Jim Shepard - Like You'd Understand, Anyway

Our third morning at the lake, the yak is still bleating, the wind still blowing. Outside the tent it's very cold. I watch two of the porters rig up an ingenious little sling for their food pouches.

I'm interested in the racial origins of inventiveness. The gene for nomadism is clearly hereditary, given that racial groups like the Comanche, the Gypsies, and the Tibetans are all nomadic; what, then, of the gene for resourcefulness of a certain kind, or inventiveness? Might that not be an area in which such peoples are our equal, if not superior?

Beger, when I raise the notion, is intrigued by the idea, within limits.

This is a golden time for anthropologists, especially within the Reich. Lenz was certainly correct to remark that we're presently governed by the first widely influential leader to recognize that the central mission of politics is race hygiene. All of us in the sciences have profited by such a regime, even if we've also had to accommodate ourselves to a good deal of foolishness and boorishness. It is, we all agree, crucial to delineate precisely and objectively the hierarchical boundaries between the classes and the races, because scientific precision reassures the ordinary citizen that the law will protect his own security.

We've all done our bit. Ancestral Legacy devoted many man-hours of work to the drafting of the Marriage Health Law, especially to the definitions of hereditary degeneracy in its various manifestations. And before this mission I myself had begun branching out into the more positive aspects of eugenics: conceiving new methods to increase the birthrate of the superior populations. It's a national opportunity. And there's simply too much funding there to ignore.

The new poultice seems to have made Beger worse. He soldiers on but remarks more than once with a sheepish smile that he's feeling a little green. We stop for a midday meal, and I tend to his foot myself. The smell once his boot is off is eye-watering.

“We may have to go back,” I tell him, unwrapping the mess.

He can't even bring himself to disagree, though he's stricken at the prospect of having let us down.

Gulam's hail magician, who also dabbles in medicine, is called over to examine the foot. He seems briskly untroubled by what he sees and returns half an hour later with some kind of paste in a wooden bowl. He applies the paste with his fingers and leaves me to rewrap the foot.

The next morning the tethered yak is gone. The tether is snapped. Footprints surround the spot and trail away to the salt lake, where they disappear. I ask who was on watch but the porters refuse to acknowledge any accusation in my question. The yeti are, after all, magical animals.

The incident does seem to have affected morale, however. A certain listlessness or wariness is evident in the manner in which the group goes about its business of packing up and preparing to get under way. “We will all be killed,” one of the porters says sotto voce to Gulam, believing me out of earshot. He sounds matter-of-fact.

I take advantage of a small snow squall nearby to hold up the column, gather the porters round and deliver a scientific lecture on the origins of snowstorms. I want them to register that a white man's rationality can have more power than all of the mountain spirits whirling in their heads. They seem impressed enough with the information they've been given. I ask if there are questions, and they all stare back at me silently. I give the word for the column to proceed.

We strike out, finally, from the shores of the lake, heading back into the endless plains. The change depresses Beger's spirits further. “How much longer like this?” he asks the porter closest to him on the pack animal.

“Until the rocks grow beards,” the porter jokes.

Two or three of them still mutter every so often about the loss of their tea maker. But they are of a race that can make do in any number of ways, I remind myself. This is a people who can burn sheep dung hot enough to melt metal.

Truth be told, our friend Reichsführer Himmler has had some very strange ideas. He wants to prove that the Nordic race descended directly from the skies. His theory of glacial cosmogony insists that all cosmic energy erupts from the collision between ice and fire, and nowhere is that clash more primeval, of course, than here, where the land is closest to the upper sky. Hence the entire department of Ancestral Legacy, with its charge to study the origi-nary area, spirit, deeds, and legacy of the Indo-Germanic race. The whole thing is mostly unscientific. He's sent us off in search of a proto-Gangetic Indo-European language, which would be evidence that Tibet was once inhabited by a Caucasian race, perhaps ancestors of the Scythians. I had a number of talks with him in which I sought to guide him back to firmer theoretical ground, all without success. There is a certain futility to resisting one of the Reichsführer's pet projects.

In the middle of the night I'm awakened by that same high whistling. Surrounded by snores, I wrestle myself hurriedly into my outer garments and emerge from the tent, shining my pocket torch about. The porter on watch is gazing disinterestedly off into the darkness. When I shine my beam in the direction of our tethered yak, it's swallowed in the gloom. I investigate. The tethered yak is gone. The porter claims to have heard nothing.

The entire next day Beger seems half-asleep. Every so often a porter's casual hand nudges him back upright on his pack animal.

During the evening meal that night their barley beer tastes slightly strange. Beger is already asleep and I find that I too can hardly keep my eyes open. I give Gulam instructions about tethering the next yak closer to camp and then close my eyes for a moment's rest. The next morning I wake very late, my mouth an old stewpot. The sun outside the tent is blinding. The yak is tethered nearby, as I requested. The porters and the other pack animals are gone.

Beger exhibits surprisingly little reaction to the news. They left water and food, as well as the guns. I have my compass. But with only the two of us, we're at least three weeks from help, I tell him.

“At least,” he agrees, his face turned to the tent wall.

We seem unable to rouse ourselves quickly, and thus get started distressingly late in the day. The yak periodically rebels at being ridden, so we make only a handful of kilometers before having to stop for the night. We manage three days of this before that yak disappears as well. This time even the tether is gone.

“Somewhere some yeti are having a feast,” Beger says to himself when I inform him. He spends the day out of the sun in the dispirited half teepee of the tent. Without help, I've only been able to erect it in a semicollapsed way.

What a creature , I think, with real wonder. Sitting at the tent's entrance and tracking the dust storms and whirligigs on the horizon, I remind myself that I've done what I set out to do: validated, to my own satisfaction, my belief. Before me, science had to settle for the same trio of consolation prizes: footprints, dens, fecal matter. I'm going to be like Du Chaillu, the Frenchman who was the first to shoot a gorilla: an animal that for two thousand years Europeans believed to be mythical. And I'm not simply discovering another animal. On the scrolls that serve as meditation aids in the monasteries, the yeti are positioned between the animals and mankind. I've been mocked for devoting my life to a legend. But legends have moved whole nations and held them together.

Beger turns feverish in the night. I minister to him with water and cool compresses. He cries silently and gives himself over to being held. He sweats through his undergarments, and when I peel them off, we both can see a red line running from his ankle up to the lymph nodes in his groin.