Philip Kerr - Esau

‘I was never at a birth before,’ admitted Boyd.

‘Me neither,’ said Jack.

‘Everybody has been present during a birth, at least once,’ Jutta remarked tartly. Swiftly she performed an endotracheal intubation and then attached the tube to a cylinder of oxygen.

‘Hey, Boyd,’ said Jack. ‘Light me a cigarette, will you?’

‘Sure thing.’ Boyd lit two and fed one between Jack’s lips. ‘There you go. Gee, this is just like MASH.’

Jutta looked around angrily.

‘No smoking in here,’ she yelled.

‘Sorry,’ said Boyd, extinguishing both cigarettes with a shrug of apology. ‘I forgot.’

‘If you want to help, Jon, you can help Jack undress. I shall want to examine his injuries as soon as we’re finished here. And you can give him a hot drink with whisky in it.’

‘Sure thing.’

‘The heartbeat,’ said Jameson, snatching off his stethoscope. ‘I’ve got it.’

‘Good,’ said Jutta, pressing her hands to the yeti’s abdomen. ‘Okay, let’s see if we can time these contractions. Ready?’

Jameson nodded and, lifting his wrist, stared closely at his Breitling wristwatch.

‘Contraction,’ said Jutta.

‘Right,’ said Jameson, pressing one of the bezels on his watch. ‘She looks well dilated.’

Jutta peered down between the animal’s legs.

‘There’s more bleeding too,’ she said. ‘You know, if this was a human baby, I’d probably be thinking about performing an episiotomy.’

‘We have no idea if this is full-term or not. Anything less than thirty-two weeks and her baby won’t be viable anyway, so it won’t matter if the skull is injured or not. Besides, delivery forceps aren’t exactly the sort of thing you bring along on a trip to the Himalayas.’

‘I was thinking that we could maybe improvise something,’ suggested Jutta. ‘The cook boys have some large serving spoons.’

‘You mean like a victims. Yes, that might work.’ Jameson glanced around the clamshell and caught Warner’s eye.

The other man needed no prompting.

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he said, and quickly left the clamshell.

There was a long pause before Jutta reported another contraction.

‘Four minutes,’ said Jameson.

‘I think we still have a little time,’ she said. ‘I’d better go take a look at Jack.’

Jutta washed her hands and pulled on some polythene gloves. Boyd, helping Jack to sip a hot drink, stood up to allow Jutta to sit down and examine him.

As a doctor working with mountaineers, Jutta had seen a lot of contusions and knew that fit men in their prime of life bruised less easily than anyone else. But Jack’s whole body was the black-and-blue colour of a housefly, and he looked to her to be as bruised as she had ever seen a man. She made him spit into a tissue to check his sputum for any internal bleeding and, seeing none, she then looked more closely at his ribs, running her fingers over the covering tissues.

‘You’re lucky,’ she said. ‘The ribs are probably just cracked. Of course I’d prefer you to have an X ray, but from the look of you it doesn’t seem as if there’s been injury to any deeper structures. We’ll need to strap you up a bit, but rib injuries are less liable to infection.’ Shifting her attention to the bite on his shoulder, she added, ‘Which is more than I can say for your shoulder. That’s a nasty-looking bite. It will have to be cleaned and dressed immediately. And I’ll need to give you a tetanus shot.’

‘Contraction,’ reported Jameson.

When Jutta had bandaged Jack’s ribs tightly, Boyd helped her to turn him over so that she could stab a hypodermic into his buttock. Then, while she dressed the bite, she questioned him closely about his freezing injuries, trying to distinguish frostbite from the two less serious conditions of frostnip and frostnumb. Concluding that it was too early to be sure, she gave him some antibiotics to prevent any infection, zipped him up in the warm casualty bag, and placed an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth.

‘Will these do?’

Lincoln Warner came back into the clamshell brandishing two long-handled spoons. He handed them to Jutta, who laid her fist in the bowl of one spoon and nodded.

‘I’d say that was about the size of a child’s head. What do you think. Miles?’

Jameson took one of the spoons and shrugged.

‘I suppose so. You’re the doctor.’

‘Yes, and that’s why you’re going to deliver this baby.’

‘Me?’

‘You’re the veterinarian. You’re going to be the expert on yetis, not me.’

‘Since you put it like that, I suppose it should be me.’

‘I’ll help.’

Outside the clamshell, a faint growl in the air announced the return of the Allouette with the other members of the expedition from Camp Two.

‘I still think you should go back down in the helicopter. Jack.’

Jack shook his head.

‘I’m feeling better already,’ he said.

The helicopter set down five passengers: Swift, Cody, Mac, Hurké Gurung, and Ang Tsering. With no room on the Allouette for the rest of the Sherpas, they were descending from Camp Two, in the Machhapuchhare ice corridor, on foot. As soon as its passengers were clear, the helicopter’s rotors picked up speed, beating the air hypnotically. Then it backed into the sky, tail first, like some great dragonfly, and by the time Swift and the rest had reached the clamshell, it was no more than a distant hum on the horizon.

Mac was the first through the airlock door. Already bristling with cameras, the little Scotsman immediately began to set up the video camera on a tripod, close to the delivery table where he thought he could get the best shots. Swift and Cody followed closely behind. With only a glance in the yeti’s direction. Swift went straight over to Jack and knelt down beside him. He looked drawn and pale.

‘How are you doing?’ she asked. ‘You had us worried back there.’

She pulled the oxygen mask a few centimetres off his face so that he could answer.

‘See if you can persuade him that he needs to be in a hospital,’ Jutta said over her shoulder.

‘How about it. Jack?’ said Swift. ‘Jutta says you need to be in the hospital.’

‘I’m a little tired,’ he whispered, on the edge of sleep. ‘And I ache a bit. But I’m really okay.’ He smiled weakly. ‘If it were you, would you leave now? With a living specimen under your nose?’

‘I guess not,’ she admitted. ‘My God, Jack, we’ve actually done it. We’ve actually got a yeti.’

‘Then you’d better not waste any time,’ he said, drifting off to sleep. ‘Get to it...’

Swift got up and stood at Jutta’s shoulder.

‘I’ve given him something to help him sleep,’ she said. ‘I’d feel better if he could have an X ray. His ribs have had a beating. And he’s got a bad bite. If he doesn’t show any marked improvement after sleep, I’m sending for the chopper again, and I don’t care what he says.’

Swift nodded silently. She walked around the table, arms folded about her, rapt in thought, hardly daring to believe the evidence of her own eyes. This was her first proper view of the yeti close up, and her immediate impression was that it was magnificent-looking, with a nobility about the head and face that was quite unlike the many artist’s impressions of the creature she had seen in her extensive computer archive. She was reminded of the difference between the early illustrations of Neanderthal as hulking subhumans of low intelligence, and more recent computerized makeovers that had grafted images of living humans onto Neanderthal skulls, producing handsome, intelligent-looking faces that you might have seen on any subway. She picked up one of the hands, examining the big leathery palm almost as if she expected to be able to deduce the creature’s character and temperament before proceeding to divine its fortune. The yeti was wearing Didier’s ring, on the very end of its smallest finger.