“Oh, Nathan,” she said. “You sound cynical, but cynics are just idealists who have been disappointed. I remember that about you—you’re such an idealist!”
I know, Freds—you will be agreeing with her: Nathan Howe, idealist. And maybe I am. That’s what I told her: “Maybe I am. But jeez, the atmosphere in the department made me sick. Theorists backstabbing each other over their pet ideas, and sounding just as scientific as they could, when it isn’t really scientific at all! You can’t test these theories by designing an experiment and looking for reproducibility, and you can’t isolate your factors or vary them, or use controls—it’s just observation and untestable hypothesis, over and over! And yet they acted like such solid scientists, math models and all, like chemists or something. It’s just scientism.”
Sarah just shook her head at me. “You’re too idealistic, Nathan. You want things perfect. But it isn’t so simple. If you want to study animals, you have to make compromises. As for your classification system, you should write it up for the Sociobiological Review! But it’s just a theory, remember. If you forget that, you fall into the trap yourself.”
She had a point, and besides we caught sight of some bees and had to hurry to follow them upstream. So the conversation ended. But during the following evenings in the tent, when Valerie Budge was explaining to us how human society behaved pretty much like ants—or when Sarah’s boyfriend Adrakian, frustrated by his lack of sightings, went off on long analytical jags like he was the hottest theorist since Robert Trivers—she would give me a look and a smile, and I knew I had made my point. Actually, though he talked a big line, I don’t think Adrakian was all that good; his publications wouldn’t exactly give a porter backstrain, if you know what I mean. I couldn’t figure out what Sarah saw in him.
One day soon after that, Sarah and I returned to the middle high valley to hunt again for beehives. It was a cloudless morning, a classic Himalayan forest climb: cross the bridge, hike among the boulders in the streambed, ascending from pool to pool; then up through damp trees and underbrush, over lumpy lawns of moss. Then atop the wall of the lower valley, and onto the floor of the upper valley, much clearer and sunnier up there in a big rhododendron forest. The rhododendron blooms still flared on every branch, and with the flowers’ pink intensity, and the long cones of sunlight shafting down through the leaves to illuminate rough black bark, orange fungi, bright green ferns—it was like hiking through a dream. And three thousand feet above us soared a snowy horseshoe ring of peaks. The Himalayas—you know.
So we were in good spirits as we hiked up this high valley, following the streambed. And we were in luck, too. Above one small turn and lift the stream widened into a long narrow pool; on the south face above it was a cliff of striated yellowish granite, streaked with big horizontal cracks. And spilling down from these cracks were beehives. Parts of the cliff seemed to pulsate blackly, clouds of bees drifted in front of it, and above the quiet sound of the stream I could hear the mellow buzz of the bees going about their work. Excited, Sarah and I sat on a rock in the sun, got out our binoculars, and started watching for bird life. Goraks upvalley on the snow, a lammergeier sailing over the peaks, finches beeping around as always—and then I saw it—a flick of yellow, just bigger than the biggest hummingbird. A warbler, bobbing on a twig that hung before the hive cliff. Down it flew, to a fallen piece of hive wax; peck peck peck; wax into bird. A honey warbler. I nudged Sarah and pointed it out, but she had already seen it. We were still for a long time, watching.
Edward Cronin, leader of a previous expedition of this kind to the Himalayas, did one of the first extensive studies of the honey warbler, and I knew that Sarah wanted to check his observations and continue the work. Honey warblers are unusual birds, in that they manage to live off the excess wax of the honeycombs, with the help of some bacteria in their gastro-intestinal systems. It’s a digestive feat hardly any other creature on earth has managed, and it’s obviously a good move for the bird, as it means they have a very large food source that nothing else is interested in. This makes them very worthy of study, though they hadn’t gotten a whole lot of it up to that point—something Sarah hoped to change.
When the warbler, quick and yellow, flew out of sight, Sarah stirred at last—took a deep breath, leaned over and hugged me. Kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks for getting me here, Nathan.”
