Vic very, very slowly walked into the cave, stopping every once in a while to let the tigress get used to his presence. He went to the side of the tigress away from the cubs and stood there for a while looking at that lifted paw.
The tigress rumbled a bit, but did not growl. Anyone who had saved her cubs could not be all bad.
Vic squatted down so that he could see the wounded paw. There was no thorn in it and no quill. But there was an arrowhead deeply embedded in the flesh. No one on the Indian side of the mountain used arrows, therefore it must have been fired by a Tibetan.
Very gently, Vic lifted the foot and drew out the arrowhead. The tigress turned to look at him and again he thought he saw gratitude in her eyes. She even spoke. She said, ‘Ouf,’ and followed that with ‘Aum.’ Vic was not up on tiger language, but accepted these remarks as being friendly.
She now took to washing her four cubs just as a house cat washes her kittens.
Now Vic dared to do something very dangerous. He picked up the four tiny cubs, put two in one pocket and two in another. The tigress grumbled and worried but could not attack such a friend. Vic walked very slowly out of the cave and the tigress followed, and kept on following until they arrived at the camp.
Sherpas who had been standing about saw the monster approach. They rushed into their tent and closed it firmly against this great killer. Hal and Roger came out and Vic told them the whole story. Then the tigress was put to sleep and she, along with a bagful of her precious babies, was sledded down to Aligar.
Hal put an arm around Vic and said, From now on you’re our brother.’
That’s what I’d like to be,’ said Vic.
Later on, Hal slipped a cheque for $250 into Vic’s pocket for the capture of five remarkable animals.
Chapter 30
The Yeti Mystery
Their animal collection complete, the boys and the Sherpas returned to Aligar.
They had one more job to do. John Hunt had asked them to investigate what the world called the Abominable Snowman and the people of the mountains called the Yeti.
The main thing for us to find out,’ said Hal, ‘is whether there are Yeti or not. Are they real, or just imaginary? Most of the mountain people believe they are real. In Katmandu they believe it. In Bhutan, shut in by the Himalayas, they have great stories about these unseen creatures. The Yeti are called ‘the national animal of Bhutan’. They even put a picture of the Yeti on their postage stamps.’
‘If everybody believes it, it must be true.’ said Roger.
‘Not quite,’ said Hal. There was a time when everyone believed the earth was flat, They were all wrong. Even in these countries there are some who don’t believe in Yeti. I think that shopkeeper is one of them. The head lama is perhaps another. The relics they tried to sell us may not be real Yeti scalps, or Yeti arms, or Yeti tails, or have anything at all to do with Yeti. I don’t know. We’ll just have to find out. First let’s go to see that shopkeeper who tried to sell us what he called a Yeti scalp.’
They dropped in at the store and were enthusiastically received.
‘Ah,’ said the shopkeeper, ‘you came to buy that Yeti scalp.’
‘Well,’ said Hal, ‘we’ve been thinking about it. But first I’d like to have you come down to the mayor’s garden where our animals are stored. I think you’ll be interested to see them. Bring along the Yeti scalp.’
The man called his wife to take care of the shop and went with the boys to see the magnificent white tiger and the cubs, the beautiful snow leopard, the ibex, the Tibetan yak and finally the blue bear. The shopkeeper was much pleased and impressed.
‘And now you have come back to buy the Yeti scalp.’ he said.
‘Let me have it for a moment,’ said Hal.
The blue bear was lying at the side of his cage and some of his hair projected between the wires. Hal placed the furry scalp beside the fur of the blue bear.
‘Do you notice anything?’ he asked the shopkeeper.
‘Can’t say I do,’ replied the shopkeeper.
‘You don’t notice that the hair on the scalp and the hair on the blue bear are exactly the same?’
‘Well, now that you speak of it, there is a slight similarity.’
‘Not just a slight similarity,’ said Hal, ‘they are exactly the same. In other words, that scalp was made from the skin of a blue bear, not a Yeti. And you tried to sell it to us for a lot of money.’
The shopkeeper was full of excuses. ‘How did I know the scalp was made of blue bear skin? The man who sold it to me said it was a true Yeti scalp. I took his word for it. I can’t help it if he was not honest and reliable.’
