Redemption in the Himalayas: Yeti!
by Dan Gallagher
British explorer, Dr. Bart Lloyd, awoke to his Sherpa guidemaster, Lonzing, telling him they had to go back. Lloyd, an unsponsored paleozoologist, had intended to get results this time and to be taken seriously. Temptation to bitterness clawed at the tall thirty-five year-old African-Englishman.
Nobody believed in gorillas, snow leopards or warm-blooded fishes until some laughed-at researcher found them, he had often thought, smoldering. So finally the adventurer had spent his last pound sterling to ascend the Himalayas in June of 2020.
Lloyd walked back to the edge of the ridge. He peered over the icy side, west toward still-dark Tibet. Nausea took him but he forced himself to view the eastern side as well. The menacing gray slopes dived down steeply. Lloyd knew that the gusting wind could easily send even his six-foot frame over the ledge, scraping down the cliff like a carrot against a grater. He backed away and returned to camp, which was already packed up.
Lloyd yelled to be heard over the rising moan of the wind, “Yes, you were right. Storm coming. Let’s leave. Now.”
With one hand signal from Lonzing, the line of five men linked by a nylon life-line moved out. The expedition slowly descended the ridge to a broader point they felt they could trust. As a safer route presented itself to the southeast, a sense of confidence returned to the men.
Lloyd was jolted by a loud beep from the small computer strapped in its case on his left hip. The ray-gun-looking sensor to which it was attached hung exposed from his other hip. Signaling for a stop, Lloyd pulled the sensor from his belt and held it level to the ground.
“BEEEEEEP!” the computer blasted at him.
He unclipped the rope that kept him from ranging from the Sherpas and trudged away toward the bare side of the chasm. The noise stopped. Curiosity pestered him. The Sherpas tossed their hands, plainly irritated. He stepped back toward the snow’s edge and up onto a small boulder.
“BEEEEEEP!”
A quick horizontal air-chop from Lonzing made it clear that no crevasse or cave would be excavated on this climb.
“Okay. Okay!”
Hanging the sensor back on his hip, Lloyd gave in to his guide and jumped off the rock.
The snow-dusted ice under his boots collapsed. Lonzing’s red face-mask disappeared upward out of sight in a cloud of shimmering snow. As Lloyd’s knees buckled at the impact, a spiked crampon broke from his boot and he fell backward onto his huge backpack. The rain of glittering snow cleared a bit and he could see that the Sherpas now lay on their stomachs above him, tossing down a line.
Lloyd rose to reach for the rope, but felt himself slipping backward and downward. He slid twenty feet down into near-pitch blackness, a tunnel of rock and ice surrounding him.
Suddenly, an almost birdlike resonance with a distinctive growling undertone paralyzed him. Lloyd swallowed hard, reached for the flashlight attached to his right shoulder, and sat upright to face the sound. It stopped. A pale glow lit the craggy tunnel ahead of him. He turned on the flashlight as much to satisfy his frayed nerves as to see his way out. From behind him in the tunnel, snow and ice particles slid toward him as Lonzing crawled in and crouched beside him.
“You are all-okay, Sahib?”
Lonzing clamped a five yard safety line onto the back of his novice client’s belt so that it could not easily be removed.
“Yes. Just bruised. I heard a sound farther in.”
“It is the wind. We are under a very thin ridge and this cave must open eastward to the big valley.”
“What if it’s the yeti?” Lloyd protested. “That’s what we’re here for. We must get some video before we leave; at least record the sound for analysis.”
Lloyd detached the small camera from his computer and mounted it on a bracket that he extended from a harness on his hood. He attached a seven-inch dish microphone to another harness on his left shoulder and switched the apparatus on.
At that, the shriek came again.
“No, Sahib. We must go now! That is yeti.”
