by Eva Ibbotson
Now he tried to jump on his chair, fell off, and squeaked: “Yetis! That’s what we should hunt! Abominable Snowmen! Fly out to the Himalayas and have a great big yeti hunt!”
There were groans from the other hunters and the MacDermot-Duff of Huist and Carra swore a dreadful oath. “Don’t be an imbecile, Prink,” he said. “There aren’t any such things.”
“Yes, there are, there are!” shouted Mr. Prink. “Look!”
And he took out a bundle of newspapers and threw them down on the table.
They were the papers that had been printed after Lucy’s footsteps had been found on Nanvi Dar, and the headlines said things like: ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN STALKS AGAIN or MYSTERIOUS DENIZENS OF THE MOUNTAIN HEIGHTS or IT’S YES TO THE YETIS.
“Pull yourself together, Prink,” snarled Bagwackerly. “A pack of newspaper lies.”
“It isn’t; I’m sure it isn’t,” squealed Mr. Prink. “We could stalk them in the snow and flush them from their lairs and shoot them with exploding bullets. We could have a yeti skin for the billiard room and yeti tusks in the armory and—”
“Ein yeti schkalp für die library!” shouted Herr Blutenstein from Hamburg.
“That’s enough!” thundered Colonel Bagwackerly. “If I hear another word about yetis, Prink, I’ll have you thrown out of the club.” He broke off. “Drat it, that’s the doorbell, and I had to send the servants away. Can’t have them prying into our affairs. Go and see who it is, Prink. You might as well do something useful for once.”
So Mr. Prink got up and went out of the room. When he came back, he couldn’t speak. His mouth opened, his mouth shut, but that was all.
“Well, what is it?” said Bagwackerly impatiently. “Who was there?”
“It’s … it’s … what you said I mustn’t say another word about,” stammered Mr. Prink. “With … bedsocks.”
Furiously, Bagwackerly pushed him aside and strode out into the hall. When he came back, his bloated face looked as though it had been dipped in flour. “My God,” he said, groping to loosen his tie, “my God …”
And then, with a great effort, he pulled himself together. “Shut the door, quickly, quickly,” he said. “We’ve only got a couple of minutes. We must make a plan.”
The yetis were sitting in the Blue Salon having afternoon tea. They were sitting very close together though the room was vast—so close that Ambrose and Lucy could curl their eighth toes together like they used to do when they were small.
Polite afternoon tea is not an easy meal for yetis. When they balanced the fragile teacups on their knees, the cups sank right into their fur and couldn’t easily be found again, and the biscuits were so thin that they had to say “Sorry, biscuit” about ten times before they got a mouthful.
But that wasn’t why they were sitting so close together. They were sitting like that because of the things on the walls. Lady Agatha had not told them about the things that would be on the walls of the Blue Salon and the Gold Drawing Room and all the other rooms that the yetis had seen. Right above Ambrose, so that his trunk almost dipped into Ambrose’s teacup, was the head of a poor dead elephant. Grandma was sitting next to a large stuffed marabou and Uncle Otto’s bald patch had two nasty scratches where a pair of moose antlers had caught him as he bent forward to pass the jam.
And though Lady Agatha’s relations had been very nice to them, somehow they had not been quite like the yetis expected. The one with the red face and the gingery mustache who said he was Uncle George had such strange pop eyes, and when he spoke, it made the yetis feel that they were soldiers on parade rather than members of the family. Uncle Mac, who came from Scotland, had sworn quite dreadfully when he had spilled some hot water on his bare and tufty knees, and though the yetis were used to Bad Language from when Perry changed a wheel, somehow this was different. As for Uncle Leslie, he was such a twitchy, squeaky little man that he made the yetis very nervous. There didn’t seem to be any women in the family either, which was a pity. A woman’s touch would perhaps have made them feel more welcome.
“’Ump,” said Clarence sadly. He meant the lump of sugar, which, for the third time, had dropped from the sugar tongs onto the carpet.
“I wish Con and Ellen would come,” whispered Ambrose—and it was rather an uncertain whisper. “They promised to say good-bye to us.”