Hal felt like saying that he couldn’t help it if the shopkeeper was not honest and reliable. Instead, he merely smiled and returned the scalp to the shopkeeper.
‘Please sir,’ said that gentleman, ‘don’t tell anybody about this.’ He walked back to the shop with his fake Yeti scalp.
The boys went in to thank the mayor for taking good care of the animals. Hal paid him more rupees than he had ever seen at one time in his life.
‘Glad to be of service,’ said the mayor. That’s what we are here for. We also like to provide our guests with some of these Yeti relics.’ And he laid them out on the floor.
The two young naturalists examined them very carefully.
One that the mayor said was the arm of a Yeti was really the hind leg of a Himalayan bear. A ‘Yeti claw’ had really come from a black bear. A beautiful white rug said to be the skin of a Yeti was a skin all right, but the skin of a snow leopard.
The two investigators left to meet their friend the head lama, and Hal asked, ‘When you saw the Yeti through the window, did you take a photograph of him?’
‘No,’ said the lama, ‘he was gone before I could get my camera out.’
‘Have you ever seen a photograph of a Yeti?’
‘I can’t say that I have. But in the magazine called Yeti, published in Katmandu, I read about a yogi who had taken a picture of a Yeti. People came to his home to see it but they never could get him to show them the picture. He always sent them word that he was meditating and could not be disturbed.’
‘But I don’t understand,’ said Hal, ‘why the picture he had taken was not reproduced with the article in the magazine. What did he say in that article?’
‘He claimed that he had encountered the Yeti on a glorious day with snowflakes flying in the air. By the way, I have the article. You can read it for yourself. It is in English.’
Hal and Roger read the article by the yogi whose name was Nath. The yogi wrote:
All was still and calm. I was chanting Hindu prayers when I suddenly saw the greatest spectacle of my life. I knew it was the Yeti, the great Snowman, the thing we have been talking about for years. I was astonished. As he drew closer he looked in my direction. He nodded his head and continued hopping or limping as he moved. Then the Yeti went away and disappeared into the misty clouds that hang over the mountain. Before he left I got his picture. When he was gone my companions caught up with me and were surprised to find me in a dazed condition. I pointed in the direction of the disappearing Yeti, but my friends said they could see nothing. The creature was seven arms tall, and as stout as a barrel. He had long arms and a short neck, a pointed head, and was hairy all over. He had no tail. The footprints he left were enormous.
But the picture the yogi said he had taken was not published with the article and was never seen by anyone.
Hal suspected that the whole thing had been dreamed up by the yogi during his meditations.
The lama also had relics that he was willing to sell at high prices. The yogi had said his Yeti had no tail. The lama insisted the Yeti he had met did have a tail, and here it was. He laid it down on the floor. Hal took it up and examined it. He recognised it as the tail of a golden langur.
The lama bad other relics, all supposed to be parts of Yeti - scalps, teeth, jawbones, claws, arms and legs.
He said he had a complete
Yeti hide. He didn’t want to sell it, but would show it for a thousand rupees.
Hal guessed that the reason he didn’t want to sell it was because if he kept it he could show it over and over and over again at a thousand rupees a time.
‘How is it that we see no skulls of Yeti V Hal asked.
There are not many of them,’ said the lama. ‘I have the two best ones.’
He brought them out. Hal at once identified them. One was the skull of a dog. The other was the skull of a gorilla.
The next thing that was laid before them was an immense tooth. The lama informed them that a Yeti with toothache had torn the tooth from its mouth and thrown it in the snow. It could be bought for two hundred dollars.
‘All very interesting.’ said Hal. He did not say that this was the tooth of a Himalayan bear. ‘I’d like to buy it but it will take nearly all the money we have to ship our animals to New York. We have enough to pay for our lodging here if you will allow us to sleep on the floor for a few nights.’
‘You are more than welcome,’ said the lama. He swept up his ‘true Yeti relics’ and stored them away. He said he must go and meditate, and he left the room.
Perhaps he meditated on how to convince these boys that Yeti were real, not just creatures of imagination.
The boys walked through the village. They looked again at the great five-foot print outside the shopkeeper’s door. They remembered large footprints they had seen elsewhere in their climb up and down the mountain. The people had said these were made by enormous Yeti.
