Like a spy who had held his secret too long, Bob kept talking. Terry and I remained bent over our plates. The Cronin and McNeely evidence was not the news. The news was that our authority on natural history since our schooldays accepted this evidence. He was not offering a conclusion, but uncertainty that had baffled not just him but also George Schaller. George and Bob had talked at this dinner table. George was the one who said that the prints were similar to a mountain gorilla’s, and George knew large mammals, having knocked off definitive studies of the mountain gorilla, lion, and tiger. He had come to Nepal to add to that list a quest for the snow leopard.
Dessert then was brought to the table: chilled litchis, the insider’s fruit of the tropics. Beneath a gnarled, brown, thin skin is a dew-like flesh wrapped a marble-sized hard seed. Squeezing on the skin to eject the fruit that is inside, I popped one litchi after another into my mouth. Delicate and moist, they melted on my tongue, like morning mist disappearing at dawn. Terry and I remained in listening mode filling our mouths with litchis.
Back to the living room and another pot of tea. Whatever this some ‘thing’ was, Bob believed that it did not live in the snows where its evidence had been found, agreeing with William C. Osman Hill. The animal was likely to be a herbivore; Bob gave an interesting reason that herbivores could be reclusive because carnivores had larger home ranges and so they signalled their presence with more discoverable kills. To support its size, a large herbivore, Yeti, gorilla, or panda would need a lot of grass or bamboo, and that meant this snowman must live in high grasses and bamboo.
Bob was careful not to step into the tempting area of seriously proposing a new animal for the footprints. He was quite sure the mystery would be explained by a new way of understanding a known animal’s footprints. Terry was convinced about the bamboo, noting that bamboo forests are great hiding places. (He and I had once been entangled for nearly a day in such a miserable thicket in the Kullu Valley.) He thought that while the animal may eat bamboo, it would not live in that world, proposing that we should examine caves.
Bob then raised a point I had never seen discussed: the timing of the Yeti searches. Footprints had been usually found in the spring, sometimes fall. In those seasons animals are generally on the move, and perhaps that is why the footprints are found on high glaciers, as the ‘thing’ moves from its dense habitat and passes from valley to valley before or after winter. When, though he wondered, would be the best time to find the animal?
We all agreed that summer would be bad as monsoon and leeches would overwhelm. Terry suggested spring as in an open jungle it would be possible to see further. I opted for fall when food supply would be greatest and animals are sexually active—hopefully vocally active. Caves gave me little hope because for years I had been trying that.
Bob reminded us of winter, an idea neither Terry nor I liked; both of us having had some of our most unpleasant days in the jungle with low snow and winter rains. But Bob suggested that was the reason—winter drives animals lower, and with the snow we could exactly the right medium to connect to the mysterious footprints. Moreover, whatever and wherever the mystery was, we should assume the individuals were not many, and as there is now little pristine habitat low in the Himalaya, in winter those few animals would concentrate in that remaining jungle. With snow, it would be like having the animals drop off their business cards where hopefully some would carry the distinctive imprint.
Leaving the bungalow, we looked in the direction of the brick wall where now rising from amid the ferns was not one but two rat snakes twisted around each other like two thick vines. They were in a fight for territory. In Nepali folklore, the snake is the lord of the underworld. Two rat snakes swaying like the ones before us are periodically mistaken for a cobra, the particular incarnation of the lord of the underworld. As we watched, the smaller snake seemed to prevail, and the other with what appeared to be a midriff bulge slipped under the wall.
The following evening, leaving Kathmandu, I sat on the right side of the Royal Nepal Airlines jet as it climbed through billowing clouds. Earlier that day I had met the king. We had a custom to meet on my departure every time I visited his country to share what I had found on that visit. And that day, after sharing our survey in the Manang Valley, we talked about my plan to head out again in search of the footprint-maker. Shah Dev said then what he had said before: ‘The Barun is the densest jungle in my kingdom.’
