7.4 Jesse Being Readied for the Trail
Source: Author
OUR FAMILY APPROACHES THE BARUN. It is still one day’s walk away. The discovery of our footprints on the ridge is two weeks away, and three weeks distant is the proposal from Lendoop that the maker of the footprints we found is rukh balu, the tree bear.
With Tumlingtar airstrip three days behind, we look across the Arun Valley; the village of Num lies below on the ridge and Hedangna is across on the opposing ridge. At the head of the valley is Makalu. Snow blows from this fifth-highest summit; a band of clouds beneath it portends the rains of the Barun we shall soon experience. Makalu is notorious for its weather; only four expeditions had, by 1983, made it to its summit. Beyond Makalu stands Lhotse, the fourth highest, and behind her, Everest. ‘Earth’s sisters in the sky’, the Tibetan poet Lhakpa Phuntshok calls them.
With the splendid view in front of us, I swing Jesse off my shoulders. He runs after a cluster of yellow butterflies with black lines in their wings. The air here suddenly smells sweet. I crave for toast and a cup of tea. Just then a porter comes up the trail, carefully placing his feet on each stair-like rock, body bent under two gigantic bundles held by a strap around his forehead.
Cinnamon, that’s the smell! He stops at the stone wall where we sit. Releasing the strain off his tumpline, he gives a long whistle—the universal sign throughout Nepal saying that your load is heavy.
I ask, ‘Kahan jane ho?’ (Where are you going?) The universal greeting of the trails.
‘To Hille … but if prices in Hille are too low, by the big truck to Dharan.’
‘Did you cut the cinnamon, or are you carrying it for someone else?’
‘It’s mine, from the trees in the jungle I know. Slowly, I’ve gathered it. I do not take too much from one tree because then I cannot go back the next year. Nowadays, some people cut too much, and then the tree dies.’
‘Big load you have. It must be two people’s load,’ I say.
‘Three loads.’
It is my turn to whistle—180 pounds!
‘Why doesn’t one of your children help? Three loads are too much for an old man. Your knees will soon hurt like doors that swing on rusty hinges. And when they do, you will have to stop walking the hills. Three loads are too heavy.’
‘Last year one more of my children died. Many children have died; so again I have left my children—if they carry loads, maybe they will also die—what else does a man have as he grows old but his children who walk on after he is gone? So I told them to go to school while I walk the trails. My wife makes sure they go each day while with this load we buy uniforms, shoes, and pencils.’
‘What happened last year to your children?’ Jennifer asks.
‘Last year the sickness came. For six years it had not come. But last year it returned. You know the children’s sickness, the one with fever?’
‘What does he mean?’ Jennifer whispers to me.
‘Measles,’ I reply quietly. ‘Some villagers call it the sickness of children. It sweeps these villages every five to seven years, infects all who have not had it, and then returns when a new group of children are not immune.’
‘One son and one daughter are left,’ he continues. ‘I pray to God that my son does not die, because last year the sickness returned. My son almost died, as did the daughter.’
‘If your son has had the children’s sickness once, he will never get it again,’ I answer.
‘Yes. But my wife and I worry … and he might get another sickness. We were thankful this year that our son did not die. But we have lost three daughters. My wife is still strong; soon she will have a baby. Is that your son running over there?’
‘That is our son,’ I answer. ‘When you return home, take your son and daughter to town. A doctor there can protect them from the sickness of children and other sicknesses too. He will give each child an injection—that will help your children even more than school uniforms.’
‘Yes, but my children need uniforms for my family to be respected. And, sir, be careful with your son. Why bring such a lovely son to this place? Keep him home as I keep my children.’
‘We want our son to see your beautiful home, to learn how to live in these beautiful mountains,’ I reply.
The porter is quiet as our group looks across the valley. ‘If you think these mountains are beautiful,’ he says, ‘that is good. But for me these mountains make life hard. You have not had to plough the rocks in my fields. My fields are close to the jungle, and I do not think you have had to protect growing corn from bears.’
‘What happened to your three daughters who died?’ Jennifer gently asks in Nepali.
