Eva Ibbotson - The Abominables

When Agatha had been in the valley about thirty years and Ambrose, Clarence, and Lucy were already children rather than babies, a very old and stringy female yeti tottered into the valley from a range of mountains to the east. They called her Grandma, and just sometimes after she had taught her to speak, Agatha wished she hadn’t, because all Grandma did was grumble. She grumbled about her rheumatism, she grumbled about her teeth. She grumbled about her share of juniper berries at lunchtime and about how careless Ambrose was, bouncing on her corns. But the yetis knew one had to be kind and gentle to the old, and they behaved beautifully toward Grandma. The only thing they wouldn’t do, even for Lady Agatha, was keep their ear lids open when she sang. And really, you couldn’t blame them. Grandma singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” as she milked the yaks didn’t just sound like a road drill. It sounded like a road drill with tonsillitis.

Even after Grandma came, Agatha’s family was not complete. A few years later, Father, who sometimes went exploring in the High Places, came back with a rather shy and nervous yeti a few years younger than himself.

When he was young, Uncle Otto (as they called him) had had a Dreadful Experience. He was standing on a pinnacle of rock, admiring a most beautiful and uplifting sunrise, when two porters, carrying the baggage for a party of mountaineers, had come round the corner and seen him. Uncle Otto had smiled most politely, showing all his beautiful white teeth in welcome, but the porters had just screamed and gibbered and, throwing down their packs, rushed down the mountain so fast that one of them had fallen into a crevasse and been killed.

After this, Uncle Otto had always felt shy and unwanted, and soon afterward a bald patch had appeared on his high, domed forehead. There is nothing like worry for making your hair fall out. But when Agatha taught him to speak, and to read, she was amazed at his intelligence. In the pocket of her father’s jacket, which she had slipped on before she was carried away, had been a copy of the Bible, and Uncle Otto used to spend hours sitting under his favorite rhododendron tree and reading. What’s more, he never skipped like the others did but even read the bits where Ahaz begat Jehoadah and Jehoadah begat Alameth. Not that he was conceited — far from it. It was the others who were so proud of him.

And so the years passed peacefully and happily for Agatha and her yetis in the secret valley of Nanvi Dar. Because there was no smoke to get into her lungs, petrol fumes to give her headaches, or chemicals to mess up her food, Agatha grew old very, very slowly. Nearly a hundred years after she had come to the valley, she was still healthy and strong.

But in the meantime the world outside was changing. More and more mountaineers came to climb the high peaks with newer and shinier tents and ropes and ice axes and stood about on the mountaintops being photographed and quarreling about who had got there first. And then one day Clarence said, “’Ook! ’Ook!” and when they looked up to where he was pointing, they saw, far away, a strange red bird in the sky — a helicopter — which quite amazed Lady Agatha, who’d left England when there weren’t even any motorcars.

After that came the hotel.

It was a huge luxury hotel — the Hotel Himalaya, they called it — built just across the border in the province of Bukhim, so that wealthy people who were too lazy to walk anywhere could sit in their rooms and watch the sun go down on the peaks of Nanvi Dar. The hotel meant new roads and planeloads of tourists. It meant litter on the snowy slopes and monasteries serving egg and chips and selling rubbishy souvenirs. It also meant new kinds of people: property developers and speculators, people who thought of the mountains not as beautiful places to be respected but as something that might make them rich.

Lady Agatha wasn’t a worrier, but she began to worry now. It seemed to her only a matter of time before someone discovered the valley. And she knew enough about the cruel and terrible things that might happen to her yetis if the wrong people found them. They could be put in zoos behind bars with people poking them with umbrellas and throwing toffee wrappers into their cages. They could be put in a circus or a funfair and treated like freaks. Or — but this was so awful that Agatha began to shiver even as she thought of it — they could be hunted and killed for sport as the great mammals of Africa had been hunted and killed when man first set eyes on them.

“Now listen, my dears,” she said to her yetis, gathering them around her. “I must ask you to stay safely hidden in the valley. No climbing in the High Places. No exploring.”

“But I want to meet humans,” said Ambrose. “You’re a human. They could be our friends and tell us stories, like you do. And we could help them lift things.”

Lady Agatha sighed. She blamed herself, of course, for not having been more honest about the world from which she came. But how could she explain about human wickedness to the yetis? They would simply never understand it. She could only hope that the yetis would obey her.

And the yetis did. Ambrose, in any case, was busy taming his pet yak, an animal called Hubert. Yaks (which are a sort of small and very shaggy cow) are stubborn and hardy animals. But they are not very clever at the best of times. They don’t need to be, because all they do is eat grass at one end and give milk at the other. All the same, there had probably never before been a yak as stupid as Hubert.

He was about the size of a folding pram, with a sad, boot-shaped face, a crumpled left horn, and knees that knocked together when he walked. Hubert knew he had a mother, but he was never quite sure which of the yaks was her, and when he did find her, he would suddenly get the idea that he was supposed to be back with Ambrose. Sometimes he would get so muddled that he would just bury his head in a hollow tree or a hole in the ground and give up; there were Hubert Holes like that all over the valley. Ambrose, however, wouldn’t hear a word against him, and as he said, Hubert was probably the only potholing yak in the world.

But though all the yetis were as good and careful as could be, something dreadful did happen after all.

In a way it was Lady Agatha’s fault for cooking such a lovely yak-milk pudding for their supper. Father and Uncle Otto had three helpings each; Grandma and Clarence and Ambrose had two. But Lucy said “May the Lord make us truly thankful” to the yak-milk pudding no less than five times. Nobody can have five helpings of pudding and sleep soundly. And that night, Lucy rose from the bed of leaves in which she slept beside her brothers, and with her blue eyes wide open and her arms stretched out in front of her, she walked — sightless and fast asleep — across the meadows, scaled apparently without effort the ferocious cliffs surrounding the valley, and stepped out onto the eternal snows.

UCY GOT BACK SAFELY TO THE VALLEY—sleep-walkers usually seem to get back to their beds. But the glacier she had walked across had just had a new fall of snow. And right across it, from end to end, she left a row of footprints. Huge, clear, dachshund-sized prints: eight toes, rounded heels, and all. There is nothing like a portly yeti with flat feet for making marks that even a nitwit could identify.