I was uncomfortable. The boyfriend, you know—and Sarah was so much finer a person than he was.… And besides, I was remembering, back when we shared that office, she had come in one night all upset because the boyfriend of the time had declared for someone else, and what with one thing and another—well, I don’t want to talk about it. But we had been good friends. And I still felt a lot of that. So to me it wasn’t just a peck on the cheek, if you know what I mean. Anyway, I’m sure I got all awkward and formal in my usual way.
In any case, we were pretty pleased at our discovery, and we returned to the honey cliff every day after that for a week. It was a really nice time. Then Sarah wanted to continue some studies she had started of the goraks, and so I hiked on up to Honey Cliff on my own a few times.
It was on one of those days by myself that it happened. The warbler didn’t show up, and I continued upstream to see if I could find the source. Clouds were rolling up from the valley below and it looked like it would rain later, but it was still sunny up where I was. I reached the source of the stream—a spring-fed pool at the bottom of a talus slope—and stood watching it pour down into the world. One of those quiet Himalayan moments, where the world seems like an immense chapel.
Then a movement across the pool caught my eye, there in the shadow of two gnarled oak trees. I froze, but I was right out in the open for anyone to see. There under one of the oaks, in shadow darker for the sunlight, a pair of eyes watched me. They were about my height off the ground. I thought it might be a bear, and was mentally reviewing the trees behind me for climbability, when it moved again—it blinked. And then I saw that the eyes had whites visible around the iris. A villager, out hunting? I didn’t think so. My heart began to hammer away inside me, and I couldn’t help swallowing. Surely that was some sort of face there in the shadows? A bearded face?
Of course I had an idea what I might be trading glances with. The yeti, the mountain man, the elusive creature of the snows. The Abominable Snowman, for God’s sake! My heart’s never pounded faster. What to do? The whites of its eyes … baboons have white eyelids that they use to make threats, and if you look at them directly they see the white of your eyes, and believe you are threatening them; on the off-chance that this creature had a similar code, I tilted my head down and looked at him indirectly. I swear it appeared to nod back at me.
Then another blink, only the eyes didn’t return. The bearded face and the shape below it were gone. I started breathing again, listened as hard as I could, but never heard anything except for the chuckle of the stream.
After a minute or two I crossed the stream and took a look at the ground under the oak. It was mossy, and there were areas of moss that had been stepped on by something at least as heavy as me; but no clear tracks, of course. And nothing more than that, in any direction.
I hiked back down to camp in a daze; I hardly saw a thing, and jumped at every little sound. You can imagine how I felt—a sighting like that…!
And that very night, while I was trying to quietly eat my stew and not reveal that anything had happened, the group’s conversation veered onto the topic of the yeti. I almost dropped my fork. It was Adrakian again—he was frustrated at the fact that despite all of the spoor visible in the area, he had only actually seen some squirrels and a distant monkey or two. Of course it would have helped if he’d spent the night in the night blinds more often. Anyway, he wanted to bring up something, to be the center of attention and take the stage as The Expert. “You know these high valleys are exactly the zone the yeti live in,” he announced matter-of-factly.
That’s when the fork almost left me. “It’s almost certain they e
xist, of course,” Adrakian went on, with a funny smile.
“Oh, Philip,” Sarah said. She said that a lot to him these days, which didn’t bother me at all.
“It’s true.” Then he went into the whole bit, which of course all of us knew: the tracks in the snow that Eric Shipton photographed, George Schaller’s support for the idea, the prints Cronin’s party found, the many other sightings.… “There are thousands of square miles of impenetrable mountain wilderness here, as we now know firsthand.”
Of course I didn’t need any convincing. And the others were perfectly willing to concede the notion. “Wouldn’t that be something if we found one!” Valerie said. “Got some good photos—”
“Or found a body,” John said. Botanists think in terms of stationary subjects.
Phil nodded slowly. “Or if we captured a live one.…”
“We’d be famous,” Valerie said.
Theorists. They might even get their names latinized and made part of the new species’ name. Gorilla montani adrakianias-budgeon.
