Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  Families are helpful panoplies of any number of degenerate diagnostic characteristics, as if arrayed for the scientist's perusal. Even the most masculine of the porters we have here with us partake at times of the nature of the child, or the female, or the senile Caucasian. During the planning of our trek, for example, Gulam could not be instructed to use my fountain pen. Instead he took it in his fist and tapped out a shape on the paper as if he was working with a chisel.

  These are people whose methods of going about the day have remained unchanged since the Stone Age. And yet they were for a time in the ancient world the uncontested masters of Central Asia.

  My theory is that the altitude, combined with the intensity of ultraviolet rays and the cold, hugely reduces the likelihood of bacterial reproduction. Otherwise these people would have long since died off, given their lack of commitment to even the most elementary hygiene.

  …

  Another long week of walking and riding. Beger cries out periodically when he turns his foot in his boot. The porters have tried a different poultice.

  At twilight we come to the edge of a great salt lake, a startling robin's egg blue in the blinding sun. Dried salts of varying widths band the shoreline. Three of the porters explore with Gulam while the others start a fire and erect a communal tent. Some sort of animal sinew is employed for the guy ropes.

  Beger is of the opinion that we have a much better chance of finding the yeti in the higher elevations, where most of the sightings have been recorded.

  “The conventional wisdom,” I tell him.

  He responds with an unpleasant smile before turning away. The lobes of his ears below his fur hat are a merry red from the sun. “Here, what's to prevent them from seeing us coming kilometers and kilometers away?” he asks.

  “By all accounts they have no fear of people,” I remind him. “And of course they'd have as much warning in the mountains as they would here.”

  He glumly drops the subject.

  “Our only alternative is to choose whom to trust and then to trust them,” I tell him.

  He snorts.

  Gulam returns pleased. A short way down the shoreline are fresh footprints and the crushed bones of something.

  “Maybe they're using this as a salt lick,” Beger says from inside the tent.

  After dark a yak is set out as a lure. Staked to the ground fifty yards or so from the camp, it bleats and grunts its frustration at being separated from its fellows. I clean and ready our rifles. They're formidable, if a little balky when left untended, but their heft is reassuring. The yak bleats all night long. The next day we travel twenty or so kilometers around the shoreline and repeat the procedure.

  The guns travel in specially sewn oilskin pouches for protection against the grit. Beger tries soaking his foot in the salt water while we watch the sun set. Up to this point, in terms of birds, I've noticed only a few small snow finches and the occasional sand grouse.

  The sun's rays lance over mountain ridges that remain unimaginably distant. The salt around us turns orange in the light.

  From that first childhood moment in which I could see over my windowsill, I dreamed of far horizons. At the age of seven I found a translation of Sir Charles Bell's Grammar of Colloquial Tibetan. The first two phrases I learned were “the elephant gun is on the yak” and “all monks are too lazy.” Few foreigners have explored Tibet as comprehensively as I have. I've traversed eleven thousand kilometers on quests botanical and zoological. I've suffered missionaries, British colonial officers, unwashed philosophers, and the mineral ingratitude of the natives themselves. With Tibet, everyone grasps a different aspect, but no one comprehends the entirety. It's more than a country. It's an island looking down on the rest of the planet.

  Our third morning at the lake, the yak is still bleating, the wind still blowing. Outside the tent it's very cold. I watch two of the porters rig up an ingenious little sling for their food pouches.

  I'm interested in the racial origins of inventiveness. The gene for nomadism is clearly hereditary, given that racial groups like the Comanche, the Gypsies, and the Tibetans are all nomadic; what, then, of the gene for resourcefulness of a certain kind, or inventiveness? Might that not be an area in which such peoples are our equal, if not superior?

  Beger, when I raise the notion, is intrigued by the idea, within limits.

