by Jeremy Bates
Olivia was bowed forward, a dusting of snow covering her head and shoulders. She had stopped shivering twenty or so minutes ago, which, contrary to common sense, was a sign of increasingly severe hypothermia. Worrying that she might be falling asleep, I was about to shake her shoulder when she tilted backward. For a moment I thought she was stretching, but she kept reclining as though she were in a chair without a back.
I snatched her forearm and said, “Olivia!”
She sat straight. “Huh?”
“You were falling backward.”
She seized a nearby branch. “I didn’t even realize… What time is it?”
“Time?” I said. I was confused—drowsy and cold and confused, and I found it hard to believe any of this was going to change. “I don’t know. What does it matter what time it is?”
“How long since you activated the transmitter?”
“Oh.” I tried to think. “Maybe an hour, I guess.”
“Only an hour? I’m so cold.”
“Maybe we should climb lower now.”
“’Kay.” She closed her eyes.
“Olivia! Stay awake!”
“I’m awake.”
“Let’s climb down a bit. The movement will warm us up.”
This time she swung a leg over the branch she sat on—and almost fell backward.
I grabbed her forearm again. “Whoa.”
“I’m…bit dizzy.”
“You’re okay,” I said, deciding not to mention a lack of coordination was also a sign of severe hypothermia. Or that she was now slurring her speech. “Give me your rucksack. It’s throwing you off balance.”
“No.”
“You can climb down easier.”
“I said no.”
Frowning, I looked at the rucksack, then back at her.
“What’s in your bag?”
“Nothing.”
Earlier, when I’d asked her if she had any food in it, or any warm clothes, she’d told me the male yeti had gone through it while they’d been in the tunnels and had dumped everything out. She’d only grabbed it because of the hair and scat in one of the smaller pockets. I’d never questioned this, but now, looking at the rucksack a second time, there appeared to be something substantial in the main pocket.
“Let me see,” I said.
“I told you—”
“Then let me see.”
“No!”
My frown deepened. Her behavior was baffling and worrisome.
I stared at her. She stared back—glared back, dark, tired circles lurking beneath her eyes—and then perhaps realizing she would have to show me sooner or later, she shrugged off the rucksack, unzipped the main pocket, and held the bag toward me.
I made to take it but she said, “Don’t. Just look.”
I pushed back the top flap and looked inside—and my heart sickened.
The baby yeti’s head lay in the bottom of the pocket, on its side. It had been severed at the neck. The visible eye was hooded and cataracted. The mouth gaped open, as if in a scream. In death, it looked so small and fragile. So human.
I experienced an ephemeral hot flash, followed by a blast of revulsion.
“You cut off its head?” I said, my voice quiet, the revulsion already giving way to mounting fury.
“It was already dead,” she said.
I recalled the male yeti batting the baby across the room, its body striking the rock wall, dropping limply to the ground. It had clearly been unconscious, but dead?
“How do you know it was dead?”
“It wasn’t breathing.”
“You checked its pulse?”
“It was dead!”
“You cut off its head, Olivia!”
“Calm down, Corey.”
“Calm down? Calm down? “When—how—?” But I knew. No wonder it had taken her so long to exit the cave behind me. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“I needed proof. And this—this is indisputable.”
“Was it worth your life?” I asked dangerously.
“What?”
“Why the fuck do you think the yeti followed us all the way back to camp? Why the fuck do you think it’s waiting down there now? You cut off it’s baby’s head!”
“It was dead—”
“Bullshit!”
“Calm down—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down! Fuck! I can’t— How did you ever think you would get away with this? Seriously, Olivia. How? You’d just run away with their baby’s head in your bag?”
“They were fighting. I thought we’d have time to get back to the snowmobile.”
I wanted to keep shouting at her, for her stupidity, for her greed. I only shook my head.
“And we did,” she said reasonably, almost petulantly. “We got to the snowmobile.”
I continued shaking my head. The fact she was trying to justify her actions was mindboggling.
“How was I supposed to know it would follow us for hours? That’s insane.”
“No,” I said, struggling to keep my voice even. “What’s insane is that you cut off the head of a baby yeti.”
She made a noise that was a mewling mix of bright anger and grinding frustration.
“You’re responsible for their deaths,” I said, wanting to hurt her. “Those Mansi women.”
“Fuck you, Corey.”
“And when whoever comes to rescue us—”
“Stop!”
“And they get ripped to pieces—”
“Stop!”
“Because the yeti’s still down there, and it’s not going to leave us alone, and it’s not going to shy away from the helicopter now, not in a million years, no fucking way, not after what you’ve done. So you know what? You’ll be responsible for their deaths too—”
“I hate you.”
“And when I die in this tree, and when you die—”
“Shut up shut up shut—”
“You’ll be responsible—”
“Shut up!”
Disgusted, I looked away from Olivia then, but I still saw her in my mind’s eye, in the cave, hunched over the baby yeti’s inert body as she performed an act of brutish savagery, sawing through the flesh of its neck with her hunting knife, grunting and panting with the effort to sever tendons and the spinal cord, blood from the jugular belching onto the ground around her as she worked quickly and feverishly to steal her prize before its mother or father returned.