I couldn’t help myself; I had to speak up. “If we found good evidence of a yeti it would be our duty to get rid of it and forget about it,” I said, perhaps a bit too loudly.
They all stared at me. “Whatever for?” Valerie said.
“For the sake of the yeti, obviously,” I said. “As animal behaviorists you’re presumably concerned about the welfare of the animals you study, right? And the ecospheres they live in? But if the existence of the yeti were confirmed, it would be disastrous for both. There would be an invasion of expeditions, tourists, poachers—yetis in zoos, in primate center cages, in laboratories under the knife, stuffed in museums—” I was getting upset. “I mean what’s the real value of the yeti for us, anyway?” They only stared at me: value? “Their value is the fact that they’re unknown, they’re beyond science. They’re the part of the wilderness we can’t touch.”
“I can see Nathan’s point,” Sarah remarked in the ensuing silence, with a look at me that made me lose my train of thought. Her agreement meant an awful lot more than I would have expected.…
The others were shaking their heads. “A nice sentiment,” Valerie said. “But really, hardly any of them would be affected by study. Think what they’d add to our knowledge of primate evolution!”
“Finding one would be a contribution to science,” Phil said, glaring at Sarah. And he really believed that, too, I have to give him that.
Armaat said slyly, “It wouldn’t do any harm to our chances for tenure, either.”
“There is that,” Phil admitted. “But the real point is, you have to abide by what’s true. If we found a yeti we’d be obliged to say so, because it was so—no matter how we felt about it. Otherwise you get into suppressing data, altering data, all that kind of thing.”
I shook my head. “There are values that are more important than scientific integrity.”
And the argument went on from there, mostly repeating points. “You’re an idealist,” Phil said to me at one point. “You can’t do zoology without disturbing some subject animals to a certain extent.”
“Maybe that’s why I got out,” I said. And I had to stop myself from going further. How could I say that he was corrupted by the tremendous job pressures in the field to the point where he’d do anything to make a reputation, without the argument getting ugly? Impossible. And Sarah would be upset with me. I only sighed. “What about the subject animal?”
Valerie said indignantly, “They’d trank it, study it, put it back in its environment. Maybe keep one in captivity, where it would live a lot more comfortably than in the wild.”
Total corruption. Even the botanists looked uncomfortable with that one.
“I don’t think we have to worry,” Armaat said with his sly smile. “The beast is supposed to be nocturnal.” —Because Phil had shown no enthusiasm for night blinds, you see.
“Exactly why I’m starting a high-valley night blind,” Phil snapped, tired of Armaat’s needling. “Nathan, I’ll need you to come along and help set it up.”
“And find the way,” I said. The others continued to argue, Sarah taking my position, or at least something sympathetic to it; I retired, worried about the figure in the shadows I had seen that day. Phil watched me suspiciously as I left.
So, Phil had his way, and we set up a tiny blind in the upper valley to the west of the one I had made the sighting in. We spent several nights up in an oak tree, and saw a lot of Himalayan spotted deer, and some monkeys at dawn. Phil should have been pleased, but he only got sullen. It occurred to me from some of his mutterings that he had hoped all along to find the yeti; he had come craving that big discovery.
And one night it happened. The moon was gibbous, and thin clouds let most of its light through. About two hours before dawn I was in a doze, and Adrakian elbowed me. Wordlessly he pointed at the far side of a small pool in the stream.
Shadows in shadows, shifting. A streak of moonlight on the water—then, silhouetted above it, an upright figure. For a moment I saw its head clearly, a tall, oddly shaped, furry skull. It looked almost human.
I wanted to shout a warning; instead I shifted my weight on the platform. It creaked very slightly, and instantly the figure was gone.
“Idiot!” Phil whispered. In the moonlight he looked murderous. “I’m going after him!” He jumped out of the tree and pulled what I assumed was a tranquilizer pistol from his down jacket.
“You can’t find anything out there at night!” I whispered, but he was gone. I climbed down and took off after him—with what purpose I wasn’t sure.
