Mountain of the Dead

by Jeremy Bates

  “Hurry!” Igor yelled. “It’s coming in!”

  “My hat!” she cried.

  Zolotaryov seized her by the shoulders and all but tossed her out of the tent ahead of him. Grabbing a camera sitting on a bedroll, he followed behind her.

  The cold struck him like a truck; it must have been close to thirty degrees below zero. Through the fury of snowflakes and the lashing wind he made out the shadowy shapes of the others lurching down the mountainside, for all the world looking like swimmers wading in knee-deep water. Zolotaryov followed them, the flashlight still clutched tightly in his right hand, the beam flaring excitedly, revealing nothing but white snow and black sky.

  Then he stumbled, dropping the flashlight. At the same time he realized if they continued fleeing blindly they would lose each other and die from exposure.

  “Stop!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. He pushed himself back to his feet. “Come back!”

  Igor appeared beside him and called out, “Stop! Everyone! Stop!”

  A voice, from somewhere in the dark, replied, “Is it coming?” Georgy.

  Zolotaryov looked back toward the tent, but he could no longer see it.

  “No!” he shouted regardless.

  “Igor!” Zina shouted.

  “Here!” he said.

  Zina emerged from the blizzard, appearing to magically materialize from thin air. Lyuda, holding Georgy’s hand, followed.

  Zolotaryov and Igor continued calling to the others until they had all reunited.

  “What…hell…thing?” Rustem demanded, the unforgiving wind shredding his words as soon as they left his mouth.

  “You saw…!” Zina said, holding up her arms to protect her head from the invisible blows from the storm. “Snowman!”

  “What…want?” Lyuda said, her hair streaming witch-like around her head.

  “We need…back!” Doroshenko said, his arms folded across his chest. He wore nothing but his tent clothes.

  “Go back?” said Kolya, who was dressed much more warmly. “Crazy?”

  “Freeze here!”

  “No way…back!” Lyuda said. “Almasty…tent, Yuri!”

  “Maybe…won’t…hurt…?”

  “Maybe…off heads!”

  “Can’t stay here!” Zolotaryov said. “Need…decide!”

  “Go…valley!” Igor said. “Lozva River valley,” he repeated. “Wood…make fire!”

  “Freeze,” Georgy said. “Don’t…boots!”

  “Can’t…back…tent!”

  “’Gor’s right!” Zolotaryov said. “Valley…warm…fire…then go back.”

  “If…not gone?” Rustem said.

  “No…argue!” Igor seized his shoulder and shoved him downhill. “It might—”

  The rest of the sentence disappeared into the raging gale.

  ⁂

  They descended the mountain walking abreast of each other in two parallel lines. The wind pushed inexorably at their backs, as if urging them to hurry up. Yet Zolotaryov kept telling them to keep rank and not panic. If they ran and fell, he warned, they could be swept away down the mountain.

  Doroshenko knew this was a one-way journey. They would never be able to climb back up the mountain to the tent with the headwind in their faces. Which meant even if everyone got off the exposed slope together, they were still in some seriously deep trouble—him particularly. Without a jacket, boots, or socks he wouldn’t last another twenty minutes, fire or not.

  Every so often Zolotaryov contradicted his own advice to keep rank and hurried off to either side of them, no doubt to make sure they still headed in the right direction.

  After they crossed the frozen Lozva River, they spotted a large cedar in the distance, the wood of which would burn well. Igor quickly went to work sawing off all of the tree’s lower branches with his pocket knife, Kolevatov and Kolya scavenged moss and twigs and other kindling, and Zolotaryov got a fire going. Doroshenko and Georgy, the two least properly dressed, huddled closest to it. Doroshenko, holding his frozen hands to the small flames, could barely feel any heat.

  “Put more wood on it!” he said.

  “We need to make what we have last,’ Igor replied.

  “I don’t have a jacket like you, Igor! I’m freezing to death!”

  Zolotaryov set several more broken boughs onto the fire.

  “Not enough,” Georgy said. He was shivering. “Need shelter.”

