Outside experts who have heard about our actions are sceptical: Can China’s Communist Party truly be a partner? But China has an unexpected history of partnership. Barefoot doctors and peasant scholars were not the accepted models of how health and education could be delivered. In environmental protection can a people-based approach be used? Hu Jintao just told us the idea is to co-opt the political for the environmental, to change to live with nature. To me this meant developing bioresilience on the part of one species to accommodate to change: what will carry not only human life but all life is setting in place systems that grow our abilities to stretch.
John Craighead, Tom Roush (a friend from New York), and I sit around a big table, one of perhaps twenty in this cavernous hall, built for the Chinese army when, during the 1960s and 1970s, they feared attack by CIA-supported fighters of the Dalai Lama. With time people gain insights, and the Dalai Lama’s enlightenment is proven by his present message of no longer advocating violent insurrection. In a world today tempted towards fundamentalisms, the journey of this man speaks: he began as a fundamentalist and took in new ideas. His Holiness stretched.
Across the table, Tom is talking: ‘Dan’l, I know it sounds stupid, but that Everest we saw today has got to be the biggest thing in the world, and when in front of that mountain you know you’re a long, long way from anywhere’. Tom is unwinding from the shock of discovering himself castaway atop a 17,700-foot pass when our vehicles abandoned him in the dark after our group stopped for sunset photographs. He asks, ‘What prompted you to start this project, Dan’l?’
The talk has been of biology for the past hour, and that tired others in our group so they turned in for bed. ‘Tom, I came searching for the Yeti. Some “thing” was making footprints in the snow. But what I discovered is a habitat; the larger context of the Yeti tied us to a quest for wildness’s lost place in a today that takes away wildness’.
‘If you want wildness,’ John laughs softly, ‘let me introduce you to Ursus arctos horribilis—you’ll feel wild real fast as you scramble up a tree with a grizzly on your ass, leaving unrecognizable footprints on tree bark’.
‘I know the story’s Nepal side—the Yeti leading to Makalu–Barun National Park’, Tom says. ‘But how did you cross a closed international border, especially one into Tibet in China? You don’t get opportunities such as we had in our just concluded meetings with three vice-governors when the border is closed. You cannot simply stop by their offices to propose an idea when you cannot even enter the territory where they work’.
‘Work grew by partnerships, Tom’, I answer. ‘To get a partner you must offer that person something, and over the years what I’ve offered is information. In international work, Americans usually offer money or power. But having neither, I use information. When I became a friend with Nepal’s Crown Prince in graduate school and then when he became king he needed information he was not getting from his own people, and I brought him that. His trust grew.
‘But I want to know how you got into China? Tibet was totally closed’, Tom asks. John is smiling, for he’d watched the story unfold over six years.
‘As a climber, Tom, I learned that sometimes a crazy idea leads into an interesting climb. There are many routes up every mountain’.
‘Tell about using the king’s helicopter’, John says with a grin.
So I start, ‘When Makalu–Barun Park was underway, in 1985 an international conference was held in Nepal, and because our new park was based on partnerships with people, I was invited to speak. Attending that conference was a delegation from China. And it being an all-Asian conference with ministerial-level representation, the King of Nepal held a reception.
‘My speech had been earlier in the day. I had talked about both sides of the border, extending from how Makalu–Barun was a core area in the pan-Himalayan wild, and I spoke of the role of the mountains in people’s lives across Asia. At His Majesty’s reception I went up to the Chinese delegation—they are very formal you know—but my speech had made me known, and asked the delegation’s leader if, being from Beijing, he would like to look into his country from several passes between Nepal and China the following morning. He could see then what I had spoken of. I suggested we might arrange for the king’s helicopter to show him. He was astonished, saying how could he, a minister from China, use the king’s helicopter?
‘Let’s ask’, I said, and we walked over to the king. I was greeted graciously, and permission was given. So the following morning we flew around the world’s highest summits and peaked over into China. Three senior members of China’s government saw valleys and mountains that called for being created into a national park. Introductions in Tibet followed.