As the jet ascended through the clouds, outside the plane, higher still above, were Himalayan snow and ice, land whose abode was in the clouds. The flight passed over the Marsyandi valley where the villagers were so worried about the bun manchi, leaving the great Manaslu massif behind, bringing up the Annapurnas—ice and rocks out of the window, amid the clouds.
As the plane levelled, colours on the snows changed. The sun dropped off the horizon, reddening like a fireball as it fell, shining across what minutes before were white clouds, firing them into reds. As it set further, the snows, also white earlier, turned lavender, flashing to electric red as the sun found a crack in the clouds. As we flew on, peaks turned pink, and the sun, now behind the earth, reflected on to the summits from the outer atmosphere. When the Royal Nepal Airlines leaves Kathmandu on time, a seat on the right side of the Kathmandu-to-Delhi evening flight is one of the great aeroplane rides over the earth.
A YEAR LATER, I WAS IN MY MOUNTAINTOP HOME. A fire was burning in the fireplace, and I sat with the just-off-the-press book, The Arun: A Natural History of the World’s Deepest Valley. Presented were Cronin and McNeely’s discoveries. While serving as Peace Corps volunteers in Thailand, they had become interested in the Yeti, but the expedition they designed had a broad ecological scope; but with some intentionality siting it in the Arun Valley where Tom Slick had made his most enigmatic Yeti finds, specifically in the valley immediately south of the Barun.
The book opens describing the trek to their base camp. It began at Tumlingtar where a short takeoff-and-landing airstrip happens also to be situated at the crossing of foot trails that connect Nepal east–west and north–south. Cronin’s mention of Tumlingtar brought back my years in Nepal’s family-planning programme, specifically the 1969 Tumlingtar vasectomy camp. A young physician decided to demonstrate vasectomies to quell local fears about our upcoming campaign. Unfortunately, he cut and tied his patient’s testicular vein instead of the vas deferens. The villager walked home. The next day the man was carried back crying with pain, his scrotum ballooned to the size of a volleyball. The story flashed from Tumlingtar, porter-to-porter, tea stall-to-tea stall, exaggerated by some to castration. Throughout the kingdom strong men became terrified.
Khandbari Bazaar is the big town on their route. I helped set up a family-planning office there. On Wednesdays, the day of the weekly market, people milled about having come in from the villages—women of that region dressed in especially bright colours. At the market I paid a paltry seventy rupees for 50 pounds of the tastiest tangerines, roped the basket to the outside of the helicopter that took me back to Kathmandu. That was the trip when I surveyed the Sun Kosi River for our successful river run.
In the jungles to the south of the Barun, Cronin’s biological story unfolds. The eighth chapter introduces the Yeti. Cronin presents a veteran hunter who says: ‘Oh, yes! We have many kinds of wild animals in these forests. There are bears, and musk deer, and Yeti, and pandas, and leopards, and civets, and monkeys, and many, many more.’1
It was so matter of fact. The Yeti is a distinct animal. A shikari, such as the man speaking, is an interesting authority, and perhaps very accurate. Village hunters’ livelihoods depend on jungle knowledge—not where to bag trophies, knowing what animals can be found where and when, specific knowledge that will provide food. Skills are learnt from one’s father, and often his father’s father, a circle of family secrets—stories about a tree, changes of a stream, populations of a bird. In most villages, only a few families are hunters.
One skill every shikari has is of storytelling. Hunters
brag about what they have done, and share little about their next hunt. Each hunter has his own style. Some exaggerate, others understate, and neither style can be trusted when possible employment is involved. Cronin’s hunter seems to be enjoying his story and, I assume, trying to get employment.
But this man is never mentioned again. After a Yeti revelation, why let this guy walk right out of the camp if the information was credible enough to lead the chapter? Why not pay him to show the Yeti’s habitat? Nothing more is said about him. Hunters often double as porters when they can get the pay of a Western expedition. This expedition’s area straddled the trail to Makalu. The hunter could have known of Western interest in the Yeti from having worked for mountaineers. He may have worked on Tom Slick’s expeditions fifteen years before when they hired hundreds of local people.