  “We should have gone back to the tent,” Rustem said.

  “There was a snowman in the tent, Rustem!” Zina said.

  “Should we try to go back now?” Kolya said. “Maybe it’s gone?”

  “Doroshenko and Georgy won’t make it,” Zina said.

  “I can make it!” Doroshenko said, knowing he couldn’t, but knowing he would die here if he didn’t try.

  “No one can make it,” Igor said. “Not until that wind dies down. We need to find shelter in the forest.”

  “Shelter?” Rustem scoffed. “Do you see shelter anywhere, Igor? I’m going back.” He turned to leave.

  Igor grabbed his arm. “You won’t make it!”

  “Let go of me!”

  “Listen to me—”

  Rustem swung his fist, striking Igor in the face. Igor wobbled on his feet, then leapt at Rustem, bowling into his torso and knocking him to the ground. He threw a few punches before Zolotaryov and Kolevatov pulled them apart.

  “Stop it!” Zolotaryov shouted. “Stop fighting!”

  Igor stumbled away, drawing the back of his hand over his bleeding nose.

  “You guys are crazy!” Zina shrieked.

  Doroshenko had been watching the confrontation with creeping indifference, too cold to do anything else. Tears blotted his eyes. Was this the end? Was this really the end? Was he never going to see Zina again under better circumstances? None of them deserved this fate, but she least of all. She was too kind a soul. She had so much goodwill and laughter to share with the world.

  “The forester said there were ravines all around out here,” Zolotaryov said, panting from his effort to restrain Igor. “That’s what we need, a ravine. It will protect us from the wind. There might even have been a nook we could fit into. If there is, and we start another fire, it will be as good as the tent.”

  “He’s right!” Kolya said hopefully. “We’ll spread out—”

  “No,” Zolotaryov said, cutting him off. “We need to stay together. Kolya, you and Igor and Kolevatov come with me.”

  “What about me?” Rustem said.

  “You stay here with Zina and Lyuda. You three make sure the fire doesn’t go out.” He looked at Doroshenko and Georgy. “Massage their hands and feet. Try getting some heat back into them.”

  “B-b-be quick,” Georgy said, still shivering.

  Nodding, Zolotaryov started off into the stunted forest, the other three following.

  Initial search teams boarding a military helicopter in Ivdel

  CHAPTER 26

  There were no celebrations as you might expect after capturing video evidence of one of the most sensationalized and divisive creatures of all time. No exclamations of surprise or high fives or laughter. Olivia and Vasily spoke quietly amongst themselves, mostly in Russian, often urgently and furtively. Disco and I sat a few yards away from them, keeping our voices down as well. Words like “bizarre” and “unbelievable” came up a lot between us, and not only in relation to the yeti, but also to Vasily, and his effort to deceive us. We also spoke about how such a creature could exist and never be sighted or captured. We wondered what it ate, and its intelligence, and whether it was a social or solitary animal. And most of all, whether it meant us harm or not. All signs pointed to the negative, but we still wondered.

  Eventually, when we had run out of questions to ask each other, Disco went to sleep. I wanted to do the same. We hadn’t been getting very much rest these last couple of days, and it was already well past midnight. Nevertheless, my brain was too wired, and so I lay beneath my sleeping bag, watching Olivia and Vasily mo
ving around the depths of the cave with their flashlight beams arcing this way and that, presumably searching for physical evidence of the yeti.

  My resentment toward Olivia built inside me. It was much more virulent than anything I’d felt, before or now, toward Vasily. Because I could understand why Vasily did what he did to me. He was desperate, dying, and wanted to leave a legacy behind. But what had been Olivia’s motivation? Why had she signed on?

  For kicks? For money? Something else equally trite?

  Whatever the reason, her betrayal was made all the worse because it was personal. I had slept with her. I had been attracted to her.

  And she’d been totally fucking with me.

  I must have dozed off after all, because when I opened my eyes I discovered Vasily now snoring beneath his sleeping bag and Olivia sitting near the buttressed flashlight, cross-legged, seemingly oblivious to the cold as she scribbled in a stenographer’s notebook with a pencil.