  This is a golden time for anthropologists, especially within the Reich. Lenz was certainly correct to remark that we're presently governed by the first widely influential leader to recognize that the central mission of politics is race hygiene. All of us in the sciences have profited by such a regime, even if we've also had to accommodate ourselves to a good deal of foolishness and boorishness. It is, we all agree, crucial to delineate precisely and objectively the hierarchical boundaries between the classes and the races, because scientific precision reassures the ordinary citizen that the law will protect his own security.

  We've all done our bit. Ancestral Legacy devoted many man-hours of work to the drafting of the Marriage Health Law, especially to the definitions of hereditary degeneracy in its various manifestations. And before this mission I myself had begun branching out into the more positive aspects of eugenics: conceiving new methods to increase the birthrate of the superior populations. It's a national opportunity. And there's simply too much funding there to ignore.

  The new poultice seems to have made Beger worse. He soldiers on but remarks more than once with a sheepish smile that he's feeling a little green. We stop for a midday meal, and I tend to his foot myself. The smell once his boot is off is eye-watering.

  “We may have to go back,” I tell him, unwrapping the mess.

  He can't even bring himself to disagree, though he's stricken at the prospect of having let us down.

  Gulam's hail magician, who also dabbles in medicine, is called over to examine the foot. He seems briskly untroubled by what he sees and returns half an hour later with some kind of paste in a wooden bowl. He applies the paste with his fingers and leaves me to rewrap the foot.

  The next morning the tethered yak is gone. The tether is snapped. Footprints surround the spot and trail away to the salt lake, where they disappear. I ask who was on watch but the porters refuse to acknowledge any accusation in my question. The yeti are, after all, magical animals.

  The incident does seem to have affected morale, however. A certain listlessness or wariness is evident in the manner in which the group goes about its business of packing up and preparing to get under way. “We will all be killed,” one of the porters says sotto voce to Gulam, believing me out of earshot. He sounds matter-of-fact.

  I take advantage of a small snow squall nearby to hold up the column, gather the porters round and deliver a scientific lecture on the origins of snowstorms. I want them to register that a white man's rationality can have more power than all of the mountain spirits whirling in their heads. They seem impressed enough with the information they've been given. I ask if there are questions, and they all stare back at me silently. I give the word for the column to proceed.

  We strike out, finally, from the shores of the lake, heading back into the endless plains. The change depresses Beger's spirits further. “How much longer like this?” he asks the porter closest to him on the pack animal.

  “Until the rocks grow beards,” the porter jokes.

  Two or three of them still mutter every so often about the loss of their tea maker. But they are of a race that can make do in any number of ways, I remind myself. This is a people who can burn sheep dung hot enough to melt metal.

  Truth be told, our friend Reichsführer Himmler has had some very strange ideas. He wants to prove that the Nordic race descended directly from the skies. His theory of glacial cosmogony insists that all cosmic energy erupts from the collision between ice and fire, and nowhere is that clash more primeval, of course, than here, where the land is closest to the upper sky. Hence the entire department of Ancestral Legacy, with its charge to study the origi-nary area, spirit,
deeds, and legacy of the Indo-Germanic race. The whole thing is mostly unscientific. He's sent us off in search of a proto-Gangetic Indo-European language, which would be evidence that Tibet was once inhabited by a Caucasian race, perhaps ancestors of the Scythians. I had a number of talks with him in which I sought to guide him back to firmer theoretical ground, all without success. There is a certain futility to resisting one of the Reichsführer's pet projects.

  In the middle of the night I'm awakened by that same high whistling. Surrounded by snores, I wrestle myself hurriedly into my outer garments and emerge from the tent, shining my pocket torch about. The porter on watch is gazing disinterestedly off into the darkness. When I shine my beam in the direction of our tethered yak, it's swallowed in the gloom. I investigate. The tethered yak is gone. The porter claims to have heard nothing.

  The entire next day Beger seems half-asleep. Every so often a porter's casual hand nudges him back upright on his pack animal.

  During the evening meal that night their barley beer tastes slightly strange. Beger is already asleep and I find that I too can hardly keep my eyes open. I give Gulam instructions about tethering the next yak closer to camp and then close my eyes for a moment's rest. The next morning I wake very late, my mouth an old stewpot. The sun outside the tent is blinding. The yak is tethered nearby, as I requested. The porters and the other pack animals are gone.

