches it walked on using them like snowshoes. Farther up, protected by shade, old snow covers the route, and I find serow tracks. With the snow, I will now be able to read which animals have been travelling this ridge. The serow, a short-haired, donkey-sized goat-antelope with white stockings is now rare across the Himalaya, for it is an animal of the dense jungle. This individual soon angled off. A couple of hundred feet higher, I see tracks of the lesser panda, a tiny red-and-white-faced cousin of the giant panda from the Chinese side. This individual was unexpectedly high this time of the year for bamboo shoots are not yet out.

  Higher still, I come across tracks of a musk deer. Pressure on this animal from poaching is considerable. Maybe the way to save it, as proposed by Nepali biologist Sanat Dhungel, is to farm the animal and saturate the fragrance market with musk milked from farmed animals. That will lower the global price, bringing down the incentive for illicit harvesting. The Barun would be the ideal habitat for a musk-deer farm because in this high, cold temperate zone hangs the lichen usnea, one of the deer’s favourite foods.

  Domesticating the wild to protect the wild—is that the way to treat (or justify) this last-of-its-kind place? Soon the deer’s tracks I follow are joined by a leopard’s. Prey and predator’s trails appear to be made yesterday evening while the snow was hardening. The two trails, the leopard following the deer, turn into a bamboo thicket.

  Reading tracks in snow entails guesswork. The snow type, the wind, lower atmospheric pressure that promotes sublimation of snow, the canopy overhead, the sun and its angle, and the ambient temperature shape a footprint after the animal first imprints it. Looking at the leopard tracks I wonder again about Shipton’s. That day he claimed to have picked ‘the best one in the shade’. How did he define ‘best’? Another que
stion has long baffled me: what gave shade on a glacier? Did he mean a boulder, for it had to be high enough for something big to walk under it? Yet that does not make sense as few animals walk intentionally under overhangs; or, if they do, they usually go under it to rest. Shipton’s mention of shade raises questions of credulity with regard to his report. Also questionable is the fact that he intentionally selected the most mysterious print, implying an abnormality.

  From the high altitudes concerning this legend have come only mysteries. But usually biological relics endure at altitude, So if there was any physical reality beyond footprints in the snow, even just if only a little, such evidence should be found. Higher altitudes are devoid of moisture, bacteria, and fungi—nature’s agents of physical decay—so for the animal that makes the footprints why do just the footprints endure and not any relics of the body that made them? On mountaintops in California’s dry White Mountains, dead pine tree trunks have not rotted even after 2,000 years. The teeth of every other animal are found on Himalayan moraines, and yet no Yeti teeth have ever been found.

  Why are footprints that melt and lead to empty trails the only thing found? Claims of Yeti skins have all reliably been attributed to known animals. Because no other physical proofs have ever been uncovered, the explanation that does not disappear is that the footprints are made by an animal, which, when its body parts are found, turns out to be a known animal.

  TRACKING, ALWAYS SOPHISTICATED, NOW IS AN ALTERED ART from the past. Move by every move, FedEx shipments are tracked. The stock market is tracked. Children are tracked through according to their abilities. We track the wheels of a car when driving, and our eyes track the open space between the print in a book. These are new tracking skills—and being lost is life’s oldest, arguably, humanity’s first science.

  In all forms, tracking is logic. Stories by trackers are almost certainly humanity’s first systematic narratives. Through tracking, our species found its way to food. Our species would not have found the food we needed if acts of gathering had been dependent on luck; from the art of tracking we then developed the science. From tracking we asserted logic over the land.

  But humans lack animals’ most powerful tracking device: smell. Each family of life manages fragrances differently, but the primate family scarcely manages with smell. Carnivores’ trails reek with their concentrated urine and odours, for these animals worry little about being followed, protecting their food by fencing it with a noxious scent. And the feet of many animals smell, leaving odours imprinted in the land. Because humans’ sense of smell is relatively weaker, we follow by sight. Footprints are viewed as shapes, but a lot more describes them from the sound made to the smell laid.

  More than following specific marks, skilled trackers in using their sight read the pattern on the land as part of the land. A first vision is that of perspective. It involves not looking down but ahead, as far as the eye might detect what has been dragged or where brush might be bent back. Only then does the tracker look at the prints making the trail. The tracker is seeing these as roadways, ways of the quarry and ways of others who might also be following, connecting into continuous trails of animals gone before, assembling deeper meaning from the multiple tracks as well as direction.

  While following specific tracks, a tracker walks beside them. Each animal has specific imprints that can be learnt. As people have distinctive fingerprints—tracks left on everything we touch—so does every animal, for hooves are nails on fingers. And except for snakes and birds, animal tracks made from four feet are available. And among these four one foot will likely have some abnormality: a chip off a hoof, a bend to a digit, or the manner one drags. (Snake belly trails also have distinctive features.) Spotting these is easiest when highlighted by a shadow that lifts ridges or slight indentations to view. Thus, the best time for tracking is morning or evening because that is when shadows lengthen these details, magnifying (as a lens magnifies fingerprints) what might be less easy to see when light shines straight down.