  She noticed me stir but didn’t say anything.

  I sat up and draped my sleeping bag around my shoulders like a cape. My head pounded. I waited a few moments to determine just how bad the pounding was going to be—turned out, really bad—and scrounged inside my rucksack for the first-aid kit I’d brought. Besides the usual gauze rolls and Band-Aids and aspirin, I’d stocked it with a small pharmacy of antibiotics, antihistamines, antidiuretics, and more. I shook out four aspirin from a bottle, dry-swallowed them, then stuffed everything away.

  “Find anything interesting?” I asked Olivia, my throat dry and sore, my breath puffing in the cold air in front of me.

  “Some frozen scat,” she said, not looking up from her notebook. “And a few strands of reddish-white hair.”

  “Does that mean we now have DNA evidence of the yeti?”

  “There are no roots on any of the hair samples,” she said. “So we can’t get nuclear DNA. But if we can get some good mitochondria DNA, then we can compare the samples with samples in GenBank, the world’s genetic sequence database, which will at least prove the hair doesn’t belong to a polar bear or some other known animal.”

  Listening to Olivia talk DNA, she didn’t sound like some hired hand instructed to spook an American writer. In fact, ever since she’d seen the video on Vasily’s phone, she’d been a different Olivia altogether: focused, introspective, methodical.

  “How tall was it?” she asked me.

  “Huh?”

  “The yeti? How tall was it?”

  “Ten feet, I guess.”

  “Describe it.”

  “It was big.”

  “You can do better than that.”

  I shrugged. “Furry. Muscled. Monkey face.”

  “What did it smell like?”

  “Like an animal.”

  “Please be serious here, Corey. Do I really need to tell you how important a discovery this is?”

  “What are you writing?” I asked.

  “I’m documenting this experience.”

  “You’re not a circus performer.”

  She paused. “No, I’m not.”

  “Are you a journalist?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “All the questions. Feels like you’re writing a piece.”

  “I’m a cryptozoologist,” she said.

  I blinked. “Seriously?”

  “Is that harder to believe than a circus performer?”

  “You’re a Bigfoot hunter?”

  “Bigfoot hunter?” She scowled. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means you hunt Bigfoot.”

  “Excuse me. I’ve spent my entire adult life engaged in proper scientific study.”

  “Does that include banging on trees to scare people?”

  She seemed embarrassed. “That wasn’t me.”

  “But you knew it was Galina. You went along with it.”

  Olivia didn’t say anything.

  “So how do you even become a Bigfoot hunter?” I asked. “Is there a secret handshake or something to get into the club?”

  “I’m not a goddamn Bigfoot hunter, okay, Corey?” She glared at me for a long moment before continuing: “I was young, just out of university, and I replied to an advert on a telephone pole. It was a position as a research assistant for a grant-funded cryptozoology study. I was planning on going overseas to teach English and travel and stuff then, and I figured it would be good to have a few grand saved up before I went. So I applied, was hired, and ended up spending the summer camping out in the forest, checking motion cameras, collecting hair and dung samples for laboratory analysis, all that stuff.”

  Bigfoot hunting, I almost said, but I held my tongue.

  “The contract was only for six months,” she went on, “but I got along well with the professor heading the study, and he renewed it, and my plan of traveling and teaching got pushed to the back burner. Instead I continued to do fieldwork, mostly in conjunction with the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club. The years slipped by. I started speaking at conferences and writing papers and got a bit of a reputation.”

  “And a Russian oligarch offered you a job in Russia?”

