Snowman

by Norman Bogner

  "Christ, this is gruesome," Wright said, and hurriedly passed the photographs on, then gesticulated futilely to Monte. "You said on the phone that some kind of bear was loose. Did a bear kill her?"

  "I don't know. The tracks weren't made by any animal we can identify."

  Wright poured himself a glass of water from a silver thermos and popped a Valium into his mouth.

  "What's up there?" Hammond asked nervously. "I was going to send my kids to the lodge for Christmas."

  "Cathy, we'll make whatever money you need available. You don't have to account for any of it. It's all in cash—but somehow you've got to find a way to contain this."

  Wright rose from the table and moved sluggishly toward the door.

  "I've never seen anything like this," he muttered.

  Chapter Six

  Holiday Inns were all the same; no surprises, ran the commercial. Ashby checked into the one in Westwood. His room looked as if it were made out of disposable plexiglass. They probably just threw the whole thing down the incinerator when the guest left.

  Ashby had spent the afternoon at the AAA trying to figure out a route to the reservation. It was inaccessible by plane. Forty miles from Blythe, it showed up as a minute crescent in the heart of the Mojave Desert. The Colorado River angled through it, but there was no sign of a road.

  He phoned his secretary and learned that the only newsworthy event was the merciless snowstorm, the heaviest one of the winter thus far. The balmy late-Indian-summer weather in L.A. was a relief.

  "You've had calls from Monte and Cathy all day." He was not surprised. "They've been on my back about your story on the girl."

  He poured a Scotch from the pint of Dewar's he had bought before checking in. No point in paying room-service prices.

  "They give any reason for being so concerned?"

  "Not to me."

  He swallowed some Scotch. It was wise to play possum.

  "Margaret, call them back and read them the obit. That should calm them down. Anything else happening at the lodge?"

  "Not that I've heard. It's packed. Seems all the advertising they did paid off."

  Over a cold hamburger in the coffee shop, the vision of this mass of visitors rushed through Ashby's mind, and his unease increased. Weren't they all in danger? But if he warned them off, he might be starting needless hysteria. He had no proof of a Snowman—would have none unless Bradford could identify the marks on the body. Besides, he wasn't sure he believed it himself. Wasn't the only Snowman ever seen thousands of miles away in the Himalayas? Did the creature have the ability to reproduce?

  In the moonlight the ski lodge was the size of a small pearl from the glacier below the summit of Sierra Mountain. A thin, veinlike crevasse slowly appeared in the glacier. It gradually widened as the fissure expanded, heaving blocks of ice as large as ten-story buildings down the mountainside. New ice channels were forming between the pinnacles of snow, and troughs belched forth as boulders were shifted and trees uprooted. The rumbling sounds could not be heard eighteen thousand feet below at the lodge, and in a few moments the tremors became muted in the vicious hacking of the wind.

  Under the surface, frozen rock was being crushed. An opaque light, gray and diffuse, began to sear the frozen ice cascades. An arm sprang through the melting glacier, and the Snowman emerged.

  He moved downhill toward the lodge. He took huge strides, and the ice hissed from the heat given off by his body. The blizzard conditions near the summit drove him into a frenzy. He had come down thousands of feet and was now just above the advanced slope. In the distance the lights from below formed a darting jellied viscous pattern. His attention was diverted by the whipping of the cables which the gondolas ran on.

  The wind changed direction, and now on the mountain there were other sounds which were familiar. In the guttural rasp of the eddying winds the roars of bears were carried as they prowled the dense forests. He took the scent and hacked down a large fir tree. Intruders threatened his hunting ground.

  Ashby started out at six the following morning, to avoid the downtown freeway traffic. The distance to the Desert Center was about two hundred miles, but he had no idea how long after that it would take to reach the reservation. He stopped off at a roadside deli and bought himself a couple of sub sandwiches and a six-pack of Coors. He rolled down all the windows, because the heat was becoming intense. When he reached the desert, sand devils struck his car unexpectedly, causing it to veer from side to side. In the distance, smoking, swirling tornadolike winds rose from the flats as though from a witch's caldron, whipping the sage-brush and yucca. There was a constant hum over the baked terra-cotta arroyos and then the sudden swoop of a shrike and its vicious "chack" as it attacked a spadefoot toad too slow to reach its burrow. Waterless stream beds twisted down the slate mountains. Along the roadside behind cacti tortured into peculiar shapes were rattlers, lizards and Gila monsters. The windshield was smeared with a variety of fire ants and centipedes blown from the ground by the sand devils.

