Philip Kerr - Esau

As if to compensate for the inhospitable weather, everyone went out of their way to be pleasant to one another, although it was clear that the altitude had already left one or two members of the team feeling restless and irritable. Boyd produced a bottle of bourbon, and it was not long before they started to debate the subject of their expedition.

‘I don’t figure he’ll come tonight,’ said Cody. ‘Not in this storm at any rate.’ He took off the rimless glasses that lent him his Karl-Marx-in-the-British-Library look and started to clean them vigorously.

‘Who?’ asked Jutta.

‘The yeti, of course.’

Boyd laughed scornfully and knocked back his drink. He said, ‘I don’t figure he’ll come at all,’ and poured himself another generous shot.

Quickly the team divided itself into three groups of opinion: Swift, Jack, Byron Cody, Dougal MacDougall, Hurké Gurung, and Ang Tsering, who all believed in the existence of the creature; Jutta Henze, Miles Jameson, and Lincoln Warner, who were all agnostics; and Boyd, who dismissed the yeti as a traveller’s tale or, at best, some kind of local phenomenon for which there would prove to be a perfectly rational explanation.

‘I don’t see anything particularly irrational about believing that these mountains might be home to an undiscovered type of great ape,’ said Cody. ‘I must say I find that possibility a great deal more likely than some of the other explanations I’ve heard for the yeti. Freak atmospheric conditions, giant sloths and lemurs, and that kind of thing.’

‘You know, I’m a little surprised at you people,’ said Boyd, absently brushing his short moustache with the edge of a forefinger. ‘I thought you were scientists. But this—’

He moved off his moustache and started to rub his bullet-shaped head with apparent exasperation.

‘I didn’t say anything back in Khat, when you told me that you were hunting something more than just a few old bones. But frankly, I think you’re all on a wild goose chase.’

‘Have you ever been on a wild goose chase?’ asked Lincoln Warner. Underneath the clamshell his deep voice sounded like Darth Vader’s.

‘I can’t say I have,’ admitted Boyd.

‘Back in Wisconsin, we used to see a lot of Canada geese. Me and my daddy used to hunt them sometimes. Dumbest bird I ever saw. Driven by greed and not much brain.’ He grinned a dazzling white smile and wagged a long dark poker of a finger at Boyd. ‘Therefore, my friend, speaking as someone who has been on a wild goose chase, I have to tell you that it’s not half as difficult as it sounds. Those birds were easier to shoot than an empty beer bottle.’

Swift was silent for a moment. Back in Washington she had quite liked Boyd. But in Khatmandu, he had made a halfhearted pass at her in the hotel after a night of drinking, and Swift, who had had a few drinks herself, told Boyd that there was more chance of her sleeping with a yak than there was of her going to bed with him. Now, out here, his scepticism struck her as plain rude, not to mention potentially demoralizing for the team as a whole. She wondered if there was something personal in this mockery of their aims. If in some small-minded way he wasn’t getting back at her for turning him down so abruptly and with such crushing sarcasm.

‘You know, I’ve been collecting old bones, as you put it, for quite a while now,’ she said calmly. ‘Ever since I was a child. I was never much interested in collecting stamps or coins or whatever. I could never see the point of that kind of collection. I used to say that collecting fossils, especially human fossils, was the one kind of collection in which the proximity of individual artifacts could create a greater meaning. Well, Jon, here I think the point is that there’s a possibility that we have the chance of finding, for want of a better phrase, a living collection. Maybe a living specimen. The search for a new truth often starts out as the most unlikely proposition. But I don’t see how that endeavour can be described as a wild goose chase.’

Boyd shrugged and shook his head as if dissatisfied with his earlier figure of speech. ‘A wild man chase, then.’ He smirked. ‘I dunno. Something crazy at any rate.’ It was clear that he hadn’t really been Listening to what Swift had said.

Swift decided that perhaps Boyd had just drunk too much bourbon.

‘So what would you say to the two people sitting here who have actually seen a yeti?’ she asked. ‘Jack and the sirdar.’

‘Jesus, I dunno,’ said Boyd and laughed. ‘H-A-D, maybe.’ He meant high-altitude deterioration.

‘Excuse me, sahib,’ said Gurung. ‘But I am born in these mountains.’

‘Sherpas need oxygen too,’ said Boyd.

‘Only not as much as the rest of us,’ said Jack.

‘Okay then, Hurké, answer me this,’ Boyd persisted. ‘When you went to the summit of Everest, was it with or without oxygen?’

‘Yes, you are right, sahib. First time of ascending, it was with oxygen. The second time of ascending, with Jack sahib, it was without oxygen, please. But the point is significantly made. Even Sherpas can see through things funny. And though I am most awfully sure that I saw what I saw, maybe Boyd sahib is being too polite to be stating the obvious, which is that many Sherpas are very superstitious fellows.’

Boyd nodded his approval.

‘Good for you, Hurké,’ he said, and refilled the sirdar’s glass.

For a moment none of them spoke. Then something struck the outside of the clamshell with a thud. Even Jack jumped a little and, anticipating the question, shook his head and said:

‘Piece of ice, probably. The wind throws all sorts of shit around up here. As soon as they bring up that chicken wire from Chomrong, we’ll build a fence. Just in case.’

‘Just in case of what?’ laughed Boyd. ‘A yeti comes cold calling?’

Jack smiled patiently.

‘Just in case of avalanches. That’s another reason we didn’t choose to pitch down at MBC. Some of that snow on the face of Machhapuchhare looked treacherous.’

He had good reason to be nervous of avalanches on Machhapuchhare, but he felt he hardly needed to expand on his caution.

‘H-A-D,’ MacDougall snorted angrily. ‘That’s just a lot of bollocks, and I’ll tell you for why. Because I’m bloody sure you couldn’t count what happened to me as a hallucination, pal, and that’s because I didn’t see a bloody thing. But I heard something though. Oh aye, of that I’m quite sure, no mistake.’

‘This was on Nuptse, wasn’t it, Mac?’ said Swift. There was hardly a single report of an encounter with a yeti that she had not committed to the memory of her laptop and with which she was not now familiar.

MacDougall nodded. ‘Nuptse, yes,’ he said.

‘Nuptse is one of the foothills of Everest,’ Jack said for the benefit of those who were not climbers.

‘At nearly eight thousand metres, it’s a hell of a foothill, is that not right. Jack?’

‘Right.’

‘Aye, well early one morning, we were maybe up at about five and a half thousand metres or so, I awoke to hear someone moving around outside our tent. I mean, proper footsteps like, y’know? Sort of slow and deliberate. Anyway at first I thought it was Jack. He and Didier had been leading and I figured they must have reached the summit early and come back down. So I called out to him. I says. Jack, is that you? No answer. So I calls him again. What, are you deaf or something, you Yank bastard? How did you get on? Did you make it? Still no bloody answer. So, I’m zipped up inside my bivvy, right? And I’m thinking to myself, what the hell’s going on here? Because now I start to hear whoever it is outside opening up rucksacks and going through our gear. And for a moment I think, Christ, we’ve got a bloody thief on our hands. I really can’t believe it, y’know? We’re five and a half thousand metres up the side of Nuptse and there’s some bastard tryin’ to rip us off.