Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery

by Daniel C Taylor

  Luck is clear: that house-sized boulder would have pancaked his family and house had its path slightly differed. Inside his house, light streams across hewn logs that shine with marks of an adze crafter who knew his skill. Years of padding feet have polished a patina to the wood. As we sit on Lendoop’s ground-bear skin, a trophy from one of his hunts, his wife brings us food. Then Lendoop brings out his bear skull. But I’ve already bought Lhakpa’s, for that had front and hind feet as well. One skull should allow us to determine where the tree bear lives taxonomically as a species.

  four

  My First Yetis

  4.1 A Panoramic View from 17,600 Feet, Looking South towards the Himalaya, Indicating the Locations of Almost All Serious Yeti Sightings

  Source: Author

  July 1956. Twenty-seven years before I found those footprints on the Barun ridge, I crossed the Yeti’s trail. I was eleven years old. We lived above the town of Mussoorie in the Indian Himalaya, the last bungalow at the top of the hill—it took over an hour to hike there from where the motorable road ended—an expansive compound, and in those days there was the jungle all around with towering deodar cedars.

  My grandfather purchased this mountain home in 1920 for a hard-to-imagine low price in an India hungry for cash after the First World War, a land having also just endured the Great Influenza epidemic. With a population in 1920 one-fifth that of today’s India and one-third of that in 1956, an India then alive with jungles, it was an India that taught different skills to a child. On waking up every morning, I had to think about a snake maybe having come in through the bathroom drain, and to remember to shake out possible scorpions from my shoe.

  Walking into the jungle was like stepping out the back door, a skill of everyday life—in the way a child in the city learns to cross wild traffic when stepping off the curb, or a child on a farm learns to climb aboard a moving tractor, or children everywhere learn to navigate parental tantrums. Whatever world they grow up in, for a child that world is normal. The idea that this normal might be unusual is one that comes as they enter new worlds, just the way one learns that one’s native language is not spoken by everyone.

  That day the monsoon was pouring outside our bungalow. While Grandma took a nap, I quietly crept into the kitchen. A screened-in cabinet was where cakes were kept for teatime, and my prey was a fold of icing; a careful swipe of an eleven-year-old finger could remove it undetected. The adventure of the steal lay as much in the thrill as in the sugary bite. But while passing the dining-room table I was stopped by a photograph on the newspaper, a footprint. At the age of eleven I met the Yeti for the first time.

  Rain shook the windows. For two generations, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins had come to this hill station to escape the summer of India. Habits begun in British times were changing now, from the way we dressed (as in the front hall, hanging off deer antlers were our pith helmets seldom used any more) to the way we looked at the jungle (wondering whether it was right to kill animals as we once easily did). India was changing, as we had only years before lived through the birth of the newly independent India.

  For a ‘white’ child growing up in those optimistic days of the framing of a new country, melding relics of our history with the changes all around, my life at least still circled around the jungle. A python skin curled above the trim down the hall, a poster also hung nearby showing the different types of mosquitoes as well as the life cycle of malaria-making mosquito, and walking staffs to accompany one’s walks stood ready in a corner by the door. Stories unfolded with all these, often told from the wide swing on the veranda (from where Aunt Margaret as a teenager had shot a leopard twenty years before), a swing that looked out into those splendid deodar cedars. Artifacts and stories, all were parts of a large foreign family’s trying to understand in an India which we had also made into our home.

  For three weeks now the monsoon had clattered on the tin roof, clouds had wrapped the house, where with the monsoon the pervasive smell of mildew would last another two months. Today was a Saturday, and usually on Saturdays, without school, I went into the outside world. But trapped today by the monsoon, with no more icing to be gleaned without notice, I took the newspaper to the living room; a tiger skin with a mounted head was draped over the piano, and I settled into an old armchair to read.