Tom smiles, ‘You could make a movie out of this’.
‘That was only a door into Tibet—I kept gathering information’, I continued. ‘After the Everest preserve, I suggested we study the larger Tibetan region. The whole Tibetan region was incompletely known in the mid-1980s, even to the Chinese. It cost some money which I had to raise, but the results were staggering. Teams now of Chinese and Tibetan scholars have been going into valleys for five years. The original Everest park ended up connecting to five parks in Nepal and now on through Bhutan, India, Myanmar, into Sichuan in mainland China itself’.
Tom sits silently.
John has thought of another question. ‘Dan’l do you remember that cave in the middle of the Barun Valley? You said you were going there someday to look for your Yetis. Dense jungle was at its doorstep, a stream running past, no human village for a week’s walk. Nearby were grassy glens where baby Yetis could gambol in the sun. The climate was ideal, and food plentiful. Did you ever check it out?’
‘Well yes. Last year I was in a helicopter surveying the boundaries for Makalu–Barun National Park. With our survey of the Ishwa Khola finished, as we headed to the Barun I asked to fly across the meadow where Derek spotted the cave. It was by chance the same time of the year, and the same time of the day. The chopper was 20 feet off the ground. Immediately that cave stood out—big, inviting, mysterious. I pointed the pilot towards it. Then, hovering in front, the cave disappeared. The black entrance so convincingly a cave turned into a shadow cast by the cliff above. At a 10:00 a.m. angle on a November morning, the sun creates the appearance of a cave.
‘Ah, my last fantasy farewell’, Tom exclaims. ‘Lost Yeti survivors holding out in secluded caves, noble savages making love in the grass as their disappearing kind holds valiantly on to a balance with nature while other hominoids destroy it. Let’s go to bed’.
BUT THE BEAR ENIGMA CONTINUES TO PUZZLE. The tree bear and the ground bear, are these two bears or one? Science that answers mysteries by DNA and skull features says ‘one bear’. The villagers of Shyakshila, who know their bears by behaviour, say ‘two bears’.
In the villagers’ definition of bears based on behaviour what matters is the likelihood one bear is more apt to invade their lives. If a fierce bear lives in their jungles, and another easily scares out of their cornfields, having two bears makes sense. But to organize life on our planet, science says both bears are one. A scientist can place fourteen skulls into a sequence and all differences explained within normal taxonomical variations. Nonetheless, skulls do not have behaviours—and concerning those skulls though once wild, what that dentition can do in fields and to people is a very different definition.
For science’s questions, John’s hypothesis is probably the finding: the tree bear is the juvenile, the ground bear is the adult, and likely the dramatic ‘thumbs’ are an inner digit in young bears still with flexible tendons where these digits are ‘taught’ to fall lower on the paw and to grip in a thumb-like way. A young twoling, that must spend much of its time in trees to avoid aggressive big males on the ground, trains its front paw to work like a primate’s hand with opposable grip.
If so, what of the mystery of Oldham’s Selanarctos aboreous, advanced a century earlier, a decade and a half before the Yeti was reported? In 1988, I spent a
day in the British Museum, pulling out drawers of bear skulls. It was a delight to be in that unequalled museum. I was on the seventh floor, with bear skulls around, the world’s greatest collection of Himalayan bears. I pulled aboreus out of a drawer where it had sat 120 years, and indeed there is nothing special about it. Pocock was right, and I am sure every taxonomist would agree: arboreus is another thibetanus skull.
I went to the library on the second floor and got Pocock’s Mammalia of British India. He debunked arboreus on the basis of the skull, but described subspecies of thibetanus on the basis of coats, now an unacceptable taxonomic criterion. Selanarctos thibetanus thibetanus, from the eastern Himalaya, is smaller and has no undercoat. Selanarctos thibetanus langier, from the western Himalaya, has a thicker coat, and especially an undercoat. But in that article, in addition to the coat, Pocock described behavioural differences between langier and thibetanus of aggression and non-aggression, the differences we found between ground and tree bears.