“Another cup of tea?” asked Uncle George.
But the yetis said thank you, they had had enough.
“Come, come, just one more cup, I insist. Prink—er, Uncle Leslie, another cup for our visitors. For our relations, I should say.”
So Uncle Leslie poured out another five cups of tea, keeping his back to the yetis, and then Uncle George leaned over and dropped a small white pill into each of them.
“Let us drink to your happy stay with us,” he said.
The yetis were far too polite to refuse a toast. They hadn’t wanted any more tea but now, one by one, they tilted their cups into their mouths and drank.
“That … poor elephant’s … all … swelled up,” said Ambrose groggily.
“I feel funny,” whispered Lucy. “Not nice funny: nasty funny.”
For a moment longer, the poor drugged yetis struggled against unconsciousness. Then there was a crash as Uncle Otto fell forward across the tea things. Grandma slid off the sofa and came to rest in a gray and crumpled heap on the Persian carpet. Poor bewildered Clarence keeled over sideways, taking a case of stuffed pike with him as he fell. Then Lucy and Ambrose collapsed into each other’s arms—and it was over.
It is easy to trick innocent creatures who trust you. The yetis would not wake for a long time now. And when they did, the fate in store for them was too dreadful for anyone to imagine.
An hour later, Con and Ellen walked up the long avenue of linden trees toward the iron-studded door of Farley Towers.
The grounds were surprisingly deserted. No gardeners bent over the flowerbeds, no one strolled in the golden afternoon light.
“Look, an airplane! A big one!” exclaimed Con.
Con tilted his head back to watch the plane, which had appeared suddenly, rising steeply from the fields behind the house. The Farlinghams must have their own airstrip! The thought that they were going to visit people rich and grand enough to run their own airplanes made the children rather nervous. They had done their best, pulling the last of their clean clothes out of the battered suitcase, but they still weren’t exactly smart.
“I’m glad we didn’t bring Hubert,” said Ellen.
Perry, who wanted to get to the pub for opening time, had lifted Hubert over a low fence into a field of cows. They were the very best cows, pedigree Jerseys with soft doe eyes, but Hubert had just turned his back on them and started grazing. After finding a famous father like El Magnifico, he didn’t seem to be interested in mothers anymore.
The children had reached the graveled space in front of the house. For a moment they hesitated. The Farlinghams would probably ask them to stay the night, but after that, it was good-bye to the yetis, and both the children had lumps in their throats at the thought of it.
“Come on,” said Con, “let’s get it over with,” and he ran up the wide flight of steps and rang the bell.
For a long time nobody came. Then there were footsteps: slow, heavy ones, and the door was creakingly pulled back.
The first thing the children saw, almost at eye level, was a pair of bony knees with black tufts of hair on them. Then, traveling upward, they came to a bloodred kilt, a sporran with dangling badgers’ claws, and—much, much higher—a black beard and glittering black eyes …
“Yes?” snapped the bearded Scotsman.
“I’m Con Bellamy. This is my sister, Ellen. We’ve come to see that the yetis are all right and to say good-bye to them. Lady Agatha asked us to—”
“Yetis,” snarled the man. “What are you talking about?”
“The yetis who came just now. Ambrose and the others.”
“Look, if you’re having a joke with me, you’ve chosen th
e wrong person,” said the man. “Yetis, my foot. Now get along both of you. This is a respectable stately home and we don’t want any guttersnipes cluttering it up.”
“But they must be here,” said Con desperately. “Perhaps—” And then he jumped back as the great oak door was slammed in his face.
Feeling suddenly sick with fear, the children turned and went slowly down the steps.
“What can have happened?” said Ellen. “Can they have got lost?”
“Hardly, down a dead-straight avenue. Maybe Ambrose found a friend?”
But what sort of a friend? Not only were there no people about in the grounds, there were no animals either. No dogs sniffed the moist earth, no cats climbed the rooftops. Even the rooks in the elm trees seemed to have fled.
“Perhaps they’ve gone to explore the lake or something.”
“We’d better have a look, anyway.”
