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.
I get him redressed and resettled. His ankle I leave alone.
I doze beside him, dreaming of river crossings, the frigid water roiling and rushing and spray that tastes of minerals. In Shigatse the breeze smelled of juniper trees and tasted of dust. A spotted white bull lolled about in the middle of the street. In one village where we were welcomed, children bathed in our honor. We bedded down in furs on the ground, and the fleas and my fears that we wouldn't find enough petrol the next day kept me awake. That day on a high pass we saw across a half-mile gorge the giant goat known as the takin. It was snub-nosed and fearsome across the shoulders, and reputed to have pushed travelers off narrow and precipitous tracks. But its hair, in the sun, was a stunning gold. The golden fleece, I thought. The golden fleece.
…
I wake in the darkness, my hand hunting for my torch. We're both wheezing from the thinness of the air. Holding my breath, I cover Beger's mouth and nose with my palm and listen. There's a strong wind; under it, a far-off whistling. Something smells. I give Beger a shake but it fails to rouse him. I think of the yak outside the night before, its eyes shut against the wind, snow speckling its black fur.
In June the sherpas observe the Mani Rimbu—“All Will Be Well”—a celebration during which they venerate their nature gods. At the climax a gruesomely costumed effigy of a yeti appears. A missionary whose garden had been torn to pieces told me when I came to investigate, “These creatures are God's children, the same as us.”
The whistling comes from the other side of the tent. The one wall that's fully erect shudders and buffets against its pole.
I try to listen. Beger wheezes, his breathing further obstructed by blankets. Bruno: his first name is Bruno.
During our initial interview Gulam told me of a face-to-face encounter near his uncle's corral. The thing's face and palms were black. Its nostrils frightening in ways he couldn't make clear. He'd been petrified by the yellow of its eyes. It had hissed and then scrambled away, toting a yak calf under its arm.
A shriek, a bellow, sounds above the tent. I switch on the torch and jerk its beam to the opening. The face in the darkness bares its teeth. The faces behind it jostle forward.
Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay
Two and a half weeks after I was born, on July 9th, 1958, the plates that make up the Fairweather Range in the Alaskan panhandle apparently slipped twenty-one feet on either side of the Fair-weather fault, the northern end of a major league instability that runs the length of North America. The thinking now is that the southwest side and bottom of the inlets at the head of Lituya Bay jolted upward and to the northwest, and the northeast shore and head of the bay jolted downward and to the southeast. One way or the other, the result registered 8.3 on the Richter scale.
The bay is T-shaped and seven miles long and two wide at the stem, and according to those who were there it went from a glassy smoothness to a full churn, a giant's Jacuzzi. Next to it, mountains twelve to fifteen thousand feet high twisted into themselves and lurched in contrary directions. In Juneau, 122 miles to the southeast, people who'd turned in early were pitched from their beds. The shock waves wiped out bottom-dwelling marine life throughout the panhandle. In Seattle, a thousand miles away, the University of Washington's seismograph needle was jarred completely off its graph. And meanwhile, back at the head of the bay, a spur of mountain and glacier the size of a half-mile-wide city park — forty million cubic yards in volume — broke off and dropped three thousand feet down the northeast cliff into the water.
This is all by way of saying that it was one of the greatest spasms, when it came to the release of destructive energy, in history. It happened around 10:16 p.m. At that latitude and time of year, still light out. There were three small boats anchored in the south end of the bay.
The rumbling from the earthquake generated vibrations that the occupants of the boats could feel on their skin like electric shock. The impact of the rockfall that followed made a sound like Canada exploding. There were two women, three men, and a seven-year-old boy in the three boats. They looked up to see a wave breaking over the seventeen-hundred-foot-high southwest bank of Gilbert Inlet and heading for the opposite slope. What they were looking at was the largest wave ever recorded by human beings. It scythed off three-hundred-year-old pines and cedars and spruce, some of them with trunks three or four feet thick, along a trimline of 1,720 feet. That's a wave crest 500 feet higher than the Empire State Building.
Fill your bathtub. Hold a football at shoulder height and drop it into the water. Imagine the height of the tub above the waterline to be two thousand feet. Scale the height of the initial splash up proportionately.
When I was two years old, my mother decided she'd had enough of my father and hunted down an old high school girlfriend who'd wandered so far west she'd taken a job teaching in a grammar school in Hawaii. The school was in a little town called Pepeekeo. All of this was told to me later by my mother's older sister. My mother and I moved in with the friend, who lived in a little beach cottage on the north shore of the island near an old mill, Pepeekeo Mill. We were about twelve miles north of Hilo. This was in 1960.
The friend's name was Chuck. Her real name was Charlotte something, but everyone apparently called her Chuck. My aunt had a photo she showed me of me playing in the sand with some breakers in the background. I'm wearing something that looks like overalls put on backward. Chuck's drinking beer from a can.
And one morning Chuck woke my mother and me up and asked if we wanted to see a tidal wave. I don't remember any of this. I was in pajamas and my mother put a robe on me and we trotted down the beach and looked around the point to the north. I told my mother I was scared and she said we'd go back to the house if the water got too high. We saw the ocean suck itself out to sea smoothly and quietly, and the muck of the sand and some flipping and turning white-bellied fish that had been left behind. Then we saw it come back, without any surf or real noise, like the tide coming in in time-lapse photography. It came past the high-tide mark and just up to our toes. Then it receded again. “Some wave,” my mother told me. She lifted me up so I could see the end of it. Some older boys who lived on Mamalahoa Highway sprinted past us, chasing the water. They got way out, the mud spraying up behind their heels. And the water came back again, this time even smaller. The boys, as far out as they were, were still only up to their waists. We could hear how happy they sounded. Chuck told us the show was over, and we headed up the beach to the house. My mother wanted me to walk, but I wanted her to carry me. We heard a noise and when we turned we saw the third wave. It was already the size of the lighthouse out at Wailea. They'd gotten me into the cottage and halfway up the stairs to the second floor when the walls blew in. My mother managed to slide me onto a corner of the roof that was spinning half a foot above the water. Chuck went under and didn't come up again. My mother was carried out to sea, still hanging on to me and the roof chunk. She'd broken her hip and bitten through her lower lip. We were picked up later that day by a little boat near Honohina.