Philip Kerr - Esau

Jack realized that Bossman might possibly also be the last thing he would ever see. He pressed his head against his knees, bracing himself for the mighty blow he felt certain was coming. At best it would be a blow that knocked him senseless again.

Instead the yeti merely stood over him like some ancient Greek Titan intent on storming heaven, roared once more, and then stomped back to his original position, where he sat down again on his enormous backside. But while Bossman’s silver-red back was temporarily turned. Jack managed to push himself farther back up the gradient.

Painfully he glanced back over his good shoulder and saw that he had only about ten feet to go to reach the line where the forest ended and the ice cavern began. Although his shoulder and side hurt, his legs felt fine and he thought he might have stood up and climbed what remained of the crater’s slope had he dared to turn his back on the yetis. Instead he dug his heels into the earth and the shrubs and pushed himself up.

His hand touched something flat and reflective. It was not a piece of flat stone as he first thought, but a piece of plastic, a layered grid of what looked like photo voltaic cells. Jack felt around his helmet to see if something had come loose even though the object looked too big to have...

The second attack came from directly behind him.

Jack yelled out with fright as two enormous hands clasped his helmet like a basketball, lifting him clear off his feet. There must have been another big silverback male squatting behind him at the top of the crater all along, possibly the same yeti that had attacked him in the first place. For a moment Jack hung there, grappling with the roaring yeti’s vice-like grip as he made a futile attempt to free himself. Suddenly the creature gave his helmet a sharp twist, just as if it had intended to break Jack’s neck, and for one terrifying moment he had a close view of the yeti’s cavernous mouth with its large tartar-covered teeth. The teeth had looked harmless enough on the skull he had given to Swift. And yet they were undoubtedly the same size as the ones now snapping at his throat.

Seconds later Jack fell to the ground, but without his helmet. That remained in the yeti’s hands. His attacker roared with satisfaction, perhaps imagining that it had decapitated its victim, and then hurled the helmet back into the ice cave.

Jack told himself to play dead. It was now his only chance if the creature was not to finish him off. He had heard about Alaskan grizzly bears that would leave you alone if they thought you were dead, but Jack was aware that this would require a control over his own body and its thresholds of pain he no longer possessed.

There was just one chance he might make a more convincing corpse.

Jack hauled Jameson’s hypodermic pistol from its holster.

For a split second he thought of shooting the yeti, only something told him that the two or three minutes required for the drug to take effect on such a large creature would be all the beast needed to kill him. If indeed there was any drug in the syringe at all. And if there was no drug he would surely just aggravate the beast even further. It was his best chance and he knew it. He pointed the pistol at the inside of his thigh and pulled the trigger.

The hypodermic dart struck its close target with the cold sharp sting of a large snake. Jack cursed and fought his automatic instinct to pull out the dart.

‘Damn you. Miles,’ he thought. The dart hurt — whatever Jameson said about painless anaesthesia, the dart hurt.

In half an hour it would be dark. In another half hour — if the drug worked — he might be able to crawl away unseen.

The big silverback male — surely even bigger than Number One — swept a rhododendron bush out of its path and advanced on Jack as he waited, desperately, for the Ketamine Hydrochloride to deliver its mercifully analgesic effect.

The sirdar, being a former Gurkha naik, or sergeant, and a member of a tribe that lived in a part of Nepal always more strongly influenced by India, was a Hindu. But many of the Sherpas, including Ang Tsering, were Buddhists of Tibetan stock. Like most Nepalese, Hurké Gurung was scrupulously tolerant of Buddhists, just as they were of Hindus, and indeed Nepalese Hindus were quite Buddhist in their relaxed interpretation of the caste system. So before beginning his rescue mission, the sirdar was happy to accept a blessing from Pertemba, a Sherpa who in a previous incarnation, it was said, had been a Tibetan Lama. Hurké also accepted the loan of a little image of the Green Tara, who took precedence among all the queens of Tibetan mythology and who, he was promised, would protect him from all harm that might befall him. Another man tied a piece of yellow thread around the sirdar’s neck for good luck.

Hurké Gurung was touched by the devotion shown by his men and decided that it could only be the case that they felt he had represented them well as far as the bideshis were concerned. But he preferred to put his own faith in Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of wisdom and the remover of obstacles, and if the occasion arose, Pashupati, a benevolent form of Shiva, and the Lord of Beasts.

Uttering silent prayers to these two Hindu deities, and with fond thoughts of his wife and their son, the sirdar was lowered into the crevasse and onto the shelf leading to what the rest of the Sherpas were already calling the pabitra ban — the Holy Forest.

Jack had wrongly supposed that the Ketamine Hydrochloride would render him unconscious. He experienced the effect of the drug most noticeably as a lessening of the pain in his shoulder and side, and then as a creeping paralysis of all his major muscle groups. He had quite forgotten that the drug had only an immobilizing effect; that he would become insensitive to external stimulation; that his eyelids would remain open in a semblance of death; but that he would remain fully conscious. So he could not even blink when the yeti, crashing through the undergrowth after him, picked up a rotten log as big as a filing cabinet and raised it in the air with the apparent intention of crushing him underneath.

Instead, seemingly influenced by Jack’s complete immobility, the creature sat down on its haunches only away from Jack’s head and allowed the log to roll harmlessly back down its enormous shoulders and onto the ground. Bending forward, the yeti searched the fixed expression in Jack’s eyes for any sign of life.

Jack could only meet his penetrating stare and sense of sharp consciousness behind the amber-coloured eves. Surely, he thought, this was no ordinary ape. This was a highly intelligent creature, with an awareness of the world that seemed quite uncharacteristic of any ordinary animal.

Another more painful indication of the creature’s intelligence immediately followed, for with an insight that seemed quite uncanny, it poked Jack hard against his injured ribs with one long cigar-tube of a forefinger. It was as well he had thought to restrain himself chemically, he told himself. But for the anaesthetising effect of the Ketamine, he would undoubtedly have yelled with pain, with a probably fatal result.

Gradually the yeti began to relax and glance around to its companions with the smug delight of one who had defeated an opponent. It even seemed — he was quite sure this could only be the drug — that the creature was laughing: a deep, unpleasant, alien kind of laugh that sounded like one of the giants he had been thinking of earlier. Cronus or Hyperion. A contemptuous belly laugh born of enormous strength and size such as the Cyclops Polyphemus might have uttered before eating six members of Ulysses’s crew.

But if he had thought that the yeti might now leave him alone. Jack was soon made aware of this mistake, for the creature took him by the ankle and began to drag him back down the slope toward the rest of the group like some kind of trophy, as if he wished somehow to emphasize his dominance of the rest by his victory over the strange interloper.