  She let the barb slide and said, “In 2011 one of Russia’s foremost advocates of the existence of yetis led an expedition to a remote cave complex in the Kemerovo region in Siberia—and he claimed to have found genuine yeti hair. Government officials ran DNA tests and reported the hair came from a humanlike mammal more closely related to man than monkey. It was a huge deal at the time. They invited American researchers and scientists to Russia to discuss the formation of a scientific commission to study the hair. I was among the invitees. They took us on a field trip to a cave in Tashtagol—where the pomp and circumstance devolved into the absurd.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For starters, the cave wasn’t even remote. A trail led directly to it, apparently maintained by the local municipality. And it was conveniently surrounded by all these twisted and broken trees that looked like props from a horror film. The guide even pointed out cuts on them, which he said were made by the yeti. Then inside the cave, right on cue, there was a nest off to the side. The guide jumped into it to take a selfie.”

  “And they expected you to buy into this?”

  “When we got back to our hotel, local officials pressed us to sign a consensus statement saying what we saw constituted evidence that yetis exist in the region.”

  “You didn’t sign, did you?”

  “Of course not. But they released a forged statement to press outlets anyway, and it went viral.”

  “You should have sued them.”

  “Like the courts here would do anything.”

  “So what was the deal? Why did government officials put you up to a hoax?”

  “It was a publicity stunt. They exploited our credibility to promote their agenda, namely tourism in the region.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. “Why does that sound vaguely familiar?”

  “I’m sorry, Corey. We didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “I’m not hurt,” I lied.

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  “Anyway, this was all in 2011? You decided to stay in Russia?”

  “I met Vasily Popov that weekend.”

  “Not at a dinner party, I bet.”

  “No, during a press conference. We spent a lot of time talking. He came to Kemerovo because of his theory of what killed the Dyatlov group. I had never heard of the unfortunate hikers then, and what happened in 1959. But after speaking with Vasily, and learning of Sector 9, I was hooked. I agreed to remain in Russia to see what I could find out about yetis in the Northern Ural Mountains. I met some great researchers in my field who became friends, I became involved with Sergei, and this became my life—”

  “The threesome was real?”

  “Does that really matter?”

  “I just don’t know what to believe about you anymore.”

  “Yes, it was real. The threesome was real.”

  “And then, what, Vasily call
s you out of the blue six years or so after you met him?”

  “Not at all. We’re close friends. I see him at least once a month. I guess you can say I’m the Dyatlov Foundation’s sanctioned almasty expert.”

  “And when Vasily told you he wanted to dupe an American writer, you jumped at the opportunity?”

  “He didn’t put it like that, Corey.”

  “How did he put it?”

  “We discussed your visit in depth. Initially we were going to tell you everything up front, what we believed. But after we read your books, and learned what a skeptic you seemed to be, we knew you would never believe us. And then the doctors told Vasily he had brain cancer. That’s when he began working out the deception. I guess he felt desperate, and you know what they say…desperate times call for desperate measures.”

  I let these revelations sink in. I still felt used and bitter, but maybe not as much as I did a few minutes before. Because I could now empathize with why Olivia had gone along with Vasily. His theory that a yeti had attacked the Dyatlov group would have offered her a metaphorical get-out-of-jail-free card. She had spent the best years of her life searching for such a creature to no avail. Youthful, naïve optimism that anything was possible, that anything could exist if you looked hard enough, would have inevitably met the dream-flattening mallet of reality. What had been a cool summer job had become a dead-end career in which she would have often found herself the butt of the joke, like in Kemerovo. Vasily’s theory, however, if popularized on a grand scale, if embraced by the public, would legitimize cryptozoology—and, consequently, her time spent in her Quixotic endeavor, her life choices.

  “What about the other night?” I said. “Was sleeping with me part of the plan? Was this supposed to somehow soften me to the denouement you guys had planned?”

  Olivia shook her head fiercely. “No, of course not. That—just happened.”

  I patted my pockets for my cigarettes and remembered I didn’t have any more. I thought about the bottle of whiskey in my rucksack, but I decided there was way too much shit going on to get drunk. If ever I needed to keep my wits about me, it was right now.

  I returned my attention to Olivia. I wanted to remain mad at her, but I couldn’t. If I did, it wouldn’t be because I’d been manipulated; it would be because I felt spited she didn’t like me as much as I’d believed. And that was childish. I wasn’t in high school. I could d take a bit of rejection.