Then she tickled the other yeti and it twitched in its sleep and woke too, and its eyes were a rich and serious brown.
But the yeti father had begun to look anxious. Something wasn’t right. He began to stir the babies round, prodding and digging and turning them over like underdone sausages. And then he pounced, and with a proud grunt, held something out to Agatha.
It was another baby yeti — but so small and squashed and funny-looking that it might just as well have been an old glove or a tea cosy or a run-over cat. And when it opened its eyes and looked at her, Agatha got a shock. One of its eyes was a bright and piercing blue, the other was a deep and serious brown.
“A wall-eyed yeti,” said Agatha in amazement.
Later she called him Ambrose.
2
The Trouble with Yetis
As soon as she saw the orphaned yetis, Agatha gave up all idea of escaping from the secret valley. No, she would stay and bring the babies up to be God-fearing creatures and give them a mother’s love. For she realized at once that the big yeti who had kidnapped her must be a widower who had lost his wife in some tragic accident and that he wanted her to care for his children.
And care for them she did. The very fat, blue-eyed baby was a girl and Agatha called her Lucy, after the kennel maid who had been her best friend at Farley Towers. The brown-eyed yeti, who was a boy, she called Clarence. And of course there was Ambrose, with his mad eyes and his squashed face — Ambrose who was always being sat on by the others, or falling into mouse-hare holes, or getting lost.
The first thing Agatha did, naturally, was to teach all the yetis to talk. Father learnt to speak quite quickly even though he was over three hundred years old by the time Agatha came to the valley and it is not so easy to learn things as you get older. And of course the children learnt as easily as they breathed.
After that, Agatha taught them all the things that her governess had taught her, like the importance of good manners: not burping after meals, not scratching under the armpits however much one itched, and never closing one’s ear lids when people were speaking to one. She taught them how to clean between their teeth with a sharpened stick, and how to wash their eight-toed, backward-pointing feet in the stream after they’d been running because smelly feet are not polite. She taught them sums and their alphabet and how to sing hymns. Best of all, she used to tell them stories. Soon after she arrived in the valley, Father had realized that a well-bred English girl needed somewhere to call home, and he had gathered stones and built her a little house, no more than a hut really, roofing it with branches and grass. In the evenings, Agatha would sit outside with the yetis around her. “Once upon a time…” she would begin.
The yetis were mad about stories. Puss in Boots, Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Bears — all day they followed her about, begging for more. As for Ambrose, long before dawn Agatha could hear him sitting and breathing outside the entrance to her hut (by the time he was two years old he was much too big to get through it), waiting and waiting to hear about Ali Baba, or poor Cinderella, or Dick Whittington’s cat.
At first Lady Agatha was surprised by how easily the yetis took to a civilized English upbringing, but she soon realized that they were truly kind and considerate by nature, not only to each other, but to every living thing. In the mornings, when she combed them, they would cup their huge hands to catch the little spiders and beetles that had crept into their hair during the night, and release them carefully on to the ground. They always looked where they were putting their huge feet, avoiding worm casts and spiders’ nests and molehills, in case someone was at home. So they were particularly pleased when Agatha taught them to say sorry, for you should Always Apologize for Any Inconvenience You Have Caused.
But when they began to apologize to everything they ate (and yetis eat a lot), saying “Sorry, mango,” “Sorry, flower,” “Sorry, yak-milk pancake,” Lady Agatha thought that this was going too far — Moderation In All Things — and taught them to say grace. “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.” It was not a great improvement. They did say grace politely when they sat down to a meal together. But yetis graze quite a lot, on grass or fruit or young tree shoots, and they went on apologizing as they wandered about, so that there was an almost constant murmuring in the hidden valley, rather like a swarm of contented bees. Agatha tried to persuade them that saying sorry to every nut and berry was not the English Way, but although she was a remarkably good governess, in this she failed. The yetis continued to apologize to every blade of grass.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that they were perfect. Perfect yetis, like perfect people, would have been dull. Lucy’s little problem was food. She really loved eating. All day one could hear Lucy wandering up and down the valley saying, “Sorry,” before she cropped a mouthful of grass or, “Sorry, tree,” before she chewed up a branch. The result of this, of course, was that she became very fat, and the hair on her stomach looked as though it was growing on an enormous kettledrum. And because her stomach was always full, Lucy slept badly. Or rather she slept all right but she walked in her sleep. When you heard a terrible crash or a fearful rumbling noise in the mountains of Nanvi Dar, it wasn’t necessarily a rock fall or an avalanche. It was just as likely to be Lucy falling over a tree stump as she blundered with unseeing eyes out of her bed.
Clarence had a problem too. With him it was his brain. When he was small, Clarence had been naughty and left the valley without telling Lady Agatha and gone climbing on his own, and a gigantic boulder had come loose and hit him on the head. After that Clarence’s brain did not work too well, so that while he was as strong as the others and could pick a fir-tree as easily as a daisy, he was really not very bright and could only say one word at a time and that was usually wrong.
As for Ambrose, he started life as a little mewling thing, all eyes and feet and not much in between, and Agatha had some very worrying moments, sitting up with him when he was teething or running a temperature. Once, when he had had a runny nose for a full month, she said, half-joking, “Ambrose, you really are an abominable snowman.” The name stuck and he was Ambrose the Abominable from then on. Because of all the trouble he had caused her as a baby, and the times when she seriously thought he might not survive, he had a special place in Agatha’s heart. This sometimes happens to mothers, however hard they try to love all their children absolutely equally. But at last the worst was over, and Ambrose grew fast, and he grew strong. When he was nineteen, before he lost his milk teeth, he pushed over the biggest pine tree in the valley looking for woodlice to play with, and he would cheerfully lift boulders the size of telephone boxes to help Lucy make a Wendy house. If anyone had happened to catch sight of Ambrose, with his wall-eye and enormous strength, their knees would have started to tremble and sweat would have broken out on their brow. He really did look like people imagined yetis to be — abominable. In actual fact, however, he was the soppiest yeti ever, forever making daisy chains for Lady Agatha, or lying beside her asking if there were fairies in the stars, or begging for another story. He always gave things away — food to Lucy, or pretty stones to Clarence, and sometimes Lady Agatha thought it might be a good thing if he really was a tiny little bit abominable. She would never have called him wet, exactly, or soft (he never complained when he hurt himself), but was he just a little bit too kind for his own good?