And we were supposed to be the civilized ones?
⁂
Freezing. Waiting. Wondering. Despairing.
A viscous cycle of sensation, thought, and emotion that could not be escaped, only endured, all blurring into one another, an obfuscation of misery.
Certainty was there too—a whisper in the back of my mind that did not want to be heard, but was there nonetheless—certainty that there was no way out of this.
Olivia and I were either going to die slow, cold deaths in this tree, or hot, violent deaths at the hands of the male yeti. Because like I’d told her, it wasn’t going to be scared off by the helicopter now. It was royally pissed. It was beyond royally pissed. It wanted revenge. It wanted our heads.
And the capper: if we chose the easier of the two deaths, and remained hiding in this tree, out of the yeti’s reach, then it would no doubt take its revenge on the rescuers.
So the right thing to do, the moral thing to do, the noble thing, would be to surrender ourselves to it now. Nevertheless, I simply didn’t think I could bring myself to do this. I couldn’t get past the image of the beast tearing me limb from limb and eating my remains.
I had already witnessed Disco suffer a similar atrocity, and having such a thing done to me petrified every fiber of my being, so much so I would rather let others die than allow it to happen.
I grimaced, because I hadn’t thought my spirit could sink any lower than it had these last few hours, but right then it did, as I realized something about myself, something truly awful, that I’d never imagined to be the case.
I was a coward.
⁂
No, I wasn’t, I told myself with cheerless determination. I wouldn’t let myself be one.
I hadn’t been able to save Denise.
I hadn’t been able to save Disco.
Their deaths had been due to forces beyond my ability to control, yet that didn’t lessen my guilt any. They had died and I had survived.
It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, and one thing I knew right then, one thing I knew more than anything else, I couldn’t allow others to die in my place again.
⁂
I glanced at Olivia, slumped forward against the trunk of the fir. She would never agree to sacrificing ourselves for a greater good. But the male yeti wouldn’t be satisfied with only me. It wanted us both. Only then would it return to its cave.
Which meant I was going to have to push her out of the tree.
I looked down. The jutting branches between us and the ground would be a problem. She could grab one, arrest her fall. My element of surprise would be wasted. I’d have to go down after her, fight her, kick and punch, and even then she might get the upper hand and knock me to the ground first.
I decided the best way to go about this would be to get on the branch behind her, wrap my arms around her body, and topple us off the branch together before she knew what was happening. If we were lucky, the fall would kill us. If it didn’t…
No more thinking.
Okay.
I pushed myself slowly to my feet. My body was stiff as a board, prickly and numb everywhere, a dichotomy of sensations.
Standing on my branch, holding onto other boughs for balance, I stepped across to Olivia’s branch. She remained slumped forward, most likely asleep.
I lowered myself behind her and wrapped my arms around her body, pinning her arms to her sides.
She stirred and mumbled something.
I closed my eyes. I cleared my mind. I told myself it would be over quickly.
Tears trickled down my frostbitten cheeks. My heart beat so fast and painfully it felt as though it might burst through my chest. I could even hear it, a metronomic whump, whump, whump—
I snapped open my eyes.
I cocked my head, listening.
The whumping became louder, clearer. Unmistakable. A wasp-like drone accompanied it.
Olivia stiffened in my arms.
She tilted her head to the sky.
“They’re here!” she said in a dry, barely audible rasp.
A moment later a large camouflage-liveried helicopter that looked as though it had just flown out of the Cold War beat directly overhead, traveling fast and low.
Elation soared through me at the sight of it, vanquishing all my previous doubts and consternations about the viability of our rescue. The helicopter was not the rinky-dinky dragonfly on skids I’d been expecting; it was a twin-engine, mean-looking, powerful, beast of a machine, a testimony to mankind’s ingenuity and intelligence and mastery over the animal kingdom.
I had been so wrong, so foolish. The yeti had to be cowering wherever it hid.
“Corey!” Olivia twisted around to look at me. Her eyes held no surprise or suspicion as to why I sat behind her, nothing but a bright, fierce joy. “Corey! They’re here!”
I was already getting to my feet. “They’re landing in the village! We have to meet them there!” I started scrambling down the tree before Olivia could argue.
When I reached the lowest branch, I scanned the snowy ground. No footprints except ours from the night before. Nearly snowed over, they meandered through the dense boreal forest, appearing small and lonesome. I couldn’t see the village through the picket of pine, white spruce, hemlock, and Douglas fir, but it couldn’t have been more than one hundred yards away.
Olivia stopped two branches above me.
“Come on!” I shouted at her.
“I’m waiting for them here!”
Goddammit!
“Olivia, listen to me,” I said feverishly. “This is our only chance. When that helicopter shuts down, when the blades stop whirling—” I clamped my jaw. I didn’t know how to articulate what needed to be said. “It’ll come!” I blurted. “It won’t be scared anymore! Now let’s go!”
