Gina heard a noise ahead of her and she stopped dead in her tracks. Every survival instinct in her body told her to turn around and run back to Yukon. She had almost turned around when she felt a twinge in her stomach. She knew that it was only her nerves reacting to the situation that she was in, but it reminded her that she needed to escape the Yeti for something more than herself. Gina reminded herself that she knew this plan was dangerous when she had conceived it but it seemed to be her only hope. If she was to turn around and run back to Yukon, she did not know when she would have another chance to contrive a situation that would allow her to escape. She also knew that this was her best option at engaging Yukon to the point that she could make her way out into the middle of the valley. Gina knew that if she ran back to Yukon that she was dooming herself and her unborn child to a short life of terror followed by death. She thought better to spare both herself and the child of that torture and either escape or to die trying now. She told herself that the sound she had heard was just the wind making its way through the caves and she prayed that her assumption was accurate.
Gina grabbed a dying torch off the wall then she walked deeper into the cave, well out of the sight of Wen-Ku. When Gina was sure that the native woman could not see her, she started pulling the sloth meat out of her pockets and stuffing it into the crevices in the walls. After she had stuffed all of the meat into the walls, she quickly hurried back to the mouth of the cave.
When Gina had made her way to front of the cave, she saw Wen-Ku standing next to Yukon. The woman held the charred remains of the sloth rib that she had eaten in her hand. Wen-Ku smiled at her, tossed the meatless bone aside, then the native woman curled up next to Yukon. Despite the fact that Wen-Ku had seen numerous other brides and their children devoured by the animals in the valley and the horrors in the tunnels, she still felt as if she privileged to be the bride of a god. Had Gina not been trapped with the woman, the anthropologist in her would have been fascinated by the Wen-Ku’s thought process. Gina would have studied how Wen-Ku perceived her own and her son’s relationship with what they considered to be a god. The fact that Gina felt nothing but contempt for a woman who was so proud to keep her child in circumstances that assured him a quick and horrible death confirmed for Gina that she was no longer an anthropologist. She was a woman and a mother who wanted to save the lives of herself and her child. She peered into the crevice in which Thu-Ca was sleeping and her heart sank as the realization that she was also a human being set in on her. Gina knew that Wen-Ku would never willingly leave Yukon. Wen-Ku would also never allow her son or as she had said the Yeti god’s child to leave the cave either. The native women would die in this cave one way or the other, and so would her son. Wen-Ku’s beliefs were in direct opposition with the Gina’s beliefs. Gina took a deep breath and thought of a time in the future when she was home and far away from the horror that she was in now. She thought about telling Henry that she had left a child to die in the Yeti’s cave. She thought about one day telling her own child that she had saved from the valley about how she had left another child to be devoured by the creatures that lived there. Most of all, she thought about seeing her reflection in the mirror every day and knowing that she had left an infant in a living hell and that she didn’t do anything to try and save the infant. Tears began to form in her eyes as she resolved herself to the act of kidnapping an infant from its mother.
Gina wiped her eyes clean and she spoke to herself in English, “It’s the lesser of two evils and it what’s better for the baby.” She sobbed. “It’s also the only way that I will be able to live with myself if I get out of here alive.” She walked over the mouth of the cave, picked up a second charred sloth rib, and forced herself to take a few bites of it. The meat tasted horrible but Gina knew that she needed some food in her stomach if she had any hope of seeing her escape plan succeed. She tried to be thankful that unlike her last meal that at least the meat she was eating now was cooked. When Gina was finished eating, she tossed the rib outside of the cave. Then she grabbed one of the pelts that Wen-Ku had left there. She wrapped the pelt around herself as she walked back to Yukon and laid down as close to the Yeti as she possibly could. Her entire body shook from a mixture of fear and anticipation. She reviewed the remainder of her plan aloud in English, “Now to just wait for whatever the crawling demons are to come out of the tunnels. When Yukon attacks them, I just have to grab the baby, wrap the pelt around him, run out of the cave, grab the transmitter, and head for the center of the valley.” She said, “Just survive all of that and then hope that the rescue team is not too far off before something else attacks me.”