  On hard ground where imprints do not reveal much, look for items unnaturally placed—a pebble turned, a broken leaf or twig. Disruption happens into and on top of the land. Though the footprints are found on the land, tracks also are left above. There may be signs in bushes or on trees or brushes on rocks that are made when they scrape them with their backs and necks.

  Try to think like the quarry you follow. Human senses may be weak, but we can use our greatest gift, the mind. Explain the pattern when it is obvious and then extend it when not obvious. Follow the trail using the mind to predict. Knowing the habits of the quarry helps to get inside its mind, and it amplifies the trail. So while following one trail it is important to remember the earlier trails of the same kind. Was this individual looking for food? If so, where is its food in this land? Was it trying to get away? If so, where is the easiest escape path? As the animal is identified as a species, what also needs to be identified is the purpose that is making the path you follow. Is it headed to rest? If so, taking into consideration these habits, in what places does this species and age of animal feel secure? Was it en route to its secluded children? What type of home does this type choose? Is it headed for sex? It would be almost impossible to predict such a trail, but sometimes sounds made by the mating animals can help. When following by the mind, the spoor itself need be seen only occasionally.

  A resting animal, its eyes being closed, usually lies with its nose and ears facing upwind so that its mind can sense danger coming from at least that direction while the eyes are closed, the animal is relying on the wind to carry approaching sounds and smells. In sleep, the senses of smell and hearing remain awake.

  While other trails may brush against bushes, the trail of humanity rises above the land into the sky. When it comes to footprints, we leave a footprint no other animal can: carbon footprints. While other trails pass across the land, ours circles the planet. This larger trail took its energies from the life that died long back, and so this distinctive human trail not only circles the planet but also reaches back into time. And while the paths of others end where they are laid to rest, our enduring imprints shall disrupt life for generations to come. In my Yeti search, my mind often remembered the cartoon on my refrigerator—words a Yeti might say to a human if an encounter were to happen: ‘Is it not strange people call me “Bigfoot”, for yours of carbon is so much larger than mine?’

  IN THE AFTERNOON OUR GROUP SPREADS OUT ON the ridge where views extend to the Chinese border in the north and past Makalu to the Everest massif in the west.

  Tirtha, though, points to the jungle. ‘Before us is the wet Himalaya as it existed before people,’ he says. ‘You see in this valley seventy degrees of biological latitude—a biological view from Delhi to the North Pole, and it is all pristine. It is impossible to physically see that anywhere else now. Imagine going from Florida to the Arctic and skipping Washington DC, New York City, farms and suburbs, and the extensive human alteration of America’s East Coast. But such a journey in a pristine habitat Asia can be done here. Here, a view of 5,000 miles on the flat is travelled with a turn of the head.

  ‘Temperature change creates these habitats. For every 1,000 feet climbed, the mean temperature drops by three degrees. Today we climbed from subtropics up through temperate zones to reach this alpine zone. Above this zone is the arctic. This is just a habitat range created by the temperature. Add to that the way the sun’s energy varies depending on ridge exposure; some folds of the land get direct sunlight while others get shade. Ridges also change air currents and with that rainfall. What is extraordinary about this valley is that all this diversity of habitat is a world never altered by people. The Barun may be a valley … but it is also the whole Asian world.

  ‘Everyone expects the Himalaya to have an alpine habitat, but it is much more. Where the Barun and Arun rivers join at 3,100 feet is a phenomenally low for Himalayan heartland, and from there with fringe specimens of the tropics, the habitats climb to 29,000 feet which is beyond the Arctic and on
the fringe of Space. This valley’s bottom begins in a forest that has Castanopsis, which is a type of beech, and Schima, which belongs to the tea family; as is common with the subtropics and tropics.’

  ‘What’s so special about the subtropics?’ I ask.

  ‘Today more focus is on the tropics because of their species diversity. So biologists prioritize this life zone. But to support human life, the subtropics are more important; we are animals of the subtropics, for this is the zone where we were nurtured as a species and where civilizations evolved. Look around the world. There is almost no pristine subtropical habitat left. In many places tropical ecology exists. But humans, after agriculture, almost completely changed the subtropics. Mesopotamia used to be biologically rich—it is where agriculture began and flourished—and now these lands are desert. China and India were lands of jungles and savannas, but today they are human food fields.’

  ‘Well, what about the Barun?’ I ask.

  ‘In front of us is the pristine Asia, not just of Nepal but also of wet South Asia. What your eye sees there at the top is the Asian Arctic, then where we sit now is tundra Siberia, and going down below us are all ecozones to the subtropics—all wild. Tonight stand on this ridge and look across the valley—night makes it easier to imagine a wild world. You are on a ridge many might call “nowhere”, but look out and make two journeys: one from the subtropics to the arctic, and the other back in time before people populated the planet. You are not “nowhere” but sitting in middle of what Asia was, and experiencing life across time, and planetary diversity.’

  12.4 The Ecozones of the Barun Valley and Parallel Habitats

  Source: Adapted from Tirtha Shrestha, Development Ecology of the Arun River Basin in Nepal, ICIMOD Senior Fellowship Series (Kathmandu: International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, 1989) p. xx.