  The newspaper’s picture had been taken on the 1951 Everest Reconnaissance Expedition. That expedition had opened a region until then closed to non-Nepalis. Nepal interested me, as two years before that Everest reconnaissance my father, as a medical doctor, had been on the first expedition of foreigners to enter central Nepal, then a land more unknown than Tibet. In exploring the Everest region, Eric Shipton and Michael Ward found this footprint high on the Menlung Glacier.

  And now in 1956, the Statesman newspaper was saying that other mysterious human-like footprints had been discovered. The article asserted that independently taken photographs five years apart meant that the Yeti moved from a possible freak into fact. Photographs across such a time made it unlikely that the 1951 prints were from an abnormal individual. A mysterious species must be walking across the snows. Legends do not make footprints. The shape was clearly hominoid.

  And the foot’s size, more than 12 inches long, was near superhuman. With the newly discovered prints which were, the newspaper said, smaller than the first—about 7 inches long—there was not only a mysterious maker, but also a new mystery of size. Were the new prints a juvenile’s? Neither Shipton nor Ward, the two mountaineers who had taken the original photograph, made the Yeti claim. They had simply photographed what they found. But with added discoveries, a Yeti claim was being widely proposed.

  So, in July 1956, my Yeti quest started.

  A CURATOR AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM in the accompanying article, trying to debunk the idea of an ‘Abominable Snowman’, said that the track was made by a langur. Langurs frequented our bungalow, thundering as they ran across the bungalow’s tin roof, leaving their small round tracks in the mud. I knew those tracks. I had chased langurs off my toys for years. No museum curator could convince me that the track in the picture was langur-made, even if changed by melting snow.

  Unlike other Himalayan animals, langurs do not mind human observers. Often I watched them feed on leaves in the chestnut trees. Langurs are often seen around trees because their food is leaves. So what does a langur eat in the snow? Langurs are social animals, so I also knew that it would be out of character and equally out of habitat for one animal to be walking alone in the snow, and on a glacier, exposed to a snow leopard; forget that mister museum curator who studies dead animals—you need to know langur behaviour.

  Knowing that langurs are social animals is important. A troop cares for its individuals. Adults take turns grooming each other, and they do so for hours. A baby spends time with females other than its mother. Little langurs snuggle against bigger ones on cold evenings and show respect for their elders, even play with them. A juvenile sometimes delightfully jumps on to an older langur’s back, pretends to bite it, jumps off, runs around to the elder’s head and, squealing, gives the animal a hug before scampering off.

  Taking me out hunting, Grandpa had taught me to always think of what an animal needs and what other animals need that animal for. Get inside an animal’s thinking, he said, think always of food because they need it every day. Think, too, of protection because they need that all the time. And at certain times, think of sex, and at those times animals often do not think clearly. If I, as a boy, knew these things, museum curators should too, especially at the famous British Museum.

  In the library of Woodstock School the following Monday, I read everything I could to find about the Yeti. The next Saturday I asked Mother if I could walk down to the British Library in Mussoorie, above where the car traffic stopped and where we started the climb to our houses; the walk takes almost an hour. Not even Mother, a reading teacher, was sure her eleven-year-old boy would walk that far for books.

  4.2 The Iconic 1951 Yeti Footprint P
hotographed by Eric Shipton

  Source: Royal Geographical Society

  I found nothing helpful at the library, but on the return, passing the bookstore on Mullingar Hill, sitting in the window was Shipton’s book, The Mount Everest Reconnaissance Expedition 1951. I took it home with a promise to the shopkeeper that I’d bring the money later. That hike took the rest of the afternoon as I read the whole book, intrigued by Shipton’s account:

  It was on one of the glaciers of the Menlung basin, at a height of 19,000 feet, that late one afternoon, we came across those curious footprints in the snow the report of which has caused a certain amount of public interest in this country. We did not follow them further than was convenient, a mile or so, for we were carrying heavy loads at the time, and besides we had reached a particularly interesting stage in the exploration of the basin. I have in the past found many sets of these curious footprints and have tried to follow them, but have always lost them on the moraine or rocks at the side of the glacier. These particular ones seemed to be very fresh, probably not more than twenty-four hours old.1