‘The youngest died last year. We had not given her a name yet; she was called sanu (youngest). Both she and my son had fever. The youngest was two and my son was seven.’
Nick had been calculating the cycle, ‘Why didn’t your son get the fevers six years ago when the children’s sickness came before?’
‘My wife and I never understood that. Another daughter died, but our son did not. Maybe it was because we sacrificed a chicken at the temple. It is wise to sacrifice chickens when you are worried.’
‘The boy was one year old at that time. He would have been nursing and so protected by his mother’s immunity,’ I quietly insert. ‘Also he probably got preferential care because he was a boy, and this recent time with two children sick, the girl was likely ignored.’
Jennifer whispers, ‘Dan’l, his family must be doing something wrong. Shouldn’t we tell him something?’
‘Sir, will you give me permission to leave?’ The porter seems uncomfortable. Is it, I wonder, because I’ve been asking too many questions, or, is it that he knows how many more steps must be taken before he sets down his load in Hille or Dharan?
‘Yes, bistare janos (walk slowly). With that big load, use a stick when walking downhill; that will save your knees. Purchase rubber-soled sandals when you pass through Khandbari Bazaar. Those sandals will help save your knees—and when your children get the fevers the next time, give them lots of water; boil the water first and add a tiny amount of salt and a little bit of wheat flour to it. Feed that to your children as much as you can.’
‘Thank you, sir. When I get to Dharan, I will purchase my items. Then I will have money. With the money I now have I must walk with little food.’ He lifts the tumpline from his shoulders and positions it over his eyebrows, bending into the 180-pound load. Two aging legs pump uphill as they have been lifting him for so many years. Cinnamon bundles squeak as they adjust to their own weight; a sweet smell rising, reminding me again of breakfast toast and lingering memories. It will take this man another week to reach Hille. He might have to travel to Dharan, maybe even India. Someplace along the way his money to purchase meals may run out; he’ll be walking on the strength of water from the streams. I hope a ‘friend’ does not get him drunk one night in a border town, for then the bundles may be gone by morning.
Two days later we arrive at the Barun River, meet Lendoop and Myang, and then go into the jungles to discover the footprints on the ridge and the mystery of the scientific explanation for the tree bear.
eight
Our Evidence Meets Science
8.1 One of My Yak Caravans When Searching the High Snows behind Makalu
Source: Author
March 1983. Footprint and tree-bear discoveries then followed as described earlier. Contrasted with Cronin and McNeely’s footprints a decade before, and Shipton and Ward’s two decades before that, our footprints came with an explanation with regard to their maker. Bears had been suggested decades before by Evans and Smythe. But now the century-old footprint riddle had an answer as to how those footprints could remain hidden: the snowman lived in trees, and the unknown animal looked like a known animal.
JENNIFER, JESSE, AND I WAIT AT TUMLINGTAR AIRPORT as the Twin Otter flies in, touches down, long legs galumphing over the field’s wallows. The plane turns on the grass field nipped short by goats an
d water buffalo, and its whining turbines never stop as seventeen passengers disembark and our seventeen board. Turbines roar again, legs chatter again, and this aircraft, specially created for heavy lifting, is airborne.
Baggage fills the aisles bringing the plane’s weight to be at full gross generously calculated. Looking down the aisle into the cockpit, as the plane climbs, the Tumlingtar ridge rises in front. Will the pilot circle? No, he pulls the control yoke as we near the ridge, and the plane tail-stands. That sudden pitch causes a radio to slide out of the instrument panel which the pilot catches with his right hand while holding the yoke with his left, all of us then finding what the pilot knows—this side of the ridge has an updraft, and it hefts us over. The co-pilot turns with a wide smile on his face, and our eyes meet as he glances down the aisle; he and the pilot clearly love making their plane dance. He unhooks the latch and shuts the cockpit door.
Peaks rush past. Scratches in the plastic windows cleave the light into a rainbow lattice that makes these snows glitter. On the Kathmandu cocktail circuit, pilots, as they navigate their ‘scotch on the rocks’, share stories with the attentive who may fly with them the next day, about the ‘agriculture’ of the Himalayan airspace—how the clouds of these mountains grow both rocks and potatoes.
