Airplanes. The sky had suddenly filled with planes, skimming low toward them across the ice.
“What the devil?” said Bagwackerly. “Those aren’t ours.”
“If anyone’s trying to get in ahead of us and bag themselves a yeti, there’s going to be trouble,” snarled the MacDermot-Duff. “Those hairy brutes are ours, every one of them.”
All the hunters were stopped now, looking up through their snow goggles at the sky.
“Schweinehunde!” yelled Herr Blutenstein, shaking his fists. “You schall not schteel my yeti schkinn!”
“Pariah dogs,” screamed the Sheik. “Poachers! I’ll have you whipped!”
“Quickly, reload, everybody,” shouted Bagwackerly, gesturing to make himself heard above the roaring of the planes. “Move in for the kill. We’ll get in first. We’ll show ’em!”
And in all the snowmobiles, the hunters, terrified of being done out of their spoils, reloaded their guns and started their machines.
“Ready!” screeched Bagwackerly, and the hunters gunned their engines and set off at full throttle to finish the job.
But up above them, others were ready, too. The aircraft, after circling once, now lined themselves up and flew in low over the snowmobiles. The fuselage doors opened and five long black muzzles emerged.
The hunters did not have time to scream “Cannons!” or even to notice that it was not the yetis that were being attacked but they themselves before it happened.
“Uuugwaa! Blubble-hoo!” gurgled Bagwackerly. “I’m drowning. I’m choking! Uroo!”
“It’s poison, it’s … aauuua gug … I can’t see. I can’t move! Yak glumph,” spluttered the MacDermot-Duff.
“Hilfe! Hulp! I schtuck am,” yelled Herr Blutenstein. “I am schtuck.” He was indeed stuck. His behind was stuck to his seat, his gloved hands were stuck to his gun, his gun was stuck to his snowmobile, and his nostrils and eyelids were stuck together.
The other hunters were stuck as well. However, the MacDermot-Duff came unstuck again fairly quickly. His hands had stuck to the throttle of his machine, and it careered off at full speed straight into a big frozen ice block. With a cracking sound, the MacDermot-Duff was wrenched free and flew like a guided missile before landing with a strange tinkling sound and spinning over the ice for about a hundred yards.
Bagwackerly had been leaning out of the snowmobile to get a clear shot at the yetis, and so much of him was stuck to various parts of the vehicle that even a head-on collision couldn’t budge him. The shock of the crash was pretty devastating, however, because it dislodged his nose from the barrel of his gun. Well, most of his nose (it was a long one). The rest of it remained attached to his rifle.
All the other snowmobiles came quickly to a halt as their engines spluttered and died. They had been black and fierce-looking machines, but now they were white and glittery like Christmas decorations. Inside them, the men mumbled and struggled for a while, and then stopped moving entirely. In one of them, the Sheik of Dabubad was standing like a statue. He was childish and badly brought up, and at the moment of the attack he had been sticking his tongue out at the approaching planes. Now he couldn’t get it back in, because it was connected to his right foot by a long column of glittering ice.
The men and women of the British Antarctic Survey had been instructed not to kill, and they hadn’t killed. But it seemed a pity to waste the latest tear gas or rubber bullets on men as vile and foolish as the hunters. So they had decided on something much cheaper, simpler, and, in the Antarctic, effective. Water. They were intelligent young people, who knew that the speed of the snowmobiles would make the frozen air even colder, and that water would freeze in seconds. So they had simply pumped a few hundred gallons of water from high-pressure hoses and encased everything in ice.
The young research assistant who jumped from the cockpit of the Twin Otter as it skidded to a halt on the pack ice found the yetis as still as statues, waiting for death. He walked across the rough ice toward them, his pack of emergency supplies on his back, and then, as he saw the blood staining the ice, he started to run.
“It’s all right,” he shouted. “The hunters are being rounded up and we have come to take you away.”
When he saw Uncle Otto’s wound, he was white with fury. “Inhuman abominable monsters,” he muttered, and he certainly didn’t mean the yetis. He bent down and began to unpack the disinfectant and bandages from the pack he carried.
“I … expect … it was an accident,” said Uncle Otto, good and noble yeti that he was.
But Ambrose, who had been so loving and trusting all his life, stared at the young man with his walleyes and said: “It wasn’t an accident. They did it on purpose. People are bad.”
Chapter 16
Ambrose Gives Up
HE HOSPITAL THEY BROUGHT THE YETIS TO was a very famous one in a quiet London square. The nurses were kind and skillful, the doctors clever and comforting, and the matron wasn’t the starched and stuffy kind but a sympathetic person who let Con and Ellen stay with the yetis all day long, because she knew that people can’t get well if they are separated from those they love.
The yetis had become very famous after the children’s protest outside the palace and the rescue by the seaplanes of the British Antarctic Territory Research Station, and the nurses were kept busy shooing journalists and cameramen out of the wards. Perry had gone down to Somerset to look for his pig farm, but Con and Ellen had to have a police escort when they went to and from the hospital because of the journalists dogging them. And every night on television there was a bulletin about the yetis, and when it was on, the streets emptied, as bicycles and footballs were abandoned and children all over the country went inside to watch the news.
At first the news was grave. Lucy was very ill with pneumonia, and Uncle Otto’s wound was so deep that he had to have a long and difficult operation to remove the bullet. Both his and Lucy’s beds had the curtains drawn round them while doctors and nurses hurried backward and forward with syringes and trays of medicine and thermometers.
But slowly they both got better. They could tell that Lucy had turned the corner when she asked the nurses for a mirror and started worrying about the state of her stomach. “It’s my braids,” she murmured groggily. “They’re all undone.”
So the nurses, neat as only nurses can be, made her two lovely braids all ready for Queen Victoria if they found her again. After that Lucy managed to say sorry to a bowl of soup that the ward maid brought her. The next morning she said sorry to a dozen eggs, some grilled tomatoes, and the bunch of marigolds in a vase beside her bed. After that she was reckoned to be out of danger.
Uncle Otto’s wound, too, healed well. Soon he was walking on crutches, looking somehow very manly and distinguished, as people on crutches are apt to do, and it was now that something very nice happened to him. The clever doctors had found something to rub into his bald patch that wasn’t toothpaste or honey or cream cheese but a real medicine that someone had just invented to make hair grow. And almost day by day, as he lay in bed reading the books the kind library lady had brought him on a trolley, they could see the soft, dark down that covered his domed head grow steadily longer and stronger.
Grandma, of course, loved staying in the hospital. Being old, she had quite a lot of interesting things wrong with her like heartburn and fibroids and wind, which everybody in the hospital took seriously instead of just saying, “We must expect a few troubles as we get older,” like Lady Agatha had done.