Or maybe Cronin didn’t really understand. His book never reveals how fluent any member of the team was in Nepali. Bob said that as ex-Peace Corps from Thailand, they got along in Nepali. But indications in the book were that their members with dual fluency were the Sherpa guides. Maybe the use of ‘Yeti’ here came from the Sherpas. If a local villager mentioned the bun manchi, might not a Sherpa translate ‘jungle man’ as ‘Yeti’? What word did the hunter really use? In my time in Tumlingtar and Khandbari only two years before their time, ‘Yeti’ did not seem to be an Arun Valley word.
Again, it is clear that for Yeti hunting language is an essential skill. Questing for the Yeti appears to be as much about following words as footprints. Cronin uses a word most readers would think is Nepali but is actually Sherpa and now also English. A hunter from these valleys would more naturally have used the words ‘shockpa’ or ‘po gamo’, even ‘bun manchi’. For my purposes, I must dismiss this testimony and concentrate on the book’s photograph that follows, or the cast Bob held.
The fire was burning low now, and in anticipation of the description ahead, I went out to bring in more wood. In a night sharp and pure, my gaze went to the far-away stars. Are humans the only beings? Might some other types be hiding here or beyond? Are animated spirits out amid the stars? Our ancestors believed in prophets who carried in the word. Many trust TV now to bring messages—it shows real pictures. But for mysteries, who informs us today, and how do we know if their messages are credible?
I added new logs to the fire, and charred crusts broke off from the old ones. Fire changes hardened old life into flames. Oxygen, the breath for all life, mixes with relics of life, wood; from that new life seems to burst, dancing, life coming alive again. But this dancing message is life in a different form, bringing forward private thoughts from the finger-like moving signs. Picking up Cronin’s book, after presenting the hunter, is a familiar list of Yeti discoveries, then these sentences:
Shortly before dawn the next morning, Howard climbed out of our tent. Immediately, he called excitedly. There, beside the trail we had made to our tents, was a new set of footprints. While we were sleeping, a creature had approached our camp and walked directly between our tents. The Sherpas identified the tracks, without question, as yeti prints. We, without question, were stunned. …
The prints measured approximately nine inches long by four and three-quarters inches wide. The stride, or distance between the individual prints, was surprisingly short, often less than one foot, and it appeared that the creature has used a slow, cautious walk along this section. The prints showed a short, broad opposable hallux, an asymmetrical arrangement of the toes, and a wide rounded heel. … Most impressively, their close relationship to Shipton’s prints was unmistakable.2
February 1981. The United Nations offers me a consultancy in Nepal. My life, though, had expanded—Jennifer and I now have a six-month-old son, Jesse Oak. Taking a baby into the jungle is a way of living I grew up with—my father before me did that and it is how many families continue all over the world. Could our family go into the jungle safely? A special fare from Pan Am airlines allowed Jennifer and Jesse to travel for less than USD 400 extra, giving us a chance to see whether safe travel is possible in the jungle with a baby. After the consultancy, we float down a river on the Nepal–India border in dugout canoes, through gentle rapids, through drenching rain, and then walk to a ‘lost’ temple deep in overgrown trees and vines. Here was the octagon well where lore has it that Ram and Sita made love. Adjusting to the special childcare needs in the jungle and surprises on the road, travel rolls at a slower pace. But, as a family we have a vacation, and Jesse stays in good health.
7.2 A Barun Ridge Similar to Where Cronin and McNeely Found Their Footprint
Source: Author
In October 1982, another consultancy provides another windfall. In the years since the tea with the Flemings, while on trips to Kathmandu leading medical expeditions and consultancies, I’ve ferried out Yeti-chasing supplies. Our expedition that is soon to depart for the Barun Valley, aside from ourselves, will include Bob and Linda, but not Dan Terry. He is working in Afghanistan with his family, a land now under Soviet occupation with work that gives little flexibility.