  The following Saturday I went back to the bookstore. It was then I became aware that the owner was a friend of the family’s—that was why on my first visit he had said that I could bring the money later. Over following visits, he, too, developed an interest in the Yeti and used announcements of new books to help my search. We chatted in English, a bit in Hindi, for that was the way we who lived in Mussoorie talked. The old man remembered my father visiting his store as a boy; he was a high-caste Brahmin, who, like many Brahmins, paid attention to lineage. As his interest in my Yeti quest grew, he ordered titles I suspect he otherwise wouldn’t have. ‘Don’t worry, Danny, I can always sell these books by calling them mountain climbing,’ he chuckled. ‘White men like to read of high exploits when they vacation in the hills.’ Indeed, after I returned each book, careful so it would not look like it had been read, I would next see it in the store window under ‘Latest Expedition’.

  Looking back now I realize that in the old Brahmin I had a private librarian helping research my search. He died a few years after he first helped me and would have been very interested in my discoveries a quarter of a century later on that Barun ridge.

  The books I brought home showed explorers were finding a lot. The 1952 Swiss Everest expedition (that narrowly missed making Everest’s first ascent) found prints. That year the Belgian zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans published a paper theorizing that the Yeti was a relic population of an early hominoid, Gigantopithecus. According to him, a remnant of those prehistoric people had possibly retreated into Himalayan valleys escaping the Homo sapien populations in India and China as our human species started multiplying. Many accepted Heuvelmans’s hypothesis. The Himalaya were a region of mystery, home of Shangri La, lost people in the mountains. His hypothesis built on something certainly true: the populations of China and India were growing. His hypothesis made a reasonable assumption—if Everest’s high reaches had until then been untouched, the valleys of these mountains must have untrammelled valleys. Heuvelmans pointed to fossil evidence showing that Gigantopithecus truly existed fifty millennia ago. And with his proposal grounded in fossil evidence, the Yeti postulates no longer floated in the high altitudes of unknown origins. A pedigree was added to the footprints in the snow, grounded in the human evolutionary tree.

  But where in these valleys was the Yeti hiding? Magazines were finding that Yeti stories attracted readers. Abbe Bordet found tracks at 12,350 feet, A.J.M. Smyth at 12,375 feet, and L.W. Davies at 12,000 feet. Charles Evans found tracks at 10,000 feet that his Sherpas claimed belonged to a Yeti—but interestingly, Evans started to critique his own discovery that it might be a bear and not a hominoid. Lining up the stories in my scrapbook, the evidence was a jumble, but all seemed to be presuming, in sober British fashion, that the Yeti existed as a real animal in some form.

  The London Daily Mail had the year before, in November 1955, dispatched a Yeti hunting expedition. That seemed to be the first exclusive Yeti exploration. On it were a dozen Western scientists and 300 Nepali porters. Scouring eastern Nepal, they found six sets of Yeti tracks, most 8 inches long and 4 inches wide, as well as Yeti excrement—and in it was mouse hair, fur from an unknown animal, a feather, an insect claw, and plant products. That expedition concluded that the Yeti must be omnivorous, and of course anything that left scats was a real animal. Facts were confirming that some real animal lay behind the mystery, speculation was popping.

  Some proposals connected to fables in other countries, some to legends of fantastic monsters. But all these sensational proposals concluded by grounding their postulates in the undeniable truth of animal footprints. In my eleven-year-old mind, these descriptions of the real with what was now a real possible paranormal brought new worries. Could a Yeti wander to our house on the jungle’s edge? Were ape-men outside my room? If langurs and rhesus monkeys came, both primates like the Yeti, might wild men come too? Aunt Margaret’s leopard shot from the back veranda proved that animals able to eat people were indeed just outside the door.

  I pressed Mother to let me go into the jungle to begin my search. A month had passed since Dad was last with us having then taken a break from his medical work in the hot Indian plains. On that trip he had taken me into the jungle. So, in his absence, Mother gave permission to spend a night at a cave on the ridge below Childers with a shikari who she trusted and who sometimes accompanied Dad when he hunted ghorals.

