Christopher Moore - Lamb - The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

“This is why you come here? Why after alms you carry so much food up the mountain?”

Gaspar nodded. “He’s the last of his kind. He has no one to help him gather food. No one to talk to.”

“But what is he? What is a yeti?”

“We like to think of him as a gift. He is a vision of one of the many lives a man might live before he reaches nirvana. We believe he is as close to a perfect being as can be achieved on this plane of existence.”

“How do you know he is the only one?”

“He told me.”

“He talks?”

“No, he sings. Wait.”

As we watched the yeti eat, each of the monks came forward and put his cylinders of food and tea in front of the creature. The yeti looked up from his eating only occasionally, as if his whole universe resided in that bamboo pipe full of rice, yet I could tell that behind those ice-blue eyes the creature was counting, figuring, rationing the supplies we had brought.

“Where does he live?” I asked Gaspar.

“We don’t know. A cave somewhere, I suppose. He has never taken us there, and we don’t look for it.”

Once all the food was put before the yeti, Gaspar signaled to the other monks and they started backing out from under the overhang into the snow, bowing to the yeti as they went. “It is time for us to go,” Gaspar said. “He doesn’t want our company.”

Joshua and I followed our fellow monks back into the snow, following a path they were blazing back the way we had come. The yeti watched us leave, and every time I looked back he was still watching, until we were far enough away that he became little more than an outline against the white of the mountain. When at last we climbed out of the valley, and even the great sheltering overhang was out of sight, we heard the yeti’s song. Nothing, not even the blowing of the ram’s horn back home, not the war cries of bandits, not the singing of mourners, nothing I had ever heard had reached inside of me the way the yeti’s song did. It was a high wailing, but with stops and pulses like the muted sound of a heart beating, and it carried all through the valley. The yeti held his keening notes far longer than any human breath could sustain. The effect was as if someone was emptying a huge cask of sadness down my throat until I thought I’d collapse or explode with the grief. It was the sound of a thousand hungry children crying, ten thousand widows tearing their hair over their husbands’ graves, a chorus of angels singing the last dirge on the day of God’s death. I covered my ears and fell to my knees in the snow. I looked at Joshua and tears were streaming down his cheeks. The other monks were hunched over as if shielding themselves from a hailstorm. Gaspar cringed as he looked at us, and I could see then that he was, indeed, a very old man. Not as old as Balthasar, perhaps, but the face of suffering was upon him.

“So you see,” the abbot said, “he is the only one of his kind. Alone.”

You didn’t have to understand the yeti’s language, if he had one, to know that Gaspar was right.

“No he’s not,” said Joshua. “I’m going to him.”

Gaspar took Joshua’s arm to stop him. “Everything is as it should be.”

“No,” said Joshua. “It is not.”

Gaspar pulled his hand back as if he had plunged it into a flame—a strange reaction, as I had actually seen the monk put his hand in flame with less reaction as part of the kung fu regimen.

“Let him be,” I said to Gaspar, not sure at the time why I was doing it.

Joshua headed back into the valley by himself, having not said another word to us.

“He’ll be back when it’s time,” I said.

“What do you know?” snapped Gaspar in a distinctly unenlightened way. “You’ll be working off your karma for a thousand years as a dung beetle just to evolve to the point of being dense.”

I didn’t say anything. I simply bowed, then turned and followed my brother monks back to the monastery.

It was a week before Joshua returned to us, and it was another day before he and I actually had time to speak. We were in the dining hall, and Joshua had eaten his own rice as well as mine. In the meantime, I had applied a lot of thought to the plight of the abominable snowman and, more important, to his origins.

“Do you think there were a lot of them, Josh?”

“Yes. Never as many as there are men, but there were many more.”

“What happened to them?”

“I’m not sure. When the yeti sings I see pictures in my head. I saw that men came to these mountains and killed the yeti. They had no instinct to fight. Most just stood in place and watched as they were slaughtered. Perplexed by man’s evil. Others ran higher and higher into the mountains. I think that this one had a mate and a family. They starved or died of some slow sickness. I can’t tell.”

“Is he a man?”

“I don’t think he is a man,” said Joshua.

“Is he an animal?”

“No, I don’t think he’s an animal either. He knows who he is. He knows he is the only one.”

“I think I know what he is.”

Joshua regarded me over the rim of his bowl. “Well?”

“Well, do you remember the monkey feet Balthasar bought from the old woman in Antioch, how they looked like little human feet?”

“Yes.”

“And you have to admit that the yeti looks very much like a man. More like a man than he does any other creature, right? Well, what if he is a creature who is becoming a man? What if he isn’t really the last of his kind, but the first of ours? What made me think of it was how Gaspar talks about how we work off our karma in different incarnations, as different creatures. As we learn more in each lifetime we may become a higher creature as we go. Well, maybe creatures do that too. Maybe as the yeti needs to live where it is warmer he loses his fur. Or as the monkeys need to, I don’t know, run cattle and sheep, they become bigger. Not all at once, but through many incarnations. Maybe creatures evolve the way Gaspar believes the soul evolves. What do you think?”

Joshua stroked his chin for a moment and stared at me as if he was deep in thought, while at the same time I thought he might burst out laughing any second. I’d spent a whole week thinking about this. This theory had vexed me through all of my training, all of my meditations since we’d made the pilgrimage to the yeti’s valley. I wanted some sort of acknowledgment from Joshua for my effort, if nothing else.

“Biff,” he said, “that may be the dumbest idea you’ve ever had.”

“So you don’t think it’s possible?”

“Why would the Lord create a creature only to have it die out? Why would the Lord allow that?” Joshua said.

“What about the flood? All but Noah and his family were killed.”

“But that was because people had become wicked. The yeti isn’t wicked. If anything, his kind have died out because they have no capacity for wickedness.”

“So, you’re the Son of God, you explain it to me.”

“It is God’s will,” said Joshua, “that the yeti disappear.”

“Because they had no trace of wickedness?” I said sarcastically. “If the yeti isn’t a man, then he’s not a sinner either. He’s innocent.”

Joshua nodded, staring into his now-empty bowl. “Yes. He’s innocent.” He stood and bowed to me, which was something he almost never did unless we were training. “I’m tired now, Biff. I have to sleep and pray.”

“Sorry, Josh, I didn’t mean to make you sad. I thought it was an interesting theory.”

He smiled weakly at me, then bowed his head and shuffled off to his cell.

Over the next few years Joshua spent at least a week out of every month in the mountains with the yeti, going up not only with every group after alms, but often going up into the mountains by himself for days or, in the summer, weeks at a time. He never talked about what he did while in the mountains, except, he told me, that the yeti had taken him to the cave where he lived and had shown him the bones of his people. My friend had found something with the yeti, and although I didn’t have the courage to ask him, I suspect the bond he shared with the snowman was the knowledge that they were both unique creatures, nothing like either of them walked the face of the earth, and regardless of the connection each might feel with God and the universe, at that time, in that place, but for each other, they were utterly alone.