Philip Kerr - Esau

‘Hell, for a night with her, I think I might even take a shot at the southwest face,’ declared Boyd.

The other man felt his cheek muscles harden with irritation but tried to keep his smile going. Boyd was developing a real knack for knowing how to annoy him. Wondering if he had the same effect on everyone else, Warner turned and fixed his eyes on the roof of the clamshell and spoke as if he could not bear to look at Boyd.

‘She is very attractive, isn’t she?’

‘You want my advice? Don’t even think about it. Stop scaring the shit out of yourself with what’s on the radio and pray that they can capture one of those ape-men.’

‘Okay. Yes, I’ll do that.’

‘Now then. What do you say we find some of those ready-to-eat meals and a good bottle of scotch and have ourselves a real dinner? Me, I could eat a horse.’

Jack Furness lay on the ground in the rhododendron forest, drifting slowly back to consciousness. He was tired and wanted only to sleep. Shifting his position he felt the pain in his left shoulder from where he had been bitten and almost fainted again. His whole body ached from head to toe as if he’d been thrown around by one of those television wrestlers. Thrown around, slammed, stamped on, clothes-lined and half strangled. There was a terrible throbbing pain in his head, so bad it made him feel sick. Inside the SCE suit however it was at least still warm. Warm enough to make him want to go back to sleep, to forget the pain.

To forget the extraordinary-looking creature that had been the cause of his pain.

He pushed himself up on one elbow, opened his eyes, groaned and rolled onto his back — slowly, in case the wild man of this high Himalayan forest should think he still posed some kind of threat and attack again. If it was even still on the scene. Jack looked around, trying to get his bearings and wondering what they must be thinking in Camp Two on the ice corridor. They must have heard the attack.

‘Hello, this is Jack calling Camp Two, are you receiving me, over.’

He was lying on a gentle gradient that was covered with low, spiny shrubs. Above him soared the tops of the trees and the giant rhododendrons, and although the daylight was beginning to fade fast, he could now see that the forest concealed a deep depression and that the valley was more probably the bowl of an extinct volcano. It would certainly have explained the apparent fertility of the soil. It would also have explained why the forest was so uniquely sheltered.

‘Hello, Swift, this is Jack. Can you hear me? Over.’

He sat up and, feeling sick again, dropped his head between his knees. Feeling a stabbing pain in his left side as he tried to take a deep breath, he concluded that at least one of his ribs was cracked or broken. Added to the injury he had sustained to his left shoulder, this meant that the only really comfortable position for his left arm was pressed close to his side. Thus, partly disabled, he lifted up his head and gently thumped the side of his helmet hoping to restore the communications connection that had been lost sometime during the attack. He found the water pipe pressing against his cheek and, turning his head toward it, took a long cool drink.

‘Is anyone reading me? Over.’

It was no good. He tried to imagine what they would be thinking. Did they think he was dead? Would they attempt a rescue? It was imperative he re-establish radio contact. As soon as he could get back up the slope and into the comparative safety of the crevasse, he would have to try and take off the suit and check out all the connections. He could hear a bird singing somewhere and the sound of the wind stirring the bushes around him, so the hot mike was also working.

At first he saw only dense foliage ahead of him. But here and there, between thick, leathery evergreen leaves each as big as a baseball glove, he could see patches of a different colour. A dark, reddish brown colour.

They were moving patches of colour.

He stared, both fascinated and terrified.

Curious, they stared back.

There were maybe fifteen or twenty of them. They were sitting farther down the same gradient, less than fifteen metres away, eating rhododendron leaves and a fungus like a giant mushroom that grew in quantity on the bark of a tree.

‘Holy shit,’ said Jack.

They behaved like apes, and yet they were also something more. Their brows were apelike but there, he thought, the similarity ended, for the yetis’ faces were quite hairless and flesh-coloured, like a young chimpanzee’s, and featured a small but very definite-looking nose. Their mouths were different too: smaller than a gorilla’s and yet seemingly more articulate. Mostly they just belched with apparent contentedness, or grunted like a pig, or uttered raspy expirations of noise that sounded like chuckles. But occasionally one would lean toward another and, still looking straight at Jack, utter a more complicated set of belched vocalizations that seemed to require some labial dexterity — sounds that resembled the barking, guttural remarks of a man whose larynx had been removed. Jack felt his ears burning. Maybe he was imagining it, but for all the world it looked like the yetis were talking about him.

‘Swift, Cody? I wish you could see this. It’s fantastic.’

A sense of awe did not blind Jack to the gravity of his situation. It was still possible that the yetis might kill him. And in only a few hours his power pack would run out, leaving him without heat. With the outside temperature already dropping as dusk approached and snow filling the air above the treetops, he would probably freeze to death. He had to get out of there.

Cautiously Jack dug his heels into the soft, black volcanic earth and pushed himself gently half a metre back up the hill.

His movements produced a variety of reactions among the group of yetis.

Some craned their necks to get a better view of him, while others, chattering among themselves, stood up. A female holding an infant turned her back to him protectively. Nearest of all, an adult male, easily recognizable by his enormous size and silver-red torso, watched him intensely for a moment and then uttered a deafening roar.

Jack remained still for a moment, waiting for them to settle down again. When he thought it was safe, he repeated the manoeuvre. It had become sufficiently gloomy underneath the leaf cover of the forest for the light on top of his helmet to switch itself on automatically. Momentarily dazzled by the carbide lamp, the big male rose on long bowed legs — much longer than a gorilla’s — to his full height. Jack guessed him to be over two metres in height. The male took a deep breath and, leaning toward Jack, roared with even greater volume and ferocity.

‘Wraaagh!’

It was as intimidating a display of hominoid power and aggression as Jack had ever witnessed, and he could well understand how Hurké could have lost control of his bowels.

‘Okay, you made your point. You don’t like the light. No problem.’

Jack quickly turned off the carbide lamp and stayed quite still.

But now that he was on his feet, the big male yeti was apparently set on underlining his dominance over Jack and the rest of the group, and flinging his long shaggy arms above his head, he roared again.

‘Wraaagh!’

‘Okay, okay. I hear you. You’re the bossman.’

Advancing nearer Jack, the yeti walked quite unlike any ape he had ever seen, not with the upper part of his hugely muscled body, brachiating on the knuckles of his hubcap-sized hands, but upright, with all of his weight on his legs, his head held high in the cold mountain air, like a man. Jack thought Bossman must have weighed all of a hundred and eighty kilogrammes and the crest on his head was as high as a Norman helmet. He was the most magnificent animal — if animal he was — Jack had ever seen.