  It was late morning on a Saturday when Ram Lal and I set off. The monsoon poured, and we arrived at the cave soaked. The leeches were out. While Ram Lal started a fire to make tea, I slipped to the back of the cave, stripped off my shorts, and found a blood-swollen beast, thick as my thumb, inside my left thigh. Another leech, still skinny, had hooked behind my right knee. I sprinkled a pinch of salt on each, and in my flashlight beam gleefully watched the bloaters writhe, salt wreaking havoc on their sensitive skin, then stamped on the creatures. Only after pulling on dry clothes did I see that my vengeful stamping had obliterated tracks that might have been in the cave. I played my flashlight anyway, looking for droppings.

  Leeches fascinated Dad too. Each of those worms, Hirudinea, he told me, is both male and female, containing one pair of ovaries and nine sets of testes. But one animal cannot mate with itself. It takes two leeches to reproduce. Either embraces the other—it does not matter which—but the two line up with the front of one to the rear of the other, and from the rear of each leech sperm is injected into the other’s mouth. Eggs are laid by the other who then takes on the role of the mother, wrapping them in a cocoon. From the moment of birth, these babies seek blood (if they are of the blood-seeking group, not invertebrate-eating leeches). Dad and I looked at leeches under his microscope. Each mouth has three jaws, not two. When leeches bite these jaws open the flesh with a Y cut. Then they bring the skin apart to create a hole and the tiny wound really bleeds; after that, with the leech mouth cupping over the flow, the giant gut, that is all a leech really is, sups.

  When bloated, leeches release their bite, and as swollen grotesques they squirm to shade where the stolen blood thickens. Clear fluid is squeezed out through skin membranes. Thus digesting, soon a leech lies in a puddle of its making. No digestive enzymes exist in the belly, as with other animals, to do the work that follows. What is unique to this animal trapped between being both boy and girl, that has just concentrated its stolen blood into goo, is that a peptide in the gut starts to uncouple the amino acids in the blood, the process multiplying in the gut (it started as soon as the first drop of blood entered the body). As this fast-growing digestive system blossoms (enzymes, which most animals use, adequate to consume blood five times the volume of the animal would take up too much body space), the peptides break down the blood—the leech is distinctive, digestion without enzymes.

  To humans, leeches seem to be little worms, living and squirming on the ground as they do. I once thought they must retreat into holes in the ground like worms.
But leeches define everything in their unique way. They hide at the top of soil in wet cavities behind rocks and roots. Like tiny wisps that can fit almost anywhere, they remain hidden, secluded into moist depressions. They live for months on that bellyful of blood, enduring any heat short of fire, any cold short of freezing. Light, yes. The dark is also not a problem. What they cannot survive is dryness. Those in the blood-loving group wait, poised-to-bite, and when strengthened by a gut full of blood, they wait to attempt the role of one gender or another in sex.

  One worry fixated my youthful mind; it was not the taking of blood, but a fear when I learnt how these animals thrive in wet cavities. Unsuspecting people or animals can drink from a stream and ingest a wisp of a leech swimming in that water. Uncomfortable in the acid of the stomach where it is first swallowed, the beast crawls from the stomach up the throat and crosses into the windpipe. Happy now in moist air, it attaches to the trachea. The air passage (a perfect, wet, warm, dark cave) closes with the increasingly chubby leech swelling with blood. Swollen to be as fat as a person’s thumb inside one’s throat, even a cow can be strangled by this animal that is many millions of times smaller. When Dad told me this, I never again questioned whether I should drink water straight from streams.

  That evening by a fire at the mouth of the cave I squatted with Ram Lal talking of what animals might be out after the rains. Towards sunset the rain stopped, and under the billowing clouds golden rays unfolded across that Himalayan valley above the Aglar River. Leaving my friend to watch the rice and lentils we were cooking, I headed out; there was not much of a chance to find footprints after a rain, but I was always hopeful.