Chapter 14
Henry had Jun-Tuk with him as he was driving his snowmobile alongside the Yeti tracks at the base of the mountain. Rodgers was following in his own snowmobile only a few feet behind them. Henry’s thoughts were scattered between the deaths of his team members and the concern that he still felt over Gina. His concentration was brought to the present when Jun- Tuk tapped on his shoulder.
The old man pointed to Henry’s coat pocket. “Your coat, it glows like the sun itself and then disappears only to return again.”
Henry looked down at his coat to see an orange light blinking in his pocket. He pulled his snowmobile to a stop then he reached into his pocket to pull out the distress receiver. The receiver was not only blinking, but it was displaying coordinates. Henry’s heart leapt for joy at the sight of the blinking receiver because it meant that Gina had turned the transmitter on. As of this very instant, Henry knew that Gina was still alive.
Rodgers pulled to a stop beside Henry. “What are we stopping for? The tracks continue this way and I sure as hell don’t want to spend another night in this valley!”
Henry held out the receiver for Rodgers to see. “The transmitter! Gina must have turned it on! That means that she is alive!” Jun-Tuk could see that Henry was overjoyed and he asked Henry what the significance of the blinking light was. Henry translated the implications of what the receiver meant and the old man hugged Henry in a show of his mutual joy.
Rodgers felt a rush of excitement run through his body as well. The hunter was not overjoyed that Gina Murella was seemingly alive. Rodgers’ entire body was shaking with anticipation at the prospect of being the first person in history to kill a Yeti. Rodgers pointed to the receiver. “How far away is the transmitter from us right now?”
Henry read the information pouring through the receiver, and as he was reading it, a large smile appeared on his face. He looked up from the receiver. “It looks like she is only about three quarters of a mile from where we are right now! We are almost there! We almost have Gina back!”
It was now Rodgers who was smiling as he looked at Henry. “Not just almost to Gina. We are also just about fifteen minutes away from taking on the single greatest creature that is walking the face of the Earth.”
The joy suddenly rushed out of Henry’s face. “The Yeti. It took most of our ammunition to kill those teratorns and we weren’t even able to slow down the woolly rhino. The Yeti tore apart a mammoth with his bare hands. How are we going to kill a monster that strong?”
Rodgers smiled. “That’s easy. We are going to shoot the damned thing right through its eye. There is not a creature on the planet that a well-placed bullet to eye won’t hurt. At the very least, we will blind the creature, and at best, the bullet will go right into its brain and kill the thing with one shot.”
Henry stared at Rodgers with a skeptical look on his face. “Are you sure that you can hit that Yeti in the eye with your first shot? If his bones are anywhere near as thick as those of the wooly rhino, a shot that hits him in the head may just bounce off his skull and do nothing more than enrage him.”
Rodgers nodded. “Don’t worry, I can hit that monster in the eye.”
Henry was still skeptical about the hunter’s ability to shoot the Yeti in the eye before the monster was upon them, but at the same time, he didn’t have a better plan. Henry nodded. “Alright, let’s ke
ep heading forward.”
The group continued on for another ten minutes until they saw several large brown and black forms standing over two blood-soaked forms at the base of the mountain. Henry and Rodgers pulled out their binoculars. Henry gasped when he saw what the large brown and black forms were. Henry’s mind was flooded with the fairy tales that he had heard as a kid. Fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood and the Three Little Pigs. In those stories, wolves had been over exaggerated in terms of their size, cunning, and ferocity. Those fairy tales had been told to scare children so that they respected the wilderness outside of their doors and the potential dangers that lurked in the woods. The wolves in those stories were only allegories for the highwaymen who were the true dangers to young children in the woods. In most cases, wolves presented very little danger to humans. For the most part, wolves were scared of humans, but as Henry stared at these wolves, he knew that these creatures would think nothing of attacking a human. These wolves were the size of Clydesdale Horses and their teeth were larger than a lion’s. As Henry looked at the massive wolves, he immediately knew that they were some evolutionary offshoot of the deadly dire wolf. Seeing the killing machines ahead of him touched a primal fear deep within Henry. He looked over at Rodgers and Jun-Tuk and he wondered if they would be all that different from the three little pigs in the eyes of the dire wolves.