  In all the years he had been a reporter, his curiosity had never been so powerfully aroused by a man. It was beyond him to understand how a man like Bradford had given up civilization for this barren life. Bradford's retreat struck him as not only unreasonable but also enigmatic. He could not reconcile the idea that a Rhodes Scholar and an Olympic skier could end up in this desolate no man's land. He was determined to find out why Bradford had punished himself this way. Was he in fact a murderer and this a form of penance?

  The glare of the sun became relentless, and after a while the shimmering effect dazed him. He had left the main road and was bouncing along a primitive dirt track. Nothing, he thought, could survive in this heat. Some miles farther he was forced to change his mind. On the roadside was a battered whitewashed adobe hut. Several Indians with washed-out hooded eyes and hardened leather skin toned to dark copper regarded him with a hint of curiosity. Indian jewelry, pottery, and blankets were displayed beside the hut in a fruitless commerce.

  Ahead of him, like a group of lost, haunted souls, were a number of Indians working with primitive axes and shovels on a road. Beyond them the road was well made, with a tarred surface. Ashby drove past them along the verge.

  The Indians, stripped to the waist, wore ragged shorts and tattered shorn jeans. Sweat gleamed from their chests and backs. They seemed indifferent to his arrival.

  The sun had set moments before he reached the entrance of the reservation. The ride had been a nightmarish experience. He had crept along at five miles an hour over the steep rocky trail, which was deeply rutted and a nesting ground for snakes, lizards, and hordes of flying insects which flew at the car in throbbing, maniacal formations as though unleashed like a biblical plague. The Cherokee was caked with mud and patched with dead insects.

  Ashby was directed to the Indian agent's house, a log cabin leaning over a high bluff. The agent was a lean, squinting man by the name of Dennis Crawford. He was obviously so pleased to learn that a civilization of sorts still existed that he smiled idiotically at Ashby.

  The amenities he offered were minimal: a drafty curtainless bathroom; a group showerhouse, where the water smelled strongly of sulfur; a dinner of greasy salt pork and beans; and enormous shots of raw whiskey in chipped mugs. Crawford also arranged for a group of Indian children to wash Ashby's car.

  Whenever Bradford's name was mentioned he fell into a moody reflective silence and drank more whiskey. It wasn't clear if he was playing a poker hand and trying to get paid for information or if Bradford held some power over him.

  "When do I get to see Mr. Bradford?" Ashby asked.

  "He's not back yet."

  "How do you know?"

  "The Indians never begin prayers without him," Crawford said obscurely. Then he lapsed into that faraway, dazed posture which shelters old drunks unaccustomed to company. "You'll see something damned peculiar soon as he comes . . ."

  At the end of the day the group of men working on the road took their reward in the stream
just below the reservation. They peeled off the pickup truck like new recruits from boot camp. They picked up cans of beer from a case which had been left cooling under a large rock at the mouth of the icy stream. Their bodies were smeared with dust, muddied from sweat, and they plunged into the water. They babbled and sang like boys, scrubbed each other's backs with thick borax soap until their skin tingled. It was a fine time, the best part of the day for them. They discussed their progress, which was measured in feet. To build a road without heavy equipment was an accomplishment each man took pride in.

  They would spend perhaps half an hour in the water and behave as though they had not seen one another for months. It was impossible to talk in the sun. The effort was too great. Grunts, nods, the occasional question was the extent of their conversation. In the evening, the apparently stolid nature of the men gave way to free joyful expression. When they left the water they would lie on the straw-hard burnt scrub to dry off and drink some more beer. The road would not be mentioned; it was bad form.

