Philip Kerr - Esau

‘What the hell’s the matter with him? Why doesn’t he answer? Hurké? Come in, please.’

Then Jack heard a whisper.

‘Jack sahib, shut up, please. Don’t say anything at all, for my pity’s sake. They’re here.’

Swift jumped down from the snowbank and started along the trail marked by the unfortunate party of Sherpas.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘There’s no time to lose.’

With long stooping strides, their powerful arms hanging down by their sides, the two creatures came down the slope of the mountain and were about to enter the ice field when they caught sight of the sirdar and stopped. No more than a thirty metres separated the two yetis from Hurké Gurung. The first and only other time he had seen a yeti, it had been at a distance of at least a hundred metres with the animal moving away at speed. But now he was close enough to see that each creature was a big male, at least two metres high, very thickset, and the general shape of a human being, like a gorilla, but covered in short, reddish brown hair that was more like an orangutan. The head was very large and pointed, the face bare and flatter than a man’s, although not so flat as an ape’s.

Instinct told the sirdar to remain quiet and still, for it was plain that both the yetis were immensely strong, and he had the impression that he had only to make a sudden move and they would tear him apart. The sirdar desperately wanted to run away. But even if he did manage to get a few metres’ start on them, what then? His only escape route was back through the ice field, and the way it had been marked with bamboo poles was now a shambles. It seemed certain that by running away, he could only end up like the rest of the Sherpas, buried under a tower of ice blocks or falling down a hidden crevasse. So he remained where he was, feeling more terror than he had ever felt before, and he prayed to every god he knew that the two yetis might lose interest in him and move on.

Lincoln Warner looked at all the computers and laboratory equipment that had been set up under the clamshell, feeling irritable. He thought of the numerous facilities available to him in this remote part of the world — mapping, linkage, gene expression, DNA sequencing, remote spectroscopy, microphotometry, quantitative fluorescent imaging, and many more besides — and let out a sigh. He was bored. In the three weeks he had spent in the Sanctuary he had set up the Gel Analysis software and checked the concentrations of his DNA and RNA isolation reagents. The rest of the time, he occupied himself with playing chess on the computer, listening to music on his portable CD player, reading books, walking on the glacier, and generally hoping that the rest of his colleagues might make the zoological find of the century that would provide him with some material to work on. But he was beginning to think the odds were surely stacked against something so remarkable. Probably the best they were going to come up with were a few minutes of film shot from a distance of several hundred metres that might or might not show some kind of Himalayan anthropoid. He was beginning to regret not having resisted the pressure on him to come. The chances were that the duration of the expedition would improve his chess game and not much else. About the only thing he had achieved so far had been his mastery of the PASS program.

Written by one of his colleagues at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the Phylogenetic Analysis and Simulation Software was a method of predicting how evolutionary trees were joined through their mitochondrial chromosomes and how these DNA connections might be affected by changes in environment. Back in 1987 Berkeley biochemists had announced to the scientific world how their studies of DNA had revealed that all human beings shared common ancestry with a single African female who had lived some two hundred thousand years ago — the so-called Mitochondrial Eve. But Lincoln Warner had come to suspect that humans were once possessed of more than one kind of DNA and that there was little real evidence for the assumption that Eve must have been an African. He was even sceptical as to one of the most fundamental of anthropological tenets: that the human species had possessed one single origin. Evolution, it was always argued, did not work any other way: New species would only become established through unique speciation events. Lincoln Warner was not so sure, and the more he toyed with the large number of theoretical evolutionary possibilities made available through the PASS program, the more he supported the concept of multiregional evolution.

One environmental possibility posed by the PASS program was the so-called holocaust mutation scenario: Would a flow of new harmful mutations resulting from some sort of nuclear catastrophe damage the basic genetic structure of the human species forever? Warner hoped that neither he nor his friend in Washington would ever find out.

Catching sight of his own reflection in the empty black screen of his desktop computer, he shook his head sadly. The beard he had grown in the month he had been in the Sanctuary was, he decided, not working. It may have helped to keep his face warm outside, but it itched terribly. It would have to go.

Warner glanced at his wristwatch and saw that it was time to call the search parties. As the only member of the team remaining at ABC, it was his job to keep an eye on the weather station and make sure that everyone was kept up to date with his readings.

He pulled on his expensive fur-lined parka and went outside to where the anemometer was whirling in the almost continual wind like the blades of a tiny helicopter. He pressed a few keys on the weatherproof keyboard and noted down the readings displayed digitally on the cigarette pack-sized display screen. It looked as though the high pressure that had brought a blue sky to the Himalayas would continue for a while, and for once he would have good news to report.

Warner went back inside the clamshell and, shrugging off his jacket, sat down in front of the communications control centre that Boyd and Jack had rigged up in one corner.

Oblivious to the effect his routine radio call would produce up on Machhapuchhare, Warner picked up the handset.

‘ABC calling Hurké Gurung. ABC calling Hurké Gurung. Are you receiving me? Over?’

The sound of Hurké’s radio shattered the frozen silence of the glacier like a hammer against a pane of glass, scaring the two yetis and compelling them instinctively to adopt their most defensive behaviour. Teeth bared and with deafening screams, they charged their way down what remained of the slope, on two feet, straight to the sirdar who, believing his last moments had come and that he was about to be torn to pieces, made a namaste with his hands, bowed his head, and sank slowly to his knees.

This submissive pose saved the sirdar’s life.

The bigger of the two yetis, whose red hair was almost silver-coloured on his back, braked to a halt just over half a metre short of the kneeling figure of the Sherpa.

Hurké felt something torn from his jacket, and with eyes closed, he braced himself for a blow from an enormously powerful arm. But when, after several minutes, the two yetis stopped screaming and he found himself still unscathed, he felt able to risk opening first one eye and then the other.

Both creatures were crouched in front of him on all fours, like two enormous football players, the hair on each of their pointed head-crests fully erect, and their large yellow teeth fully exposed for maximum aggression. His eye met the enraged red iris of the smaller yeti, and the creature roared its disapproval.