Flight everywhere follows regimens, the regimens differing whether in New York airspace, or combat. Here in mountains where land can exist above the air, to prevent entering a cloud that may not be just air, the regimen requires turning towards India to work around the cloud. Now, flying over ridge after ridge, our aluminium tube with the updrafts feels as though it is going through the rapids of a river, and shaken loose with that jolting a carry-on bag scoots down the aisle and lodges against a sack of oranges.
As we walk into the Kathmandu airport, Nick jumps out from behind a pillar. ‘A tree bear is at the zoo!’ he says. Nick left us earlier to go see another part of Nepal while we continued fieldwork in a different part of the Arun Valley. After forty-seven nights in the field, Jennifer and I want news only of a hot shower. Nick continues, ‘I went back to the zoo. Remember the bear we saw? I wondered if it could be a tree bear. We don’t know how small tree bears are, but that bear is small. The zookeeper said that the bear had been in the zoo for two years; it had not grown. If it is not growing, it could be a tree bear.’
‘Yeah, Nick,’ I answer, ‘but not growing doesn’t prove anything. Maybe the bear is a runt. After all, the zoo food must be lousy.’
The next day at the zoo, as I pitch peanuts through the bars of her cage, her mouth is held open inches away. Amid crushed peanuts and saliva, to estimate age I try to fathom the wear on her molars. She loves peanuts, shells, as well as the meats. Would this bear go over the mountain upon smelling peanut butter in the wind? I push a stick through the bars to brush her teeth to better examine her cusps, and her jaws snap. As I work another stick, she curls a front paw around the cage bars. Is her inside digit likely to make a thumb-like print? It holds impressively with an opposable grip. Her breath smells like boiling turnips.
The zookeeper works backwards to figure her age. ‘She’s been a good bear, never mean, been here for two years. Since arriving, she has not grown. Maybe now she is five years old.’
We guess her weight to be less than 150 pounds, and she is too small for a normal five-year-old Asiatic black bear. But how heavy should a five-year-old Asiatic black bear be? There is no literature here in Kathmandu. The next day we depart for the USA. As we fly over the Baluchistan Desert, I look down on the Afghanistan desert where our Yeti Volkswagen had burnt out fourteen years before.
Two days later, I am pulling open the brass handles of the doors at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of National History, doors polished by thousands of tourists’ hands. Childhood dreams had me bringing something to this repository. Now accompanied by Jesse and Jennifer, we cross the ropes that funnel visitors towards the dinosaurs and head to the collections. The curator of mammals, Richard Thorington, is out.
Bill, his assistant, leads through the labyrinthine halls with case after case of specimen boxes, giant white blocks stacked up against the walls. In these, on sliding trays rest the mammals of the world, waiting for their appointed moments for their existences to be made into knowledge by the furless mammal whose another defining feature besides putting other mammals in boxes is upright bipedal walking. It is hard to look like a scientist while carrying my specimen in a red nylon stuff sack and accompanied by a two-year-old kicking a ball of paper along the floor. What’s wrong with coming to look at specimens with your kid? If the skull I carry is added to this collection, it’ll be as much his contribution as mine.
MUSEUMS HOLD THE PAST FOR PRESENT AND FUTURE USE. From life now gone they gather artefacts of aesthetics and the heritage of miscellany. As time moves on, museums allow us to go back in time bringing different times together.
Museums began as temples dedicated to the muses, places to inspire people, gathering the magic out of life experience. Ennigaldi-Nanna’s Museum (in modern Iraq) was the first museum to gather artefacts for public display. She was the daughter of the last Babylonian king. Perhaps knowing that her heritage was on its way out, she dug up shards with her own hands that gave evidence of the wonder that Babylonia was, seeking to record a story that began with her ancestor Nebuchadnezzar. To allow the future to go back in time, she described her collection in three languages.
But earlier than creating places for things gone, people gathered the living. Zoos predate museums by millennia. Princess Ennigaldi’s ancestor, King Nebuchadnezzar, built his hanging gardens of Babylon to house live wild animals and birds. Even 3,000 years before that, the Egyptians caged hippos, elephants, baboons, wild cats, and ungulates for display.
