The Ancestor

by Danielle Trussoni

  “I paused, listening. There was a struggle inside. I heard a cry of terror. It sounded human, so I ventured inside. I hoped to take a few pictures to show Pierre and hurry away to safety. But what I found was not at all what I expected. There, at the center of the passage, stood a kind of human being. It was tall and thin, with wide shoulders, long, strong arms, and white hair. It wore a leather vest and some trousers but no shoes, and it stood on two legs, as the prints had shown. The skin was pale, so pale that it blended in with the snow.”

  Justine brushed her bangs from her eyes.

  “But most terrible of all, it was carrying a human child. A little boy.”

  As Justine said these words, a feeling of horror welled up in me. Joseph. It must have been Greta’s son. I wanted to ask her to describe the boy, but I knew if I spoke I would show how deeply her story affected me. I would give everything away. “What did you do?” I managed.

  “Everything in my body and soul revolted. I sobbed, or screamed, something between the two. The noise caught the creature’s attention. It turned and looked at me. Our eyes locked for a moment. I wanted to turn and run, but I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed by fear, and by something else, too, something closer to fascination. I stared at it, this tall, white-skinned, blue-eyed beast, and odd as it may sound, I felt that I was in the presence of something marvelous. Some part of nature we rarely experience. I found there was something intelligent about it, something I recognized as human, not only in the shape of the face but the expression. And so I spoke to it, hoping that it would understand. ‘I’m Justine,’ I said. ‘Justine.’”

  Justine glanced at me, perhaps worried that I would think she was out of her mind. But I knew the exact feelings she described.

  “The creature turned to me,” Justine said. “And I was sure, from its expression, that it had understood, if not the words I spoke, then my intention. It came closer, so close I saw its glassy blue eyes. I wanted to help the child, I wanted to take him in my arms and carry him down the mountain, but I couldn’t. I was too afraid. Instead, I ran.”

  Justine looked at me, and I saw that her eyes had filled with regret.

  “I was some distance away when I heard its voice. Although the sound was muffled by the wind, it seemed to me that it had called for me to come back. Justine, I heard. Justine. The monster had said my name.”

  Nineteen

  “I’ve upset you,” Justine said, leaning to me and touching my hand. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t tell that story, especially to someone I’ve only just met. Come, I’ll make it up to you. Pierre has made lunch.”

  I followed Justine past the fireplace to an old-fashioned kitchen with an iron potbellied stove and a stone sink. Pierre had been cooking. The air was warm and smelled of roasting meat. Pierre opened a bottle of red wine and filled three plastic cups. Justine lifted a stack of plates from a shelf and set the table. The kitchen window was covered with a crust of ice, giving the world outside a watery, insubstantial look, as if everything beyond was melting. Wind whistled in the chimney. The storm was nowhere near over. I glanced at Pierre, wondering if he had tried to call the helicopter.

  As we sat, Pierre placed a metal roaster on the table. Justine added a bowl of mashed potatoes. The meat smelled rich, gamey. Pierre cut a piece of meat and put it on my plate. “I hope you like lapin,” he said.

  “Wild rabbit,” Justine translated. “Try it with mustard. It is delicious. Pierre shot it yesterday.”

  Pierre poured more wine into his plastic glass and raised it. “Bon appétit.”

  As we ate, they talked about ice-climbing gear, the top-ranked competitive climbers—a number of Koreans were ranked highly that year—and their intention to get back on the mountain as soon as the weather cleared.

  But even as we talked, I felt Justine’s story weighing on me. I couldn’t help but think of the boy she had wanted to save and the creature she had fled. Finally, when there was a pause in the conversation, I said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t forget what you told me by the fire.”

  “I can see that,” Justine said, refilling my glass. “You look like you’ve seen the monster yourself.”

  I tried to smile and took a drink of the wine. “Do you remember what it looked like?”