What, I wondered, creates the behavioural differences. My conclusion now is that the Barun being isolated makes bears there less aggressive—as, in the reverse, black bears in the United States become more aggressive when they live close to humans, eat garbage, and no longer fear people. Bears when in competition for food become aggressive. However, Barun bears who can work the trees find plenty of food; they thrive as young bears and are not aggressive. But the big old bears, who as juveniles ate well, find less to eat on the ground as the dense tree cover minimizes ground level food growth. (Trees being the base of the life pyramid in the Barun, not grass.) These codgers get mean competing for food. Aggression then enables them to survive.
If that is the tree bear/ground bear explanation, what about the Yeti?
First, it is important again to dismiss all but the evidence that is genuinely mysterious as all alleged Yeti artefacts brought forward across the decades have been studied and explained. The most famous is the Kumjung scalp. Hillary’s expedition in 1960 borrowed that and took it to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The ‘Yeti skull cap’ turned out to be a moulded portion of serow skin, probably from a serow’s rump. In another monastery is a purported Yeti finger, but DNA shows that finger to be human. A Yeti bone exists in Bhutan, but DNA evidence shows it also to be human.
Hair and droppings collected by the Slick expeditions have never been made public. I have trouble imagining Slick did not have this done privately, and it interests me that towards the end of his life he was less adamant about the Yeti existing—maybe his privately held lab information was the reason. But as Slick never brought forward evidence, and all we know is the field reports of expeditions that went looking, the absence of evidence is evidence his reports should be discounted.
A report becomes truth only when objectively confirmed. And multiple reports of multiple sightings do not sum into evidence. Yet, the Yeti lives on. When a Westerner is on a Himalayan trek, the purpose is adventure, then that adventurer comes across a print in the snow, and he brings home the ‘Abominable Snowman’. It is not evidence of the animal, but that this adventurer has been to the abode of Himalayan mysteries. In this manner, the Yeti is unlikely to ever die.
In this vein, I got a phone call from a Hollywood studio some years ago. As a ‘Yeti expert’ they wanted me to sit before cameras on a live TV screening as they played Yeti footage they had acquired. They would give me a thousand dollars. At the end of the showing I was to say whether the image was real … or point to the zipper in the suit. I declined, so they found another expert. But Bob Fleming and I watched the footage when it showed. We did not see the zipper, but in the film’s background Bob recognized a Scandinavian alder.
For the enduring Shipton print mystery that really started the Yeti search—and certainly my search—the suggestion of it being an overprint is, I am sure, the explanation. To understand this, it is helpful to look first at what the front and hind feet of Ursus thibetanus look like when the prints are made in the snow separately. The photograph 14.1 at the beginning of this chapter shows prints I found in the Barun Valley in 1986, with size indicated by a 52 mm lens cap. (Lens cap is 56 mm in exterior dimensions.) Noteworthy about the front foot is the three ‘toes’ on the upper left—these show strong similarities with the three toes on the Shipton print except that no nail marks are revealed. Noteworthy about the hind foot is the broad base. But what is most important about this rear foot is the nail mark on the upper left with a second nail mark beside it. The base of the foot shows strong similarities to the base of the Shipton print, but more crucially the two left nails on that rear print are identically placed to marks in the middle of the Shipton print.
The bear explanation for this print and the importance of the two marks in the middle of the Shipton print is not original to me. It was advanced by John R. Napier, a British primatologist who was involved in finding Homo habilis. Napier’s Yeti argument is:
Something must have made the Shipton footprint. Like Mount Everest, it is there … I would say a composite, made by a naked foot treading in the track of a foot wearing a leather moccasin … The curious V-shaped kink behind the big toe, which has no apparent biological function, could be then explained in terms of a deep fold in the leather of the moccasin.2
14.5 Jesse Washing Plaster Casts of Paw Print Moulds when We Placed the Hind Foot Offset to the Front to Replicate Various Configurations of Overprints. An Overprint that Comes Close to Repeating Shipton’s 1951 Photograph Rests on the Ground by Jesse’s Feet
Source: Author
Napier is saying that two people walked perfectly in each other’s tracks.