  The men drove up to the reservation, refreshed and happy. In the last light the fields of vegetables and fruit were an eyesore, hard arid ground which provided bare sustenance to the people. Their diet relied heavily on beans and rice, and some of the children grew up with rickets. In a small compound a dismal attempt was made to raise chickens, but the scraggly birds squawking in the pebbled, muddy runs were undernourished, good only for boiling. Yet another fiasco, the men recognized, were the thirty head of cattle they had purchased from a bankrupt rancher. Agents from the Department of Agriculture had promised to send them feed, but none had arrived, and the cattle, subsisting on burnt grass and shrubs, bellowed hungrily in their stalls.

  On the field that ran along the cabins, small boys were playing football. Bits of rag and chamois pads had been sewn together by the women to outfit them with uniforms. A misshapen bloated object was flung through the air and bounced crazily on the ground, and both teams scrambled for it. The women watched for the men over their crude charcoal braziers. Beside them on wooden poles trout hung drying. Everywhere the eye traveled the landscape of poverty incarcerated the people.

  Yet when the men arrived the spell of deprivation was broken. An odd aura of joy infused them. The sound of a drum, monotonously and primevally rhythmic, was heard. The children cleaning Ashby's car began to run in the direction of the drum and Ashby shouted after them:

  "Hey, I thought we made a deal—a buck a head . . ."

  The car was clean in sections, but crazy-quilt smears still disfigured it.

  "Save your breath," Crawford said, "they're going to their prayer meeting. They're crazy—mad, i tell you. I can't control any of them."

  "Who?"

  "Bradford and the Yaqui. They converted the whole bunch of them to some kind of religion, mystical . . . I don't understand any of it."

  "Who's the Yaqui?" he asked as Crawford rubbed his rheumy eyes and dispensed with the task of civility by pulling from the bottle.

  "He's what they call a sorcerer. Bradford's his disciple," he added ominously.

  Below them, in a large circle around a tent made of lizard skin, were the Indians. Two men joined hands and moved to the center; they both held torches. Then, at some signal, the entire group broke into an eerie chant.

  "Om Mane Padme Om . . ."

  They repeated the words endlessly until the sound became a low hypnotic wail.

  "It's like this a lot of the time, but then sometimes they all go for days without saying a word," Crawford said. "Silence . . . total silence. Scares me."

  "Why do they do it?"

  "I don't know. I've been on other reservations, and this one's different. It changed when Bradford and the Yaqui drifted up from Mexico some years back. They brought some kind of mushroom with them, and they chew it. Gets 'em high for days. They get hallucinations and run around naked, screaming." He paused and stared at him helplessly. "Bradford once told me that they're entering God by eating the mushroom—a sacred mushroom God. They're insane. If you knew what was good for you, you'd get the hell out of here."

  "Bradford was a mountain climber once," Ashby said. "He led a party up Mount Everest."

  "Don't surprise me none. He goes on retreats with the Yaqui up Palomar Mountain." He indicated a stark black outline silhouetted by moonlight. "They don't carry no food or water, and they go barefoot," he added incredulously.

  "According to what I heard," Ashby continued, "Bradford let his party die. He panicked and ran out on them."

  The agent wheezed, and a spume of phlegm gathered in his throat. Ashby realized that he was being laughed at.

  "Bradford's a lot of things to the people around here, but I never heard he was a coward. Last year a bunch of FBI agents come up here and arrested the Yaqui. They claimed he was dealing dope. Well, there was one hell of a fight. Six of the Utes were shot—massacred, if you want my opinion. But they didn't get away easy. They lost two of their agents. They arrested Bradford for it and kept him in jail for a few weeks, but they couldn't find any witnesses."

  "Did Bradford kill the FBI men?"

  "If I knew, I wouldn't say."

  Chapter Seven

  Bradford sat cross-legged, balancing a tin plate with charred trout on it. He hadn't touched his food. He waited for the Yaqui. The old man came out of his tent, frail and limping. His white beard, which had been full and shapely when Bradford had first met him in Tuxpan, ten years ago, now resembled the frayed ends of a knotted rug. The eyes were deep-set and in the firelight were like irregular anthracite pebbles. The Yaqui had not been eating, and Bradford was worried about him. It would be humiliating and disrespectful to attempt to feed him, and he would be rejected. The Yaqui was his guide, and their roles could never be reversed.