  Beger exhibits surprisingly little reaction to the news. They left water and food, as well as the guns. I have my compass. But with only the two of us, we're at least three weeks from help, I tell him.

  “At least,” he agrees, his face turned to the tent wall.

  We seem unable to rouse ourselves quickly, and thus get started distressingly late in the day. The yak periodically rebels at being ridden, so we make only a handful of kilometers before having to stop for the night. We manage three days of this before that yak disappears as well. This time even the tether is gone.

  “Somewhere some yeti are having a feast,” Beger says to himself when I inform him. He spends the day out of the sun in the dispirited half teepee of the tent. Without help, I've only been able to erect it in a semicollapsed way.

  What a creature, I think, with real wonder. Sitting at the tent's entrance and tracking the dust storms and whirligigs on the horizon, I remind myself that I've done what I set out to do: validated, to my own satisfaction, my belief. Before me, science had to settle for the same trio of consolation prizes: footprints, dens, fecal matter. I'm going to be like Du Chaillu, the Frenchman who was the first to shoot a gorilla: an animal that for two thousand years Europeans believed to be mythical. And I'm not simply discovering another animal. On the scrolls that serve as meditation aids in the monasteries, the yeti are positioned between the animals and mankind. I've been mocked for devoting my life to a legend. But legends have moved whole nations and held them together.

  Beger turns feverish in the night. I minister to him with water and cool compresses. He cries silently and gives himself over to being held. He sweats through his undergarments, and when I peel them off, we both can see a red line running from his ankle up to the lymph nodes in his groin.

  I get him redressed and resettled. His ankle I leave alone.

  I doze beside him, dreaming of river crossings, the frigid water roiling and rushing and spray that tastes of minerals. In Shigatse the breeze smelled of juniper trees and tasted of dust. A spotted white bull lolled about in the middle of the street. In one village where we were welcomed, children bathed in our honor. We bedded down in furs on the ground, and the fleas and my fears that we wouldn't find enough petrol the next day kept me awake. That day on a high pass we saw across a half-mile gorge the giant goat known as the takin. It was snub-nosed and fearsome across the shoulders, and reputed to have pushed travelers off narrow and precipitous tracks. But its hair, in the sun, was a stunning gold. The golden fleece, I thought. The golden fleece.

  …

  I wake in the darkness, my hand hunting for my torch. We're both wheezing from the thinness of the air. Holding my breath, I cover Beger's mouth and nose with my palm and listen. There's a strong wind; under it, a far-off whistling. Something smells. I give Beger a shake but it fails to rouse him. I think of the yak outside the night before, its eyes shut against the wind, snow speckling its black fur.

  In June the sherpas observe the Mani Rimbu—“All Will Be Well”—a celebration during which they venerate their nature gods. At the climax a gruesomely costumed effigy of a yeti appears. A missionary whose garden had been torn to pieces told me when I came to investigate, “These creatures are God's children, the same as us.”

  The whistling comes from the other side of the tent. The one wall that's fully erect shudders and buffets against its pole.

  I try to listen. Beger wheezes, his breathing further obstructed by blankets. Bruno: his first name is Bruno.

  During our initial interview Gulam told me of a face-to-face encounter near his uncle's corral. The thing's face and palms were black. Its nostrils frightening in ways he couldn't make clear. He'd been petrified by the yellow of its eyes. It had hissed and then scrambled away, toting a yak calf under its arm.

  A shriek, a bellow, sounds above the tent. I switch on the torch and jerk its beam to the opening. The face in the darkness bares its teeth. The faces behind it jostle forward.

  Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay

  Two and a half weeks after I was born, on July 9th, 1958, the plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on either side of the Fair-weather fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America. The thinking now is that the southwest side and bottom of the inlets at the head of Lituya Bay jolted upward and to the northwest, and the northeast shore and head of the bay jolted downward and to the southeast. One way or the other, the result registered 8.3 on the Richter scale.