Across centuries, private gatherers with financial means or hard collecting work have assembled ‘wonder rooms’. Many of these collections upon their gatherer’s passing were given to the public, and the concept of one place to which would come items from around the world and back in time became more common. The British Museum in its founding purpose was to study such artefacts, gathering ‘the interesting things’ from their empire. Should anyone other than a scholar want to enter that museum, she or he first had to request their permit by letter. And again in England the gathering of the living had begun before the gathering of the gone, since a century before the British Museum, King Henry the First collected camels, lions, and leopards to create England’s first zoo.
As the general public began visiting museums, at times the line of propriety was crossed. In a city that advances itself to be civilized, a display in 2005 at the London Zoo had people wearing fig leaves. In 1906, the New York Bronx Zoo displayed a Congolese pygmy—a live member of our own species—as ‘the missing link’. Ota Benga had been ‘collected’ in the Congo Free State as a ‘specimen’. The New York Times reported Benga was viewed in a cage that also held a chimpanzee and a parrot. On 16 September 1906 alone, 40,000 people gawked at him. New York’s black clergy protested, ‘Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes.’ But the New York Times editorialized, ‘As for Benga himself, he is probably enjoying himself as well as he could anywhere in his country, and it is absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation he is suffering.’1
As I went on my footprint expeditions, one question I’ve wondered over the years is: what would be done with a Yeti if I found it? I might try directing the action, but certainly I would lose control. Would my Yeti be welcomed as a member of society, a hominoid, or put into a zoo as an animal? Or, if only one individual was ever found, would it be pickled and put into a museum? Though I carried on with my search, I often asked myself whether I really wanted to find a live Yeti.
BILL STANDS BEFORE THE DRAWERS OF OUR HYPOTHESIZED SNOWMAN. The skulls Bill takes out are meticulously washed, each penned with a number in black ink on bones sanitized white. These bears don’t have to fight for territory; the human species has assign
ed to each a little box in its drawer in a bigger box in its Latin-named plywood-box jungle. I unwrap the newspaper padding from my red nylon bag and reveal a yellowed skull, dried muscle, and a few tendons attached to it.
While my left hand holds the mystery, my right picks up a skull whose identity is ascribed. I look into bony faces and big eye sockets. I almost expect sinews and breath to flesh these bones anew. Holes perforate the skulls, entry and exit channels where nerves and veins once ran carrying out their appointed tasks. My fingers explore the skeletal ridges, concave and convex undulations of calcified structure. How insulting to play with the head of a once-fierce bear. I look into our skull’s gaping nose hole;, here they call it ‘nostrum’. I doubt the bear had a name for this, its most important sense. What would it have thought (how do bears think?) when the message of peanut butter first came through this hole?
What features differentiate the beasts we call ‘wild’ from those we call ‘not wild’? How does a taxonomist differentiate between a bear in the jungle and a bear in a zoo? (Not at all.) How do two bears define themselves in relation to each other in a zoo? (Human conditioning causes them to learn to live together.) The white plywood boxes may hold value, but in collecting and caging animals, do we put up fences that prevent us from understanding life? As we collect what these boxes hold, do we ask how it stacks up to our values—or to the values of those life species?
I am pulling out skulls, wondering to myself what to wonder about. Bill shuffles, saying, ‘I know little about bears. My specialty is shrews. For each family and genus key features exist in the skulls, and so I don’t know what’s critical for bears.’
Of course he doesn’t know, I tell myself. The last time anyone walked into the Smithsonian with a skull from a bear previously unknown was a century before; it was when the Kodiak bear was ‘discovered’. Jennifer and Jesse patiently wait while I probe trays. Some skulls have a hole behind the eye socket; others have what seems to be the same hole in another place, and one skull doesn’t have an equivalent hole. Did that hole-less individual have trouble using some part of its mind? Dramatic differences exist among ridges down the crest of the skulls. Some are smooth while others have a ridge that sticks up half an inch or so; one has a ridge and a half. Sherpas say that the Yeti has a pointed head. Could that be an extreme ridge crest?
Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Page 14
