Philip Kerr - Esau

‘Yeti, him get tired,’ he laughed.

‘I know just how he feels,’ Swift said wearily.

‘Are you okay, memsahib?’

‘Nothing I can’t handle, Hurké.’

‘Maybe he stopped for a cigarette,’ Jameson suggested, lighting one for himself and shaking the packet at the sirdar.

‘Yeti is Marlboro man too, eh?’ He shook his head at the offered cigarette. ‘But better no time to waste, Jameson sahib. Weather will change soon I think. Not good for us. Not good for trail. Only good for yeti.’

He pointed up the valley from where they had just come.

‘Jesus,’ said Swift. ‘I didn’t notice that.’

When they had started walking, the sky had been bright blue. Only fifteen minutes before, she had looked up and seen a few clouds beginning to surround the sun like grey wolves drawn to the heat of a camp-fire. Now she saw a mist following them down so that it was impossible to see more than a hundred metres back up the trail. The effect was eerie, almost as if the mist was trailing them, just as they themselves were trailing the mysterious creature.

‘Weather change very quick in Himalaya,’ said the sirdar, and started walking again.

Another thirty minutes of walking took them past Machhapuchhare.

‘Perhaps the yeti knows that it’s forbidden to climb Machhapuchhare,’ laughed Miles Jameson. ‘Just like the rest of us.’

‘I had the same thought,’ smiled Swift.

‘I’m just glad we don’t have to start climbing again. I don’t think we’d have got very far up that mountain today.’

The trail soon brought them to the Sanctuary’s exit, and crossing several streams that flowed too fast to freeze, they passed through a gully that ran alongside a sparse wood. Sometimes Swift lost sight of the tracks altogether as the creature jumped over streams or used yak ledges inside the gully, yet somehow the sirdar always managed to divine where the tracks were to be found. But finally, as the mist engulfed them like a cold shroud and they could scarcely see each other, even he lost the trail.

‘Ek chhin, ek chhin,’ he muttered as his keen Gurkha’s eyes hunted across the snow-covered ground. ‘One moment please, sahibs. Kun dishaa? Kun dishaa?’

‘What direction?’ said Jameson, translating for Swift’s benefit.

‘Huncha,’ said the sirdar, straightening to face them once again. ‘You wait here please. I look around... maybe ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Try find trail then come back here, huncha ?’

‘Huncha,’ nodded Jameson.

The sirdar placed the palms of his woollen-gloved hands together in front of his face, as if to pray.

‘Namaskaar,’ he said.

‘Namaste,’ said Jameson, returning the gesture.

The sirdar walked quickly away.

‘Please do not wander off, sahibs,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Sherpa know country, even in fog, even in whiteout. But dangerous for sahibs.’

A second later, he had disappeared like a ghost.

Jameson lit another cigarette and kicked uncertainly at the snow beneath his feet. Swift blew her nose and then shivered.

‘I guess he knows what he’s doing,’ said Swift.

‘He’s a good man,’ said Jameson, and unslung the rifle.

‘I must say, I wouldn’t fancy trying to get back up to ABC without him.’ She looked around uncomfortably. ‘This weather’s pure ... Wilkie Collins.’

‘English writer, is that?’

Swift nodded.

‘It’s a bastard, isn’t it? Chances are that if we do stumble across a yeti, we’ll be too close for me to use the rifle. Anything closer than twenty metres and the whole syringe might cause a fracture, or even drive straight through its body. I wish I’d thought to bring along one of the pistols.’

‘Is that possible? I mean, that you might injure it?’

‘For sure, yes.’ Jameson puffed impatiently. ‘But even if I did manage to dart the beast, I’m not sure I want to go chasing after it in these sorts of conditions. I mean, some sort of chase is mandatory. We could break a leg, or worse. No, the more I think about it—’

Jameson broke the gun in half, removed the syringe, corked its quill-like tip carefully, and then pocketed it.

‘Just in case I’m tempted,’ he explained.

Swift nodded. ‘I think you’re absolutely right.’

It was then that they heard a shout from somewhere up ahead. The sirdar had found something.

‘U yahaa,’ he called. ‘Over here, sahibs.’

Jameson yelled back, ‘Haani aaii-dai chhaii.’

He and Swift started down the gully in the direction of the sirdar’s voice.

‘It would be just our bastard luck, wouldn’t it?’ said Jameson. ‘If we came across one now.’

Boyd let the search party of three get about half an hour ahead up the trail of strange footsteps and then set out along the same southeasterly bearing. From time to time he stopped and appeared to check his position with the aid of a handheld electronic device. Along the way he considered the nature of the animal the other three were tracking. It amazed him that there were scientists who could subscribe to this kind of wishful thinking. Even if there was some sort of creature, it had remained virtually undetected throughout human history. And they just expected to be able to roll up and find it. He assumed there would be some rational explanation for the strange tracks, and one that did not include the Abominable Snowman. A bear perhaps. Or even a giant Himalayan eagle. He still recalled the fright he had received when coming upon one of these rare birds on the trek up from Chomrong. How much like an ape it had looked from behind as it squatted on the ground. Even the huge footprints left by this enormous bird of prey had looked to be the kind easily mistaken for those of a giant ape. The more he thought about it, the more he was sure that it would turn out to be an eagle after all. Possibly even the same eagle. The thought made him laugh out loud, and he almost wished he could have been there if and when they ever caught up with whatever it was.

Still laughing he stopped, dropped his rucksack, and prepared to take a core sample.

The mist was lifting as quickly as it had descended when Swift and Jameson mounted the crest of the gully and, where the stream of the Modi Khola widened, they came upon a small range of signposts that indicated a holy place.

Here they found a little wigwam of rag and paper banners that fluttered at the tip of long wooden poles, like so much laundry left out to dry in the stiffening wind, a rock with some sacred symbols and mantras that were painted in green, and a small Chorten — a conical-shaped reliquary — built of red bricks and symbolizing the four elements. Then they saw the sirdar.

Smiling apologetically he led them through the thinning mist along the riverbed and pointed toward a spit of snow that extended into the fast-flowing river.

An extraordinary sight greeted their eyes. But it was not the one for which they had walked several miles.

There, his whole weight resting on hands firmly placed on a large flat rock, his brown body parallel to the snow-covered ground, his long legs stretched out straight and his bare feet together, with long hair hanging down over his face in Medusa-like coils, and naked but for a small loincloth, was a man.

For a moment Swift and Jameson were too astounded to say anything. With the temperature at fifty-nine degrees below zero Fahrenheit, neither had considered the possibility that the tracks in the snow might have been made by a bare human foot.

‘Our yeti, I think,’ Jameson said finally. ‘Boyd is going to love this when we tell him, the bastard.’

‘Who is he?’ an exasperated Swift demanded of the sirdar. ‘And what’s he doing here?’