  “I will never forget it,” she said. “There was a human cast to its features—big blue eyes, a large skull, a wide mouth—but it was not human, I was sure of that. And yet, it wasn’t an animal either, or at least not an animal I could identify.”

  “What was it, then?” I asked, my heart racing. The description matched the photo of the Iceman so precisely that I could hardly breathe.

  “For a long time, I wasn’t sure,” Justine said. “And so I began to research the legends and myths of this region, hoping to find something more substantial than the old fireside stories. It became a kind of obsession for me, to be honest. I went to natural history museums in London, Paris, Switzerland, and Germany. I spoke with professors who have studied the history of the Alps. I went to archives and read all the personal accounts I could find.

  “There was a remarkable conference on cryptozoology last year in Lausanne. Cryptozoology is not only about sensational creatures like the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot. You may read about those kinds of monsters in the tabloids, but there are more ordinary discoveries all the time. For example, a new variety of jellyfish, one that had never been documented before, was recently discovered in the Mariana Trench, thirty-seven hundred meters underwater. Antarctica and Africa are full of undocumented life-forms. Cryptozoologists estimate that fifteen to twenty percent of the animals in the world are unknown to us. There is so much in nature we haven’t seen yet.”

  She stood and went into the other room and returned with a backpack. She opened it and pulled out a worn paperback book, Sur la piste des animaux inconnues, by Bernard Heuvelmans. “Bernard Heuvelmans was the founding father of cryptozoology, the science of studying and identifying animals of more or less unverifiable existence.”

  “You mean extinct?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “But more often they are animals that have not been documented by science.” She pulled a second book from her backpack. “This was published by Oxford University Press just this year. It is a scholarly investigation into Yeti, Sasquatch, Almasty, and Bigfoot accounts. It examines the eyewitness reports, the videos, the DNA analysis done on hair samples, and, to my mind, the most interesting part of this variety of scholarship: Eric Shipton’s famous nineteen fifty-one photographs of Yeti footprints.”

  “I didn’t know such scholarship even existed,” I said.

  “Not many people do,” she said. “The Yeti is a topic most often associated with crackpots and B-movies. Not serious scholarship.”

  I picked up Justine’s book and paged through it, skimming over pictures, graphs and charts, and story after story of Yeti sightings. There were the photographs from Sir Edmund Hillary’s expedition to the Himalayas and an essay about Sasquatch sightings in Oregon. As I paged through it, nothing in the book seemed to offer definitive proof. Footprints could be faked, photographs doctored, blood samples altered. If I hadn’t seen Vita myself, I would have tossed the book aside without giving it a second thought.

  As I handed the book back to Justine, a business card fell to the floor. I picked it up and read:

  Ludwig Jacob Feist

  Cryptozoologist

  Museum of Zoology

  Lausanne, Switzerland

  Justine plucked the card from my fingers and tucked it into her pocket. Then she turned to a series of photographs in the book. “Here they are,” she said. “These were taken at Menlung Glacier in Nepal. They changed the way the world thinks about the legend of the Yeti.”

  I looked at a series of exceptionally clear photographs of footprints in snow. They showed a large, wide foot with two big toes and three small ones.

  “Shipton’s pictures are so clear, and so perfectly composed, that there could be no doubt about their authenticity. Some later s
cholars have tried to argue that ice melt caused the enlargement of the heel, but that has been effectively dismissed. In fact, it is hard to argue with Shipton’s evidence. There were a number of witnesses at the site—the prints were actually discovered by Michael Ward and their authenticity verified by Sir Edmund Hillary, who led the expedition. There were many Englishmen as well as native Sherpas who saw the prints and verified Shipton’s account. The scientific community accepted the Shipton photographs, and they are now the most concrete evidence that a species of simian–Homo sapiens still exists.”

  “At least in nineteen fifty-one,” Pierre added.