After a painfully long hesitation, Olivia descended the two branches to stand beside me.
“Once you jump,” I told her, “run as fast as you can. One, two—”
“I can’t—”
“Three!”
I pushed her from the branch. She landed on her knees and hands in the snow with a yelp. I dropped beside her and heaved her to her feet. She blinked at me torpidly, like she couldn’t believe I had pushed her.
I dug out the rifle from where it had fallen in the snow earlier, took her hand in mine, and ran.
⁂
The deep snow turned what should have been a short, easy dash into a blundering struggle through white quicksand. My pulse pounded in my head, and I no longer felt the least bit fatigued. In fact, I felt more alive than I’d ever been in my life, every sight and sound seeming to exist in crystal clarity.
Ahead, through the picket of trees, I could make out the Mansi village, the scattering of timber houses, and in the middle of the clearing, the rescue helicopter banking into a hover position.
Sensing something in my peripheral vision, I glanced to my left—and wilted inside.
The male yeti, monstrous yet astoundingly agile with its huge loping strides, sped amongst the shadowed trees, angling toward us on an intercept path.
Olivia saw it too and cried out in terror.
She tore her hand free of mine and ran for all she was worth. I kept pace next to her, panting, sweat stinging my eyes, my legs already wasted from the effort.
We reached the edge of the clearing, and the brightness of the unfiltered midafternoon light nearly blinded me. When the spangles cleared I saw the bodies of several Mansi women sprawled in the snow, all of whom were most certainly dead.
The helicopter had commenced its descent, the belly bucking from side to side, the downwash from the spinning rotors whipping the snow on the ground into an artificial blizzard. The pilot in the nose fought the controls as a gust of wind sent the machine shearing to one side.
Then it touched down safely on its oversized tires. The cabin door slid open and two men dressed in orange jumpsuits leapt out, each clasping a rifle across his chest. They would have seen the bodies from the air, hence the weapons at the ready.
Olivia waved her hands over her head, yelling for help.
The lead man halted the second man with his arm and pointed.
I glanced to my left again.
The yeti was a scant twenty feet away. It would reach us in moments.
The sharp clap of a gunshot echoed through the still forest, followed by a second gunshot a split second later.
The yeti stagger-stepped, as if it had run into a giant spider web. It threw up its elongated arms in front of its face, shouldered into a tree, bounced off it, but kept coming.
Two more shots rang out.
One struck the trunk of a spruce, exploding bark like confetti, though the other must have hit the creature because it lurched and stumbled.
Still, it kept coming.
The two men shuffled backward toward the helicopter, still firing their rifles, though no longer taking proper aim. Olivia lurched past them, clambered up the three-step ladder, and disappeared into the metallic belly.
The pilot reignited the engine, the rotors spinning faster.
I was right behind Olivia, about to enter the cabin, when a scream iced my blood. Turning, I saw one of the men lying facedown in the snow some ten feet from where he had been standing moments before. The second man dropped his rifle and tried to flee to the forest. The yeti seized him by the neck and drove his head into the ground with pitiless force.
Without really knowing what I was doing, only that the helicopter offered no safety on the ground as it was, I dashed toward the yeti. Spinning toward me, its black eyes
flashed with what I could only describe as glee at finding me so close. It threw its head back and roared, pounding its hands against its bloodied chest.
I shoved Fyodor’s rifle as high as I could above my head. The end of the barrel just reached the soft valley beneath its upturned chin.
Screaming from my gut, for Fyodor and Vasily, for Disco, and for Denise too, I squeezed the trigger.
The creature’s head jerked as blood and brain sprayed out the back of its skull.
Then, like a felled tree, it toppled backward and landed in the snow with a heavy thud.
I stared at its unmoving body in shock, not believing it was really dead.
Leaving nothing to chance, I shoved the barrel of the rifle into its right eye and fired off two more rounds.
⁂
In a daze I returned to the helicopter, to elicit help to bring the bodies of the two men aboard. As soon as I climbed the short ladder and stepped inside the no-frills cabin, Olivia threw her arms around me and whispered into my shoulder, “You did it you did it you did it you did it.” I hugged her back, my eyes drifting inconsequentially over the interior of the cabin: the white-painted bulkheads, the banged-up intensive care unit along one wall, the jumble of rescue equipment anchored to tiedown points on the floor, which was covered in an incongruous rose-colored carpet.
Was this real?
Were we really safe?
Was it all over?
The pilot was twisted around in his seat in the cockpit, shouting something to us in Russian. Olivia and I broke apart. She said something back.
“What’s he asking?” I said.
“If there are any more—”
A huge fist smashed through the round window of the door directly behind Olivia, sending shattered pieces of glass everywhere. With a shriek of protesting metal, the entire door wrenched free of the airframe. In its place stood the hulking form of the female yeti, her penny-colored eyes and skin-colored face instantly identifiable. She seized Olivia’s rucksack, still on her back, and yanked it hard enough to send Olivia crashing to the floor. The yeti yanked it again, this time tearing the main pocket open—and out rolled her baby’s head, blued and bruised and bloodied.