Jim Shepard - Like You'd Understand, Anyway

In Lharigo I was chased away from a nomad encampment.

Children threw stones. Dogs gamboled unpleasantly about my heels. Women waved small ceramic pots of flour to exorcise my evil spirit.

Beger received the same greeting when he straggled in an hour or so later. “I don't think we should ask about the yeti,” he said, grimacing at his forearm. A dog had shredded his sleeve.

My name is Ernst Schäfer and I sit with my assistant, Beger, and seven sherpas with uncertain work habits only a very small part of the way across the Chang Tang, the frozen desert between the Trans-Himalayas and the Kunlun Mountains.

The sherpas, already convinced of our slow-wittedness, tell stories of the yeti — women the yeti have abducted, yaks killed in a single blow, shattered sheep pens, and always the ubiquitous footprints. How can you tell when a yak's been killed in a single blow? Beger wants to know. In response they snigger at him and pass around a small pot of dried cream and a sack of what they call tsampa , a kind of roasted barley. Beger is offered none of either. They're really a very dirty people.

Gulam, the sherpas' leader, intones as though telling ghost stories to a child, “They come into the village and take what they want.” The other porters parody the terrified expressions of the eyewitnesses.

“When the facts run dry, they start inventing,” Beger complains, gingerly unlacing his boot. “They lie to us on principle.”

His foot does not look good. My guess would be an infection from a leech at the beginning of the trip.

Beger and I are the entirety of Operation Tibet, which was a closely guarded secret when we began and, now that we're a fly-speck in the darkness on the other side of the moon, has no doubt become even more so. We are what's known back at the offices of the Reichsführer SS as the Schäfer Unit. This has been the cause of much bitter amusement on Beger's part. Whenever we hit a snag or find ourselves powerless before native intransigence or a pack of goats that won't clear the track, leaving us half-frozen and shivering and peering miserably down into an icy abyss, Beger will say, “Don't they see that we're the Schäfer Unit?”

“I think they do,” I'll tell him.

Our purpose, as far as the Reichschancellery understands, is twofold. First, we're to explore prehistoric and linguistic issues related to locating the core of the Nordic-Aryan legacy. The language is the Reichsführer's. And second, the two of us are to incite the Tibetan army against British troops. The plan involves our rendezvousing with emissaries from our new ally, the Bolsheviks. With their help, I'm to become a German Lawrence of the Himalayas. The Bolshevik emissaries are nowhere to be found. There is no Tibetan army, and there are no British troops.

This kind of foolishness carries very little water with me. Before I was assigned to Ancestral Legacy, an odd bureaucratic backwater recently flooded with funding, I was an ornithologist of international renown, as well as an expert in zoology, botany, agriculture, and ethnology. Not to mention one of the foremost Tibetan specialists of this age. So, as I told Beger, while I've been continually impressed with Reichsführer Himmler's political gifts, I've been able to contain my awe when it comes to his scientific theories. His theories are the donkey cart we've used to land us where we want to be: here on this high plateau with sufficient funding and no oversight, in search of the yeti.

Beger's interests in the yeti lie in his having made a name for himself with a precocious monograph on the importance of the forehead in racial analysis. He studied anthropology at the institute in Berlin-Dahlem with Fischer and Abel, and he's convinced the yeti are an early hominid. He can imagine to what uses a yeti skull could be put in his research. And naturally he's devoted to science, so in the normal course of events he can work up a useful curiosity about most phenomena. Plus there's the invigorating fact that service in the Schäfer Unit has excused him from active military duty. His service to the Fatherland is supposed to be his ongoing evaluation of the Tibetan material we're intended to gather.

We haven't gathered much. He did some desultory poking around with one of the sherpas as translator before we left Lha-rigo. But for the most part I've led us to areas considered desolate even by Tibetan standards: areas of the yeti, or of nothing at all.

The ideal age for a man on an expedition like this is between thirty-one and thirty-five. I'm thirty-seven. A man much younger, like Beger, who's twenty-five, possesses the necessary vigor in abundance but not the discipline and focus of mind so crucial to patient inquiry.

And lately his powers of observation have been curtailed sharply by a postadolescent self-absorption. He's miserable about his foot and miserable that we're so out of touch with the world. He has two brothers serving in the war with Poland, a bit of news we learned about from a week-old Italian newspaper.

Of course we knew something was up before we left.

One brother is a Stuka pilot, the other a sapper in the Wehr-macht. I do a poor job keeping track of which is which.

This part of the Chang Tang is far from even the rarely used trade routes. Gulam has led us here because his uncle and brother insist that yeti roam these regions at night in search of food. During the day, with nothing stirring in any direction, the notion seems absurd, but we do well to remind ourselves that over the centuries the Tibetans have learned to survive in an environment that presents an unyielding stone face to outsiders.

We have more than Gulam's assertions on which to base our decision: two days into the trek we encountered a veritable square dance of footprints baked into a previously marshy depression near a water source. The footprints were six inches deep and two and a half feet long. A separate and enormous big toe was clearly visible on each.

“What was this, a meeting hall?” Beger remarked, unsure where to begin with his measuring tape.

…

One sherpa stands watch while the others sleep. Beger's head is under the blanket, and because his complaints have stopped I assume he's asleep as well. Eventually he pulls his boot from the fire.

Each night, my shivering prevents me from listening as intently as I would like. I have not found a solution to this problem. The previous night I walked off half a kilometer into the darkness, keeping a fix on the wavering glow of the fire. The exercise warmed me a little, and as soon as I stopped moving, small, brittle sounds rose up around me. Nocturnal rodents or insects, perhaps, going about their business. Gazing off at a tiny glow of warmth in the distance: that must be, I realized, the yeti's experience.

When I wake, the fire's gone out. The sherpa standing watch is on his back, snoring. There's a whistling — at a high, high pitch— impossibly far off.

When Alexander had conquered the entire known world — when he'd finally subjugated even the Indus Valley and pushed his phalanxes up to the precipices and chasms of the Kashmir — he's said to have sent a small expedition off to engage the yeti, maddeningly visible on the higher elevations. The expedition perished and the yeti eluded him. Pliny the Elder, who would later fall victim to his own thirst for knowledge while attempting to record natural processes during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, insisted that in the Land of the Satyrs — the mountains that lay to the east of India — lived creatures that were extremely swift and could run on two feet or four. They bore a human shape and because of their agility and strength could be caught only when infirm or old.

Aelianus, historian of the Emperor Septimus, wrote of his legions' frustration with the same satyrs, whom he described as shaggy-haired and startlingly accurate with stones. As far back as 1832, Britain's first representative to Nepal described an unknown creature that moved erectly, was covered in long, dark hair, and had no tail.