So, fighting down their panic, they searched the woods around the lake, and the Greek temple, and the kitchen gardens behind their sheltering walls. They searched the banks of the stream and the orchard and the stables, but there was no sign of the yetis anywhere.
They were searching the topiary, with its yew trees cut into all sorts of shapes, when they saw a second plane come up from behind the house and fly off toward the south.
“There’s something very wrong with this …” began Con. Then he broke off. “What is it, Ellen?”
His sister was standing stock-still with her hands over her face. He went over to her. Lying at her feet was a cat—an ordinary tortoiseshell cat.
It had been shot clean through the heart.
For a moment neither of them could speak. Then: “I’m going to break in,” said Con. “I’m going to get into the house somehow. Come on, let’s try the back.”
At first it seemed to be hopeless. The hundred or so windows were tightly shut; the green-painted doors were bolted. And then Con saw one narrow window on the ground floor where the catch had not been pushed completely across the frame. Carefully, levering with his penknife, Con started to work the wood away from the sill. It came slowly, but it came. And then they climbed through and dropped down safely inside Farley Towers.
They were in the butler’s pantry. There was silver waiting to be polished, striped aprons lying on the chair, a big sink … Silently, pushing open the green baize door, they crept along the stone corridor that connected the servants’ quarters with the main part of the house.
There were no footsteps to be heard, no sound of voices. Farley Towers seemed to be totally deserted.
And then, as they reached the hallway that led to the main back door, they stopped with a gasp.
Lying like a blue stain across the flagstones—was Ambrose’s bedsock.
“So the man was telling lies. The yetis have been here,” said Con.
But Ellen had noticed something else. “Look, there’s Grandma’s shawl, all crumpled up behind that chest. And Queen Victoria …”
“They’ve been stripped,” said Con, his teeth beginning to chatter. “Someone has—”
He was stopped by a cry. A weird, strangled, spluttering cry from somewhere below them. “Hublopp!” it sounded like. “Blumph. Haroo!”
“It’s coming from the cellar,” said Ellen.
They opened one door to a cupboard, another to a lumber room. Then they found it—a dusty wooden door from which a flight of dank stone steps led downward. And there, between cobwebby barrels, the thing that had been making the noises writhed and wriggled.
Con wrenched the gag from its mouth. It was Mr. Prink, whom the other hunters had gagged and bound and thrown into the cellar.
“What’s happened?” said Con. “Who did this? Where are the yetis?”
Mr. Prink became hysterical. “It was just because they talked that I didn’t want to join in the shoot. I’ve never shot anything that talked,” he gabbled. “If I’d been able to shoot anything that talked, I’d have shot Mrs. Prink. Mrs. Prink is my wife and she makes me eat mashed potatoes with lumps in them—”
“Shut up about Mrs. Prink. What’s happened to the yetis?”
“They’re on a plane, on the way to the ice floes. There’s going to be a great hunt down there in the Antarctic.”
Con steadied himself. It was no good giving in to panic now.
“Why there? Why ice floes?”
“So they can run better. They want some sport, you know. This is the famous Hunter’s Club. It’s no fun shooting animals that just stand still. And everyone in England’s so namby-pamby. You can’t shoot this, you can’t kill that.”
“When is this hunt going to start?”
“On Thursday. It’s for the centenary of the Hunter’s Club. They’re all going to fly out and chase them in snowmobiles. The only yetis in the world, and all for the club. Yeti skins,” raved Mr. Prink, “yeti antlers, yeti tusks!”
Con kicked him. “Shut up, you murdering brute. Where exactly are they being dropped?”
“I can’t tell you—Ow! Ow! You’re hurting me!”
“If you don’t tell me, I won’t hurt you, I’ll kill you,” said Con, and he meant it.
“A place called Coldwater Straits, near Smithson Island. It’s really good hunting country because there’s nowhere for them to hide. And I wanted to go, too. But I’ve never shot anything that talked. If I’d been able to shoot anything that talked, I’d have shot my wife. Mrs. Prink is not a nice woman. She makes me take castor oil even when I’m regular and—”
Con wanted to put his thumbs against Mr. Prink’s jugular vein and press hard, but there was one more thing he needed to know.