  “After thinking it through,” Justine said, “I have come to the conclusion that the creature I followed, the creature my grandparents had always warned us about—the Beast of Nevenero—is related to the Yeti, or a similar creature. The Sasquatch in North America, the Almasty in Russia—they all have similar traits, leave similar prints, have been described to have similar behaviors. Which leads me to believe that they are one species that has spread over numerous continents and evolved in different ways. Although, in fairness, the beast that I found diverged in very significant ways from traditional descriptions.”

  “How so?”

  “There were physical differences. Descriptions of the Yeti are more or less uniform—the monster is gigantesque, for example. But the creature I saw was no giant. It was large, yes, and clearly very strong, but it was of a more or less human scale. Also, the Yeti is always described as being covered with fur. The original name for the Yeti came from the Tibetan Miche, which means ‘man-bear,’ and there is even speculation that the original Himalayan sightings were of a species of polar bear. But the creature I saw wasn’t covered in fur. There was hair over its chest, its back and legs, but hair, not fur. In fact, it appeared to be similar to human hair. And its arms and legs were human flesh.”

  Images of Vita came rushing over me. I saw her pale skin, her large blue eyes. I remembered the description of her at birth, with her rows of sharp teeth. I turned to Pierre. “What do you think of all this?”

  “After Justine told me what she saw, I was doubtful,” Pierre said. “Her story was, frankly, very difficult to believe. But she was so shaken that I knew something had happened. Then I read Heuvelmans’s books. And went to the lectures in Lausanne. Cryptozoologists take their work very seriously. And their theories are backed by facts.”

  “So you are a believer?”

  He put his hand over Justine’s and squeezed. “I guess you could say that.”

  Justine gave him a weak smile. “I admit, I have become the Don Quixote of the Alps. Pierre is kind. He doesn’t want me to feel alone. But every time we train, and we are up there on the glacier, I am looking to see another one.”

  Pierre refilled Justine’s glass. Her cheeks were flushed from the wine, or perhaps from the excitement of the topic.

  “But the Alps are so vast,” I said, eating the last bite of my rabbit and washing it down with wine. “It seems unlikely that you will ever have another encounter like that.”

  “The odds are not so great as one would imagine,” Justine objected. “You should read about the Gigantopithecus, the species of ape dating from the Pleistocene period that Heuvelmans identified as the Abominable Snowman. It was a kind of orangutan, supposedly extinct. But it was not extinct at all. It lived in the Himalayas, undisturbed by human beings, and the species survived, perhaps for millions of years. The same could be true here, in the Alps, especially in this part of the mountains. It is so remote, so uninhabitable, that there could be any number of so-called extinct life-forms thriving here. The Yeti could be here, and humanity would never know.”

  “And besides,” Pierre said, “the reward for a live Yeti is enormous.”

  I looked from Justine to Pierre. “There is a reward?”

  “Yes, the International Society of Cryptozoology has offered a generous reward,” Pierre said. “Any information that would lead to the capture of a Yeti brings one hundred thousand euros.”

  “It isn’t the motivation for our search,” Justine added. “But it doesn’t hurt.”

  “The Montebiancos know the secrets of these mountains better than anyone,” Pierre said, pouring the last of the wine. “We could split the reward three ways.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “But the only thing I know about these mountains is that it is incredibly difficult to get a helicopter out.”

  Pierre was watching me carefully, too carefully, and I felt that he must suspect something. Maybe he’d guessed that I had been hiding information. It seemed, for a moment, that he could see into my soul—or, rather, into my genetic code—and glean the truth of my heritage. And while I shrugged off this feeling and finished my glass of wine, there was some truth to it all. I was hiding something, something my body carried deep inside it, wrapped up safe like a seed at the center of an apple.

  Lunch, combined with my sleepless night at the castle, left me exhausted. By the end of the meal, I could hardly stay awake. Seeing my beleaguered state, Justine made up a bed on the couch and insisted that I take a nap. I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, the kind of sleep that leaves one, upon waking, unsettled and disoriented. When I woke, night had fallen, leaving the room completely dark except for the flickering light from the fire. I had slept the entire day away. The storm wasn’t over yet—snowflakes swirled outside the window. There was no way around it: I would be in Nevenero for the night.