Rodgers finally spoke to Henry, “Those giant wolves look to be eating something that I would guess used to be some kind of large cat.” Rodgers pointed to several tracks in the snow around the dire wolves. “Even from here, I can tell what happened. Those cats attacked the Yeti when he still had your wife in his hand. He put her down and fought the cats. She started to run away but then she ran back to the Yeti probably for protection. The Yeti killed the cats, picked up your wife, then he continued to head south. The wolves are scavenging off the remains of the cats.” Rodgers sighed. “We are upwind from them, so they haven’t noticed us yet. We saw what happened when we came to close to the teratorns. We will have to drive well out of sight of the wolves before we cut back toward the Yeti tracks.”
Henry was staring at the wolves and thinking about how close they were to the Yeti and Gina when he remembered another fairy tale. He turned to Rodgers. “You have seen typical wolves in action. Are normal wolves able to run as fast as these snowmobiles can go?”
Rodgers thought about the question for a minute. “I would think that they could run pretty darn close to the speed of these things but not for too long.”
Henry pressed Rodgers. “For how long could they keep up with the snowmobiles? Do you think that they could keep up for about a quarter of a mile?”
Rodgers shrugged. “I would say that they could.” The hunter stared at Henry. “What are you getting at, Henry?”
Henry took a deep breath. “The Yeti protected Gina from the cats. I am betting that he will protect her from other threats as well.” He pointed to the dire wolves. “Have you ever seen Disney’s Beauty and the Beast? There is that scene where Belle is attacked by wolves and the Beast fights them off to save her. We are going to reenact that scene right now.” Henry shrugged. “Those are dire wolves. Like the teratorns, they hunted our ancestors. We don’t know how far away from them we will have to drive to bypass them and we don’t know what other things we may run into out there. If we run into more teratorns without a cave to run into, we know that we are dead. We know that the Yeti will protect Gina and we know that a typical wolf is able to more or less keep up with a snowmobile.” Henry took another deep breath. “We are a little over a quarter mile away from Gina. We are going to ride past those wolves and get them to chase us to Gina and the Yeti. The Yeti put Gina down before to fight off the cats, hopefully he will do the same thing when faced with a pack of wolves.”
Henry motioned for Jun-Tuk to climb off his snowmobile and to join Rodgers on his vehicle. Henry nodded. “When the Yeti puts Gina down and is engaged with the dire wolves, I will grab Gina and then we will make a wide arch away from the battle and head back to the valley pass.”
Rodgers shook his head. “That’s your plan? You are putting a lot of pure hope into that plan Henry. What if Gina dropped that transmitter and she and the Yeti are miles, if not days, ahead of us? What if those wolves can run faster than the snowmobiles? What if the Yeti does not put Gina down? What if the wolves ignore the Yeti and go right for the easier prey in Gina?”
Rodgers voice rose to just under a yell. “What about your Eskimo friend here? He wants to bring back proof that the Yeti is just an animal. The only way that we can bring that proof back is if we kill the Yeti ourselves. All of these points seem moot however, when you consider that the basis for your plan is a child’s cartoon!”
Henry glared at Rodgers. “The plan is based on the information that we have available to us. Jun-Tuk’s proof will come when we blow the sides of the valley pass and the Yeti stops attacking his village.” Henry took a step a closer to the hunter. “The only thing that my plan excludes is giving you a shot at the Yeti. After seeing how the wooly rhino and the teratorns handled our rifles, I am not overly inclined to think that we can take down that monster.”
Rodgers sneered. “It’s a suicide plan. I won’t be a part of it.”
Henry shrugged. “Then you better start hauling ass back to the pass because I am going to anger some dire wolves.”