“How did they make the yetis go with them? What lies did they tell?”
Mr. Prink giggled. “They didn’t. They put drugs in their tea. And I wanted to go with them, I did really, but I’ve never shot anything that talked. I’ve shot a very big rhinoceros from an armor-plated Land Rover, but it didn’t talk. If I’d been able to shoot anything that talked, I’d have shot Mrs.—Help! Help! Where are you going? You’ve got to untie me!”
“Not a chance,” said Con.
It was only when they got out into the fresh air that the real horror of what they’d heard hit the children, and then they just clung together in shock, unable to speak.
“It’s Monday today, isn’t it?” said Con when he could manage words again.
Ellen nodded. On Thursday a planeload of crazy men would set off for Coldwater Straits to murder the yetis.
They had three days to stop them. To achieve the impossible. Just three short days.
HEN THE YETIS WOKE, THEY WERE IN THE bleakest, most terrible place you could imagine. All around them, stretching to the horizon, was a flat plain of snow and ice, broken only by low ridges like ragged teeth, and here and there a huge frozen block. There was no trace of color, no blade of grass, no living thing as far as the eye could see—only the shrill screaming of the wind across the sunless waste.
“Oh, where are we? What has happened to us?” cried Ambrose, who was the first to come round after the drugs.
One by one the yetis came to and stared with wretchedness at the place to which they had been brought.
“I can’t remember anything after we drank those cups of tea with the Farlingham uncles,” said Lucy.
“Why have they sent us here?” said Grandma. “This place isn’t fit for a worm.”
“They can’t have meant to,” said Ambrose wretchedly. “Unless we’ve been bad. Was it our table manners?”
“Pack ice,” mused Uncle Otto. “The North Pole? The South Pole? Alaska …?”
“I don’t want to be in a pole,” wailed Ambrose. “I want Con and Ellen. I want—”
But Lucy had discovered something even more serious. “There’s nothing to eat here,” she said. “Absolutely nothing.”
It was true. Nothing grew on that frozen desert—no moss, no lichen, no grass.
“Wait a minute,” said Grandma. “What are those black-and-white chickens over there?”<
br />
“The penguins, do you mean?” said Uncle Otto.
“We can’t eat them,” said Ambrose, shocked. “They’re our brothers.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Grandma. “Of course we can’t eat flesh. But maybe they’ve laid some eggs.”
So they made their way slowly and painfully across the ice, doubled up against the wind. It was dreadfully hard going. The surface looked smooth from a distance, but in fact it was rough and sharp where floes had been cast on edge by the wind before freezing into a solid mass. The yetis’ poor backward-pointing feet were soon bruised and torn.
And it was unbelievably cold. Yetis can stand almost any amount of cold, but this was beyond anything they had ever experienced. The wind whipped the heat out of their faces and hands, and even their almost impenetrable yeti hair was not enough to keep them warm. Soon they were freezing as they had never frozen in their mountain home.
And when they got up to the silent huddle of penguins, it was all no good. It’s true each of the birds had an egg balanced between its webbed red toes. But one egg only. The egg.
“Sorry, penguin’s egg,” said Lucy, who was really unbearably hungry.
Then she looked at the father bird standing there quietly, not squawking, not protesting, just suffering, and she choked and turned away.
“I can’t do it,” said Lucy. “It’s his Little One. It’s the only one he’s got.”
In the lovely fertile valley of Nanvi Dar, which now seemed just like a distant dream to the yetis, Lady Agatha had taught them always to say sorry to only one egg in a nest, so as to leave plenty for the mother bird. But of course in Nanvi Dar there had been no penguins.
Though it had never been properly light, it now became darker and the yetis clung to one another for warmth and comfort. Grandma and Uncle Otto, who were old and experienced, were beginning to give up hope, but for the sake of the children they pretended to believe in rescue. “We must keep moving,” said Uncle Otto. “This is polar pack ice. There must be land we can walk to and find some kind of shelter, a cave perhaps. And we will be easier to spot if we are on the move.”