Well, you know the forest at night. Not a chance of seeing animals, or of getting around very easily, either. I have to give it to Adrakian—he was fast, and quiet. I lost him immediately, and after that only heard an occasional snapped branch in the distance. More than an hour passed, and I was only wandering through the trees. The moon had set and the sky was about halfway to dawn light when I returned to the stream.
I rounded a big boulder that stood on the bank and almost ran straight into a yeti coming the other way, as if we were on a busy sidewalk and had veered the same direction to avoid each other. He was a little shorter than me; dark fur covered his body and head, but left his face clear—a patch of pinkish skin that in the dim light looked quite human. His nose was as much human as primate—broad, but protruding from his face—like an extension of the occipital crest that ridged his skull fore-to-aft. His mouth was broad and his jaw, under its ruff of fur, very broad—but nothing that took him outside the parameters of human possibility. He had thick eyebrow crests bent high over his eyes, so that he had a look of permanent surprise, like a cat I once owned.
At this moment I’m sure he really was surprised. We both were as still as trees, swaying gently in the wind of our confrontation—but no other movement. I wasn’t even breathing. What to do? I noticed he was carrying a small smoothed stick, and there in the fur on his neck were some objects on a cord. His face—tools—ornamentation: a part of me, the part outside the shock of it all, was thinking (I suppose I am still a zoologist at heart), They aren’t just primates, they’re hominid.
As if to confirm this idea, he spoke to me. He hummed briefly; squeaked; sniffed the air hard a few times; lifted his lip (quite a canine was revealed) and whistled, very softly. In his eyes there was a question, so calmly, gently, and intelligently put forth that I could hardly believe I couldn’t understand and answer it.
I raised my hand, very slowly, and tried to say “Hello.” I know, stupid, but what do you say when you meet a yeti? Anyway, nothing came out but a strangled “Huhn.”
He tilted his head to the side inquisitively, and repeated the sound. “Huhn. Huhn. Huhn.”
Suddenly he jacked his head forward and stared past me, upstream. He opened his mouth wide and stood there listening. He stared at me, trying to judge me. (I swear I could tell these things!)
Upstream there was a crash of branches, and he took me by the arm and wham, we were atop th
e stream bank and in the forest. Hoppety-hop through the trees and we were down on our bellies behind a big fallen log, lying side-by-side in squishy wet moss. My arm hurt.
Phil Adrakian appeared down in the streambed, looking considerably the worse for wear. He’d scraped through some brush and torn the nylon of his down jacket in several places, so that fluffy white down wafted away from him as he walked. And he’d fallen in mud somewhere. The yeti squinted hard as he looked at him, clearly mystified by the escaping down.
“Nathan!” Phil cried. “Naaaa—thannnn!” He was still filled with energy, it seemed. “I saw one! Nathan, where are you, dammit!” He continued downstream, yelling, and the yeti and I lay there and watched him pass by.
I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced a more satisfying moment.
When he had disappeared around a bend in the stream, the yeti sat up and sprawled back against the log like a tired backpacker. The sun rose, and he only squeaked, whistled, breathed slowly, watched me. What was he thinking? At this point I didn’t have a clue. It was even frightening me; I couldn’t imagine what might happen next.
His hands, longer and skinnier than human hands, plucked at my clothes. He plucked at his own necklace, pulled it up over his head. What looked like fat seashells were strung on a cord of braided hemp. They were fossils, of shells very like scallop shells—evidence of the Himalayas’ days underwater. What did the yeti make of them? No way of knowing. But clearly they were valued, they were part of a culture.
For a long time he just looked at this necklace of his. Then, very carefully, he placed this necklace over my head, around my neck. My skin burned in an instant flush, everything blurred through tears, my throat hurt—I felt just like God had stepped from behind a tree and blessed me, and for no reason, you know? I didn’t deserve it.
Without further ado he hopped up and walked off bowleggedly, without a glance back. I was left alone in the morning light with nothing except for the necklace, which hung solidly on my chest. And a sore arm. So it had happened, I hadn’t dreamed it. I had been blessed.
Escape From Kathmandu Page 2