Before leaving America for the Barun, I survey the Yeti references again. Twenty-three claims must be given some level of credibility. Most are wishful, others string together irrelevant items to arrive at a Yeti option. The descriptions they give of the animal are jumbled: a baggy rear end, a villager’s tale of a shaggy fur but clear face, long dangling arms, colour from red to black to brown, a pointed head with a long sloping forehead, bulging eyebrows, feet on backwards, a shuffling gait, and that extraordinary claim of breasts so pendulous that when running they can be slung over the shoulder.
Even after thirty-one years, what continues to attract international attention to this hotchpotch of claims is the 1951 Shipton photograph. But why didn’t Shipton and Ward take more photographs that day? The Yeti was a known possibility for both of them; indeed Shipton had encountered such prints earlier. Had they taken a close-up of the other foot more could be deduced. Why not a picture showing the length of the stride? Photographs of other feet would show how the print they chose had been altered by the melting snow. I again compared Shipton’s accounts: the first from 1951 that had an offhand mention of the Yeti, and from 1969 where he described every possible detail. And, it is striking that in all of Ward’s writing he has not discussed this discovery—for he is a medical scientist.
But more deeply, why are these twenty-three published reports from the high snows automatically interpreted by everyone to indicate a wild hominoid? I, too, do that. Few start asking if a known animal might be making them. I remind myself that in our upcoming expedition I must stay focused on the footprints as it is these alone that are the only trustworthy evidence.
I have become increasingly aware that what is driving this repeating connection to see hominoids is more than the hunger for the ‘missing link’. It desires the wild alive in us. It is like the log burning in front of me, which, when ignited, draws viewers with enigmatic flames to ignite our imagination, sparked by what was once life. Hominoid-esque footprints sign a trail that connects to our evolution, projecting a possible relic still of clandestine life in the high valleys. The footprints are real, like a shadow on the land, but animation comes by a hopeful mind. For a hominoid to be successful in hiding, the animal must have intelligence approaching that of humans, and would have to be furry enough to withstand the wet cold at elevations where hair-free people cannot go. The animal could be a gorilla or panda in terms of its body and diet but one that must also have significant intellect to allow it the ability to hide.
In fire is a metaphor: a fire is not really alive. It dances, maybe even talks as fingers of flames sign ideas into the mind, an experience of the not alive though it comes from the once-alive. So it is important not to read too much into either footprints or fires, both of which speak in different ways of life past and ‘passed’.
If the Yeti indeed is a hominoid, and not a known animal with mistaken footprints, then the more likely explanation is that instead of a new hominoid it is a
half-crazy human living in the wild. Maybe it also wears clothes, and so when seen without its footprints in the snow it looks like normal people. Yetis could be the semi-mad who are cast out from their villages, or simply self-inflicted outcasts who walk out of the village to live in the jungles, maybe even still half-supported by their families. Outcasts with huge calloused feet would imprint impressive identity questions in the high snows.
7.3 Thangka, a Tibetan-Style Religious Painting, Showing a Yeti Standing on the Mountain to the Extreme Right
Source: Tashi Lama
(A thangka artist, Tashi features later in this narrative as Pasang’s son.)
Now, after searching across a quarter of a century and having searched in most of the Himalaya, I know the world’s largest mountain range is not untrammelled—I have been into almost every valley system, and where I have not personally gone, Bob Fleming certainly has, being more observant of the wild beings than I. Himalayan valleys are full of modern humans—filled from population growth pressing up from the fertile plains of India and China, a human collective on the planet comprising 40 per cent of humanity.
Yet the footprints remain unexplained. Bob saw casts of those. These are the quests in the Barun Valley we must seek to explain. They were not fakes; they were unlike anything he or George Schaller could explain, with neither Bob nor George thinking the prints to be of a human. So I should must even dismiss the mad outcast option. Bob and George saw greater resemblance to non-human makers. The mystery remains unexplained. Like shadows, footprints are outlines of life; real, yet not real. A hunter does not shoot an animal by shooting its shadow. Our family is not going Yeti hunting—we are going footprint hunting.
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 13