Lloyd’s elbows and knees quivered as he forced himself to crawl several yards toward the sound; around a jagged corner and …
The icy floor gave way, dropping Lloyd face-first into a gray abyss. With a gut-crushing yank, the safety line snapped tight. Lloyd dangled twenty feet above the floor of a house-sized cavern. Faint light penetrated a huge wall of ice shards, apparently intentionally packed snow, dimly illuminating the cave. Most of the chamber’s rock was covered with dense moss. But what literally kept Lloyd’s breath from returning was his utter shock at the scene below.
A massive red-and-black-furred figure gaped up at him and let out a growling scream. It stood over seven feet tall with arms longer than half that. Lloyd saw a bloody gash in the long fur atop its wide, cone-shaped head.
Too winded to even call for Lonzing, Lloyd uncurled his body to attempt to scramble up the rope. Lloyd could neither right himself nor ascend. He slipped back to face the screeching, man-like creature.
It arched back, growling and brandishing prominent fangs and brownish molars almost directly below. Its eyes flashed white in the swaying lamp-light. It clutched something shiny, jet-black, and squirming in one of its claw-like hands. It held a lump of ice in the other. Another yeti, smaller than the first, lay cowering against the near rock wall. Like the one screaming and jumping at Lloyd, it had a thick neck and a large, cone-shaped head.
“Oh my God, Lonzing! Lonzing,” Lloyd’s mind finally processed what he was witnessing: Do primates kill their young, or is that ice for me? Then he shouted behind him, “Get me up right now!”
Lloyd was already rising in short jerks. “Lonzing, pull!”
The yeti, apparently enraged by the head wound that Lloyd had unwittingly inflicted. It hurled the frozen missile at Lloyd and missed. Lloyd heard a ‘crack’ on the cavern wall behind him, followed by another as the ice struck the cavern floor.
The female got up and threw a fist-sized rock, which struck Lloyd’s boot, dislodging his other crampon. Then, as Lloyd rose within a yard of the opening and escape, the massive male threw the baby at him. It slapped back-first into Lloyd’s chest and blurted out a single high-pitched sigh. Lloyd’s arms instinctively closed around the shocked but squirming newborn.
If I could just get it to civilization alive! The smallness and weakness of it tore at his emotions; he knew it needed close contact. He held it under its shoulder with his right hand and opened his parka, then his jacket with the other. He stuffed the baby head-first beneath his thermal-regulator undershirt and sealed the slimy primate up within.
Lloyd felt confident that the huge ape would not scale the cavern walls or even want to pursue him. He turned to look as he scrambled back up into the tunnel. The furious yeti was only two yards behind him. It let out an alarming howl, sending Lloyd’s feet scurrying frantically.
“It’s … Lonzing: Go, Go, Go! … It’s attacking! Pull! Get out!”
The walls of the narrow passage now seemed maliciously constricting.
Lonzing did not speak but scurried and tugged with everything he had to get himself and Lloyd away. Approaching the opening where he first found Lloyd, Lonzing screamed in Nepali at the three men above. “Yeti attacking! Pull, quick!”
Lloyd’s own fear heightened to panic as he realized that even Lonzing was now frantic. The other Sherpas yanked the pair through the fissure. The force of the tug was so great that they almost lost their grip on the rope. The surface appeared just ahead.
Panic rising in their throats, the two heard clawing and screeching as the yeti followed them up through the ice-floored crevasse.
Once atop, Lloyd and Lonzing thrust their fellows forward along the only ground they could run on without being mired by snow. Limping in their running strides along the angled rock, they paralleled the snow line, a driving wind at their backs. They raced headlong into the glaring sun amid blinding gusts of snow.
Lloyd heard gruff breathing and pounding growing louder, directly behind him. He shuddered from a slap on his pack, immediately followed by a powerful tug that almost jerked him backward off his feet. The tug released, and suddenly Lloyd sensed that he had missed a step and was tripping. But as he looked down to guide a recovering step, his mind boggled. He quaked at the sight that met his and his companions’ eyes as they dropped from the cloud of driven snow. There, below his feet, lay two miles of air. Terror kept him from gasping.
[What happens next? Will Lloyd and the Sherpas survive to prove there are yetis… or become so much hamburger as they fall, grinding against miles of cliff face?]
To complete this tale,
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