  The bay is T-shaped and seven miles long and two wide at the stem, and according to those who were there it went from a glassy smoothness to a full churn, a giant's Jacuzzi. Next to it, mountains twelve to fifteen thousand feet high twisted into themselves and lurched in contrary directions. In Juneau, 122 miles to the southeast, people who'd turned in early were pitched from their beds. The shock waves wiped out bottom-dwelling marine life throughout the panhandle. In Seattle, a thousand miles away, the University of Washington's seismograph needle was jarred completely off its graph. And meanwhile, back at the head of the bay, a spur of mountain and glacier the size of a half-mile-wide city park—forty million cubic yards in volume—broke off and dropped three thousand feet down the northeast cliff into the water.

  This is all by way of saying that it was one of the greatest spasms, when it came to the release of destructive energy, in history. It happened around 10:16 p.m. At that latitude and time of year, still light out. There were three small boats anchored in the south end of the bay.

  The rumbling from the earthquake generated vibrations that the occupants of the boats could feel on their skin like electric shock. The impact of the rockfall that followed made a sound like Canada exploding. There were two women, three men, and a seven-year-old boy in the three boats. They looked up to see a wave breaking over the seventeen-hundred-foot-high southwest bank of Gilbert Inlet and heading for the opposite slope. What they were looking at was the largest wave ever recorded by human beings. It scythed off three-hundred-year-old pines and cedars and spruce, some of them with trunks three or four feet thick, along a trimline of 1,720 feet. That's a wave crest 500 feet higher than the Empire State Building.

  Fill your bathtub. Hold a football at shoulder height and drop it into the water. Imagine the height of the tub above the waterline to be two thousand feet. Scale the height of the initial splash up proportionately.

  When I was two years old, my mother decided she'd had enough of my father and hunted down an old high school girlfriend who'd wandered so far west she'd taken a job teaching in a grammar school in Hawai
i. The school was in a little town called Pepeekeo. All of this was told to me later by my mother's older sister. My mother and I moved in with the friend, who lived in a little beach cottage on the north shore of the island near an old mill, Pepeekeo Mill. We were about twelve miles north of Hilo. This was in 1960.

  The friend's name was Chuck. Her real name was Charlotte something, but everyone apparently called her Chuck. My aunt had a photo she showed me of me playing in the sand with some breakers in the background. I'm wearing something that looks like overalls put on backward. Chuck's drinking beer from a can.

  And one morning Chuck woke my mother and me up and asked if we wanted to see a tidal wave. I don't remember any of this. I was in pajamas and my mother put a robe on me and we trotted down the beach and looked around the point to the north. I told my mother I was scared and she said we'd go back to the house if the water got too high. We saw the ocean suck itself out to sea smoothly and quietly, and the muck of the sand and some flipping and turning white-bellied fish that had been left behind. Then we saw it come back, without any surf or real noise, like the tide coming in in time-lapse photography. It came past the high-tide mark and just up to our toes. Then it receded again. “Some wave,” my mother told me. She lifted me up so I could see the end of it. Some older boys who lived on Mamalahoa Highway sprinted past us, chasing the water. They got way out, the mud spraying up behind their heels. And the water came back again, this time even smaller. The boys, as far out as they were, were still only up to their waists. We could hear how happy they sounded. Chuck told us the show was over, and we headed up the beach to the house. My mother wanted me to walk, but I wanted her to carry me. We heard a noise and when we turned we saw the third wave. It was already the size of the lighthouse out at Wailea. They'd gotten me into the cottage and halfway up the stairs to the second floor when the walls blew in. My mother managed to slide me onto a corner of the roof that was spinning half a foot above the water. Chuck went under and didn't come up again. My mother was carried out to sea, still hanging on to me and the roof chunk. She'd broken her hip and bitten through her lower lip. We were picked up later that day by a little boat near Honohina.