“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 McDermott-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 McDermott-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 metres.
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 Sheikh 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 towards 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 unwrap 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 wall eyes and said: “It wasn’t an accident. They did it on purpose. People are bad.”
16
Ambrose Gives Up
The hospital they brought the yetis to was a very famous one in a quiet London square. The nurses were kind and skilful, 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 newspapermen 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 bed had the curtains drawn round them while doctors and nurses hurried backwards and forwards 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 pigtails,” she murmured groggily. “They’re all undone.”
So the nurses, neat as only nurses can be, made her two lovely plaits all ready for Queen Victoria if they found her again. After that Lucy managed to say “Sorry” to a plate of soup which the ward maid brought her. The next morning she said “Sorry” to three boiled 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 which wasn’t toothpaste or honey or cream cheese but a real medicine which 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 which covered his domed head grow steadily longer and stronger.
Grandma, of course, loved being in 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.
A lot of doctors came to see Clarence too, and put electrodes on his brain and tried to make him read things. But when the others explained that Clarence’s brain had been damaged when he was little and that he was very happy as he was and that they all loved him, they very sensibly left him alone.
With everything going so well, with messages coming in that the Hunters had been turned out of Farley Towers and the proper owner was coming back, with Mr Bellamy phoning to say that the children could stay as long as necessary, Con and Ellen should have been as happy as could be. In fact, they were worried sick.
And what they were worried about was Ambrose.
In the hospital, when the yetis first came, they hadn’t taken too much notice of Ambrose. He didn’t have pneumonia like Lucy, or a gaping wound like Uncle Otto. He wasn’t old like Grandma and bits of his brain weren’t missing like Clarence’s. A bit of rest and warmth, thought the staff, and Ambrose, who was young and strong, would soon be himself again.
But Ambrose didn’t get well and strong, and Ambrose wasn’t himself again. When Con pointed out to the nurses that he wasn’t eating — wasn’t eating at all — they told him not to worry. “Young people often go off their food, especially after a shock. Just take no notice.”
So the children tried not to make a fuss as Ambrose sent away trayfuls of egg and chips, of castle puddings and banana custard. They tried not to worry when Ambrose lay there with his blue eye dull and sunken and his brown eye glazed and staring at the ceiling. They tried not to worry when Ambrose wouldn’t even look up at the telly, though they were showing a Tom and Jerry cartoon.