Napier is right about it being an overprint, but not as a human composite. First, it’s improbable that two people walking step after step in the anoxia of 19,000 feet would do exactly the same stride, even if they wanted to make the walk easier by stepping in each other’s steps, and in this case having their bare toes always beyond the ‘moccasin’ print. (Additionally, as the snow, according to Shipton, was thin, little reason would cause a follower to seek to step in the front person’s prints.)
Second, Napier is a primatologist, not an anthropologist. He did not know that in that part of the Himalaya villagers never wear soft-soled moccasins such that the bottom could develop ‘a deep fold in the leather’. Traditional footgear such as that of North American Indians are in his mind. In 1951, before modern footwear came, a local person in the Himalaya would have worn either the hard-soled Tibetan felt boot or the rigid shoe of twisted grass rope. Both leave sharp indentations in the snow.
Other things are also wrong with Napier’s argument. First, the supposed ‘heel strike’ suggested for the back of the print is in fact caused by melting, because it matches a similar indentation on the side (not back) of the partial second print shown in the bottom of the photo, an indentation almost certainly caused by melting. An important point, mentioned earlier, needs flagging here. Napier prudently went to the original negative of the Shipton print, and he found where the cropping of the photo had not shown the top of a second print on which additional inconsistent indentations are evident, especially with a nail-appearing imprint in the upper left, and which I attribute to be nail prints.
The variations between full print and partial print are important. They are consistent with a print being made by a four-footed animal that brings its feet straight down. Further, the Shipton print is concave, whereas if a bipedal hominoid had made them, the print should be convex. Bipedal walking requires an arch to launch the toes in each stride in their pivotal role. No arch shows in Shipton’s print.
But the most determinative feature about the Shipton print, the feature indicating it was made by a bear, is what Napier called the ‘curious V-shaped kink behind the big toe’ referenced above. That is a nail mark; it is the front left nail of the hind foot. The hind end of the bear being heavier than the front, the rear foot pressed into the snow to show nails where the front foot did not depress to show the nails. Then on the right of this pri
nt is another less distinct nail mark that relates to the one on the left; the distance between the two perfectly fits the hind foot of the Asiatic black bear, precisely the right width separation for Ursus thibetanus.
Other clues in the Shipton account suggest a more complex explanation for this most famous of Yeti prints. The trail Shipton and Ward came upon was more than one bear making overprints. Recall (in Chapter Five) Shipton’s quoting Sen Tensing having no doubt whatever that the creatures (for there had been at least two) that had made the tracks were ‘Yetis’. Tracks of the ‘at least two’ were clearly confused. Here is my point: When does more than one bear travel with another? It is likely that Shipton and Ward were following a mother bear that had cubs walking after her, and this is what a second photograph in Shipton’s 1951 book shows; this photograph (see 14.6), is of the whole trail.
The photograph is clear; one set of tracks is being overlaid on top of the other. It is not as Napier was suggesting humans trying to walk in each other’s tracks, but rather young bear cubs dutifully following their mother. This photograph shows a hit-or-miss of footprints on top of others. Sometimes it is evident that the prints end up being big round saucers. Other times they appear like longish strides. (In the photograph also are Shipton and Ward’s prints walking on both sides of the saucer-like bear overprints.)
This isn’t the first time multiple bear prints were mistaken for the Yeti. In 1954, Sherpas claimed mysterious footprints to be the Yeti, but Charles Evans saw nail marks, and pointed out that one set was larger, also indicating a mother and a cub. Further, to support the mother and cub thesis, the season of Shipton and Ward’s discovery is right for travel of a mother and her cub. If Shipton’s Yeti is a bear, the explanation should fit both foot features and known bear behaviour. Likely, the tracks that day in 1950 on the Menlung Glacier were a mother and cub(s) headed across a pass in search for food.
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 29