‘How about that?’ Roger asked. ‘Those huge footprints?’
That isn’t very mysterious,’ Hal said. ‘If you make a print in the snow with your boot and come back a couple of days later and look at it you will imagine that it would have been made by a monster.’
‘But how does it get so big?’
The sun. A couple of days of strong sun and the edges of your footprint will be melted so that it looks like the footprint of a giant. Try it and see.’
Roger did try it and found it was so. The sun had so enlarged the footprint that the superstitious folk on the mountain might easily suppose it to have been made by a giant Yeti.
The boys could report to their father that there was no scientific proof of the existence of Yeti even though most of the inhabitants of the Himalayas believed in them.
Chapter 31
Mountains Make Men
In the small telegraph and telephone office Hal phoned New Delhi for five trucks to transport his animals to Bombay and load them on the freighter Horizon for New York. He cabled his father as follows:
LET ME KNOW IF YOU HAVE RECEIVED OUR FIRST SHIPMENT OF ANIMALS. A SECOND SHIPMENT WILL COME TO YOU ON THE FREIGHTER ‘HORIZON’ CARRYING A BLUE BEAR, IBEX, YAK, SNOW LEOPARD CAUGHT BY ROGER, ALSO A WHITE TIGER AND FOUR WHITE TIGER CUBS CAPTURED BY VIC STONE.
Two days later he received his father’s answer:
YOU AMAZE ME. WE RECEIVED YOUR FIRST SHIPMENT OF ANIMALS AND NOW YOU ARE SENDING MORE. I ASKED FOR SIXTEEN ANIMALS AND YOU ARE GIVING ME TWENTY-FIVE. YOUR VIC STONE MUST BE QUITE A MAN - CAPTURING NOT ONLY THE FABULOUS WHITE TIGER, BUT FOUR WHITE TIGER CUBS WHO WILL KEEP THE WHITE TIGER FAMILY GROWING IN ZOOS THAT HAVE NEVER SEEN A WHITE TIGER. GOOD WORK. CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU, ROGER AND STONE. BETTER COME HOME NOW AND GET BACK TO SCHOOL AND COLLEGE.
Hal said to Roger, ‘Dad is right about Vic. The mountains made a man of him. He had a lot of tough experiences and they toughened him. All the hard climbing, tackling a rope ladder, nearly frozen in a howling blizzard, covered with bites after using a Sherpa sleeping bag full of lice and fleas, forced to take a bath in snow, and worst of all, buried in an avalanche where he could hardly breathe and felt his last day had come, then performing that difficult and dangerous job of capturing a white tiger and cubs - it all changed him from a thieving nincompoop into a real man.’
‘Of course there’s one more thing that changed him,’ said Roger. ‘You dug him up. He never appreciated you before. Now he would do anything in the world for you.’
They didn’t dream that within half an hour Vic was going to do just that for Hal.’
‘While we’re waiting for the trucks,’ Hal said, let’s go out and take a look at a glacier. There’s a big one just outside the village.’
They found Vic and the three of them explored the glacier. It was a great sheet of ice inching slowly down the mountain. Roger had always thought of a glacier as being perfectly smooth and was astonished to find that this one was full of giant cracks called crevasses that made walking extremely dangerous. Some of the crevasses were a hundred feet deep. They came to one that was partly bridged over by snow and ice.
‘Do we dare cross it?’ Roger wondered. ‘Perhaps it will break under our weight.’
‘I’ll try it,’Hal said.
He stepped on it. ‘I think it’s solid,’ he said. Very cautiously he walked out to the middle of the bridge.
Then there was a crackling sound, the snow bridge gave way, and Hal dropped a hundred feet to the bottom of the great crack.
Fortunately the rocks at the bottom were covered with snow - but the snow had hardened and Hal landed with a jolt that knocked the breath out of him and made his mind a blank. He lay there as if dead, his eyes closed, and with no movement of his arms or legs. Roger and Vic called to him but got no answer. He was unconscious. A hundred foot fall was enough to kill even a man as strong as Hal.
‘A rope!’ exclaimed Vic, ‘We’ve got to have a rope.’ He set out at a run for the village. He came back in a few minutes with a rope and some Sherpas.