Henry revved his snowmobile then he went speeding toward the dire wolves. Rodgers cursed and followed him just like Henry knew that he would. The hunter was determined to get a shot at the Yeti no matter what. There was no way that Rodgers would risk letting a pack of giant wolves steal his prize from him.
As Henry was closing in on the six dire wolves, the beasts looked up from their feast and stared at the approaching oddity of the snowmobiles. When Henry was able to get a closer look at the wolves, they terrified him even more than they had through his binoculars. Henry sped past one of the wolves as it chewed on a piece of the dead cat. He could see that each of its teeth was as long as a steak knife and three times as thick. He also got a good look at jaws that looked more than powerful enough to tear his head off with a single bite. Henry sped past the wolves and he screamed and hollered at them in order to gain their attention. Rodgers was a second behind Henry, and while the sulking hunter remained silent, Henry could hear Jun-Tuk screaming as well. Henry had not taken the time to translate the plan to Jun-Tuk but he was glad that the old man trusted him enough to follow his lead.
The snowmobiles had no sooner passed the dire wolves than the fearsome animals started growling and cashing after them. Henry pushed his snowmobile to its full speed. He knew that his plan was risky and that there was a chance that it could get them all killed. He also thought that despite all of the mistakes that he made during this expedition, that this was the most sound information based decision that he had made. When Henry heard the barking of the dire wolves getting closer to him, he prayed that if nothing else that his plan would let him see Gina one last time before he died.
Chapter 15
Gina couldn’t sleep. Yukon, Wen-Ku, even Thu-Ca were all sound asleep but Gina was too preoccupied with waiting for a chance to make a break for it. She looked toward the opening of the cave. From the sunlight that poured into the cave, Gina guessed that it had to be around twelve noon. Wen-Ku had said that the crawling demons did not like the light. If Wen-Ku’s assertion was true, then it would make sense that it would be safer for them to sleep near the mouth of the cave when the sun was out. Gina hoped that the smell of the meat she had placed in the cave walls would entice at least one of the crawling demons to venture slightly closer to the light for an easy meal.
Gina continued to stay close to Yukon and to stare at the deeper recess of the vast cave. She was stretching her senses to the limit in an attempt to hear or see something making its way toward them. Gina also hoped that whatever found the hidden meat would be large enough to draw Yukon’s attention long enough for her to grab the baby and run out into the val
ley.
She had thought that she heard something scratching the walls but the sound quickly ended and Gina convinced herself that the sound was only her imagination. A few seconds later, she heard the sound again and this time she was sure that it was not her imagination. She focused her vision as much as she could. Gina’s heart raced when she saw a large round shadow in the flickering lights of the dying torches. The sound that she heard changed from a scratch to more of a tearing sound. Gina started to say a prayer that Yukon would hear the sound and wake up to investigate it. She groaned to herself at the irony of praying that a perceived god would wake up and defend her from a so-called demon. The thought had no sooner crossed Gina’s mind when Yukon’s eyes snapped open. The Yeti quickly scooped up both Gina and Wen-Ku in his powerful claw and pushed them behind him. Yukon growled at the shadow, and when he did so, the shadow turned and faced the direction of the cave opening.
Gina could hear something walking toward them as the shadow of the unknown beast continued to bounce along the cave wall. Gina heard a hissing sound and then she screamed when she saw a gargantuan rat come crawling out of the tunnel. Gina quickly sized up the rat. She estimated that it was a little more than two thirds the size of Yukon. She figured that the rat was roughly fifteen feet tall.
Yukon roared at the giant rat and then the Yeti took a step backwards. It was the first time that Gina had seen the Yeti back away from any threat. As an anthropologist, Gina had run into many a rat in tight places and she was well aware that even a normal a rat could be a nasty customer in a tight space. The cave was big and Yukon had some room to maneuver but Gina was sure that the giant rat was better adapted to fighting in the cave then the Yeti was. From Wen-Ku’s description, Gina had guessed that one of the species that she called the crawling demons could be some form of rat. She had just prayed that either her assumption was wrong or that one of the other crawling demons would be the first to show up.
Polar Yeti And The Beasts Of Prehistory Page 12