  Their relationship could be traced to Bradford's return from Everest with the story of his encounter with the Yeti. The media and his colleagues had built a wall of ridicule around him, destroying his self-confidence, until Bradford reached the end of his own resources and began to doubt his own experience.

  A gradual process of deterioration as insidious as an unidentified virus had finally worn Bradford down: He had no choice but to disappear. He signed on as a hand on a tramp steamer and spent a year as a seaman sailing the Punta Mayo and Juruá rivers of South America, collecting rubber from plantations. From there he had wandered through the interior of Mexico, eventually arriving in Tuxpan, where he was arrested for vagrancy.

  He and the Yaqui met in prison, and spent months together in the same cell. When he joined the Yaqui on a pilgrimage through the Yucatan Peninsula, Bradford had slowly regained a semblance of his self-respect. He embraced the Yaqui's mystical beliefs, and when they wished to commune with the sacred soma they chewed the divine mushroom of immortality.

  But even during those periods when he was hallucinating—freed from reality—the primitive urge for revenge still haunted him. The ineradicable specter of the Snowman was still buried in his subconscious. Thrusting through the ice were the distended spikelike fingers, the teeth which ground so that hard sparks flew from them, the horned skin and the massive head. He had seen nature's ultimate savage kill his men. The cataclysmic violence of the Snowman during those last few hours would never leave him.

  Bradford had left his environment, forsaken friends and colleagues, and entered what he recognized as a fugue state. He suffered occasionally from a loss of memory because the pain of the past was too intense to tolerate. But in spite of the Yaqui's guidance, Bradford knew that he could never enter the state of perfect tranquility until he could vindicate himself. One day he would return to Lhotse.

  An Indian boy brought a plate of filleted, mashed trout for the Yaqui, who said: "I'm fasting, you eat it."

  The boy took the plate away, and Bradford watched him hurry back to his brothers and divide the portion among them.

  "I'll join you," Bradford said to the Yaqui.

  "You spent the day working and you're hungry. You'll always be a disciple and never a
master," the Yaqui said.

  "Why?" Bradford asked without emotion.

  "You imitate too perfectly and try too hard for unity. Trying is resistance to the idea of embracing God. Only when you yield will you succeed."

  The Yaqui invariably spoke in riddles; when Bradford had been a young college student he had been skeptical of precisely this aspect of religion, the naive and simplistic explanations that passed for profundity. Bradford had not been able to restrain his logical mind, and although the Yaqui had virtually resurrected him spiritually, he still held back the total commitment to the mystical deity.

  The Yaqui stared at him, then shook his arm when he did not respond.

  "Daniel, I had a vision last night," the Yaqui said in a low, troubled voice. "You were on the snow and blocks of ice were falling. Men were dying . . ."

  In the flickering campfire Bradford imagined that he saw the faces of his dead Sherpas. The impression was so strong that he jumped to his feet and stumbled backward as though retreating from some invisible force.

  A small Ute boy studied him and peered around him to see what had caused his reaction. He looked up at Bradford and saw nothing, only the mantle of darkness.

  "Mr. Bradford, the agent said there was a man up at the post who wanted to speak to you."

  "Is he a Fed?"

  "I don't think so," the boy said, scampering off.

  Bradford walked along the rutted path snaking through the compound. Men finished with their dinner sat smoking around the dying fires. Their resigned faces altered and they greeted Bradford as he passed. He was popular with them, but their affection toward him was inhibited by a certain fearful respect. Bradford did not approve of fighting for trivial reasons. The previous week he had caught two men quarreling over a pack of cigarettes. He had fought both men, using his knowledge of karate and judo to throw them and hold them up as examples to the others. Some of the Utes resented Bradford's skill and the humiliating spectacle of a man no bigger than either of the two Indians thrashing both of them until they pleaded with him to stop.