If Hal could take hold of the rope and hang on, they could pull him up. They lowered the rope until the end of it lay on his body. They shouted, hoping to wake him up. He was far gone. He did not stir.
‘I’ll go down.’ said Vic. ‘I’ll tie the rope around him and you can hoist him up,’
‘You can’t do that,’ said Roger, but he was speaking to the old Vic, not the new one. Vic went down the rope hand over hand and landed beside Hal’s body. He put his fingers on his friend’s wrist. He could feel a very faint heartbeat. ‘He’s alive!’ he shouted to those above. He put the rope around the body, just below the armpits. He tied it fast.
‘Haul away,’ he shouted.
Roger and the Sherpas drew the body slowly up between the two ice walls of the crevasse and finally Hal, still unconscious, lay on the snow well away from the great crack that had swallowed him.
For the time being Vic was forgotten. Roger did what he could to revive his brother and the Sherpas had their own ideas of first aid. At last, Hal opened his eyes.
‘What’s been going on?’ he said.
‘You’ve been giving us a big scare.’ said Roger. ‘We were afraid you were dead.’
‘What nonsense,’ said Hal. ‘Why did you think I was dead?’
‘Don’t you remember? You fell into the crevasse.’
‘I did no such thing,’ said Hal indignantly.
‘You tried to cross the bridge. It broke and you fell.’
Then how did I get here?’
‘Vic went down and roped you and the men pulled you up.’
Hal looked around. ‘Where’s Vic?’
Everyone had forgotten about Vic. They looked over the edge. There he was, deep down, lying on the snow, recovering from the unusual exertion of climbing down a hundred feet of rope.
They once more let down the rope and Vic tried to tie himself into it. It was a lot of trouble, because in this great icy refrigerator his hands were numb with cold.
He was hauled up the ice wall to the top and was glad to see Hal actually on his feet as if nothing had happened. Vic extended a frost-bitten hand and Hal took it.
Vic said, ‘I’m so glad to see you’re still alive and kicking.’
‘If you hadn’t come after me.’ said Hal, ‘by this time I’d be as dead as an icicle.’
The next day the trucks came and the animals of the high Himalayas began their trip t
o the wild animal farm of John Hunt and Sons.
Chapter 32
What’s a Father For?
Vic was taken to the hospital on the plains below.
It was not just his rescue of Hal that had exhausted him, but the strain of capturing a great white tiger, and especially his near-death experience buried alive in the avalanche.
‘You have pulmonary embolism,’ the doctor told him, ‘and a bad case of edema.’
‘What’s that?’ queried Vic.
‘Water on the lungs. It makes it difficult for oxygen to reach your arteries.’
Hal had gone with him to see him safely bedded down in the hospital. Now Hal cabled Vic’s father, Robert Stone, in Cleveland.
YOUR SON IS DANGEROUSLY ILL. HE IS IN THE HOSPITAL AT NEW DELHI. HE IS NOT THE VIC YOU KNEW. NOW HE HAS BECOME A MAN WORTHY OF YOUR LOVE. HE HAS SAVED MY LIFE. YOU CAN SAVE HIM.
Two days later Vic looked up to see his father standing beside his bed. Vic had been thinking about dying. Now he began to think about living.
‘Dad,’ he said, ‘you made that long trip just to see me. I thought you had given me up as a bad job. Now I know I’m going to get better.’
‘Of course you will,’ said Robert Stone. ‘And I’ll stay until you do. Then you are going home with me. I’ve been lonesome without you.’
Under the care of a British doctor and encouraged by his father, Vic rapidly recovered. He and his father went back to Parkwood Drive, Cleveland, Ohio.
Vic, who had always been a braggart, never bragged about his adventures in the Himalayas. He did brag about Hal Hunt. ‘He and his brother - great guys,’ he said.
He was a great guy himself. His father thought, ‘Vic -short for Victory. Victory over himself.’
Hal and Roger went home to a warm reception from parents and friends. They saw again the fine animals they had taken alive - a job far more difficult than shooting them dead.
Back to the schoolbooks. But it was most curious how the algebra and geometry kept fading from the page to be replaced by a misty vision of the Gir Forest and the high Himalayas.
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