  Pierre and Justine were in the kitchen speaking quietly in French. I strained to understand them. Ç’est fini. Elle dors? Oui, c’est bon. They weren’t far away, but it seemed a great distance to me, as if I were listening to a conversation from the bottom of a deep well.

  My mind returned to what Justine had seen in the mountains two years before. I saw the tracks, the cave, the beast carrying the child. As the scene played through my mind, my blood went cold. The description of the creature was so similar to the photograph in the trophy room, so similar to Vita, that it could only mean there were others like her out there, alive somewhere in the mountains. The braid of long white hair in the trophy room seemed to back this up. And yet, I struggled to understand how it could be true.

  It was then, as I stretched my legs, that I felt a draft of cool air brush over my feet. I had gone to sleep with my shoes tied tight. They had been soggy from the snow, so I had let them hang off the edge of the couch, hoping the fire would dry them. Now my feet were bare and exposed. The wide, flat bridge; the thick, meaty pink pads that protected the heel and ball; the second toe, with its long, hooked nail glinting in the firelight—everything that I had hoped to hide had been revealed.

  I tried to sit upright, but a hard, tight tug cinched my body, holding me down. I couldn’t move more than a few centimeters in any direction. I struggled, trying to get out, but there was no give. Looking down, I found a row of bright-colored straps locked over my chest, my waist, my legs, even my ankles. Pierre and Justine had used their climbing ropes to belt me to the couch.

  I looked around the room the best I could, trying to stay calm, but it was easier said than done. I was terrified. Thoughts of every horrific thing that could happen to me—murder and rape and torture—rushed through my mind. Instinctually, I revolted against the restraints, pushing against the straps, twisting and turning as I tried to break free.

  The noise brought Pierre and Justine. Pierre held a hunting rifle in his hands, and Justine stayed behind him, her eyes wide with fascination. “There’s no need to be afraid,” Justine said.

  “They’re too tight,” I said, panic making my voice strange. “I can’t breathe.”

  “They have to be tight,” Pierre said. “Or you will run.”

  With that, Pierre took Justine by the arm and led her out of the room. I stifled a sob, feeling my cheeks grow wet with tears of fear and frustration. I called after them, trying to convince them to let me go, begging them to tell me why they’d restrained me, promising them money if they would untie
me. I could hear them talking in the kitchen, and while they spoke in French and I couldn’t understand a word they said, I clung to the hope that they would realize their mistake and free me. Soon, I would be back home, safe with Luca, telling him the story of my captivity as if it were nothing more than a dark fairy tale.

  Twenty

  I woke at the first light of day to the creeping sensation of fingers on my feet. I jerked back, a reaction that was pure animal instinct.

  “There, there,” a male voice said. “No need to get upset. I’m just taking a look at your beautiful hallux.”

  The owner of the voice sat on a chair at the end of the couch. He was an older man, perhaps sixty, with a trimmed white beard and wire-rimmed glasses. He wore a ski jacket, unzipped to reveal a bow tie. A notebook, tape measure, and camera sat on the table nearby. Pierre and Justine hung back behind him.

  I glanced toward the window. The snow had stopped falling at last, and bright light drifted through the shutters. Had this man come in a helicopter overnight? Had I really slept through helicopter noise? Maybe Pierre and Justine had given me something to make me sleep.

  “Are you aware that twenty-five percent of the bones in the human body are located in the feet?” the man said. “One-quarter. Exactly twenty-six bones in each foot. Quite a feat of engineering, wouldn’t you say?” He laughed a high-pitched, childlike laugh at his facile pun. “But that is in the human foot. I can’t say what we’ll find when we X-ray your feet. Your feet are quite unusual. Not at all like human feet. More like the feet of the Gigantopithecus, wouldn’t you say?”