Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Read online

  ‘Any book from Daniel Taylor is an occasion for celebration. No one knows or has thought more about the complex fusion of culture, landscape and spirit that is the very essence of the Himalaya. The story of the Yeti distills all of this magic into a single beam of illumination. And into this light walks Daniel, always the scientist, who reveals the truth, but in a way that only fires further the imaginations of all of us.’

  —Wade Davis, Professor of Anthropology and Ecosystems at Risk, University of British Columbia, Canada

  ‘Three decades have passed since I met Daniel Taylor ... Together we established a nature preserve as an abode for all creatures, mythical as the Yeti or real as bears ... Still people are calling ‘Abominable Snowman’ to the innocent Yeti who resides in the hearts of mountain people, who adds life in their arts and culture, and overall who helped them to raise their livelihood through tourism. I am thrilled Daniel has come up once again with ... the secrets of nature in the highest terrestrial ecosystem of this living planet.’

  —Tirtha B. Shrestha, Life Member, Nepal Academy, Kathmandu, Nepal

  ‘A mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in one hell of a yarn—and with big implications not just for protecting the Himalayas, but for the way we think about the world.’

  —Bill McKibben, environmentalist, author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, and founder of 350.org

  ‘In one fell stroke of clarity, Daniel Taylor has re-written the history books and rid us of a decades old fantasy—that of an as-yet-undiscovered ‘higher’ being—higher at least in terms of altitude, if not the smarts to elude us for over a half century! The Yeti of the Himalaya (remember the cover of Tintin in Tibet?), Bigfoot or Sasquach of North America and the Mande Burung of Meghalaya—all have been put to rest in one go! Yeti slayer or eco-chronicler cum geographer extraordinaire—call him what you will, Daniel Taylor is a true Himalayan soul who has traversed the mountains from Arunachal to Uttarakhand—from a childhood in Landour to his more recent years spent in education and conservation, spanning a sixty-year swathe of time. He can speak to the people of the Himalaya and of the animals, with equal poise. He speaks as much to the city-dweller as to ‘all who also make the wild part of their lives’. Indeed, over the years Daniel has made the high altitude wildernesses a part of his life! He takes us along on a journey from the wilds of India that he grew up in to the equally challenging wilds of the new age, in a particularly well-written series of lucid essays that are Thoreau-like at one level and Gerard Manley Hopkins-esque in their poetic thoughtfulness, at another. Unstoppable and unputdownable—you run the real risk of throwing it all away and heading to the mountains up north when you’re done with the stories of Daniel’s Himalayan lifetime as told in this book! Go for it ...’

  —Rupin Dang, filmmaker, Wilderness Films India

  YETI

  One of the author’s yak caravans, crossing Shao La Pass, the place where the Yeti was sighted in 1921 by the Everest Reconnaissance Expedition

  Source: Author

  YETI

  The Ecology of a Mystery

  Daniel C. Taylor

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  © Daniel C. Taylor 2017

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  First Edition published in 2017

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  ePub ISBN-13: 978-0-19-909136-2

  ePub ISBN-10: 0-19-909136-6

  Typeset in Goudy Oldstyle Std 11/14.3

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  Printed in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd

  Go and look behind the Ranges –

  Something lost behind the Ranges.

  Lost and waiting for you. Go!

  So I went, worn out of patience;

  never told my nearest neighbours –

  Stole away with pack and ponies –

  left ‘em drinking in the town;

  And the faith that moveth mountains

  didn’t seem to help my labours

  As I faced the sheer main-ranges,

  whipping up and leading down.

  Till a voice, as bad as Conscience,

  rang interminable changes

  In one everlasting Whisper

  day and night repeated – so:

  ‘Something hidden. Go and find it. …’

  Rudyard Kipling

  To the people of Shyakshila Village, Nepal, who protect the Barun Valley … and the Yeti

  And to you who nurture the wild in your lives

  Contents

  Mysteries and Challenges: An Introduction

  1. Arriving at the Yeti’s Jungle

  2. In the Yeti’s Jungle

  3. The Bear Mystery

  4. My First Yetis

  5. Yeti Expeditions

  6. Footprints Melting into Rivers

  7. Towards the Barun Jungles

  8. Our Evidence Meets Science

  9. Evidence Slipping Away

  10. From Whence Knowledge

  11. The King and His Zoo

  12. Back in the Barun

  13. Bears and Bioresilience

  14. Entrapping the Yeti

  15. Discovery

  Afterword

  Notes

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Mysteries and Challenges

  An Introduction

  This story traces an arc from my boyhood in the Himalaya, chasing monkeys from my toys, through launching two national parks surrounding Mount Everest. What connects monkeys chased from toys and national parks around Mount Everest is the Yeti.

  About this mystery of the Yeti, Himalayan legends assert that an animal much like humans inhabits the snows around Mount Everest. Turning the legends to serious inquiry are footprints. Stories do not make footprints—thus, if footprints exist, the maker of those footprints must also exist. And footprints that keep being found in the same basic structure across more than 100 years mean the evidence is not that of one aberrant animal’s trail, for if the prints were made by a freak, after some years that individual would die and the distinctive tracks would stop being found. Moreover, the same basic footprint found in multiple sizes suggest a population that is reproducing.

  This book clarifies what animal leaves these footprints. Various explanations were being advanced when I began the search. The prints might be made by an unknown wild man who for more than a century had eluded identification. They might be by an unknown animal but non-hominoid, related perhaps to the giant panda or gorilla with whom the footprints shared intriguing resemblance. A third explanation was the maker was
known, but not yet recognized as able to make human-looking prints. And, of course, a fourth possibility—Yeti is a materialized spirit: not an animal, but a supernatural being, Science asserts, cannot, must not, exist.

  Giving credence to the debate are always the footprints. That footprints were being found was never in doubt. Some ‘thing’ was making footprints. Still today, the mysterious prints continue to be found. Photographs are repeatedly taken. Thus, the Yeti is real, for imagined animals do not make footprints. Footprints are made only by real animals. So, as with Mount Everest, the Yeti is ‘there’, and as with those who sought to climb Mount Everest, I began a search to explain the footprints.

  My search included discovering prints. It included tranquilizing a specimen of the footprint-maker and replicating in plaster of Paris the earlier unexplained footprints, especially the famous Shipton print from 1951. Solving that took from 1956 to 1983. I searched a 1,500-mile span of the Himalaya, the south slopes (India, Nepal, Bhutan) and the north slopes in China’s Tibet. In dozens of wonderful expeditions, I visited almost every valley system across fifty years through that swath of mountains; I learned a range of local languages.

  But, to my surprise, solving the footprint mystery did not answer the ‘Yeti question’. While my discovery went worldwide in the news media in the 1980s, I realized the Yeti is a symbol of an idea as well as a real animal. My quest evolved. It investigated a concept greater than a Himalayan mystery: the question of humanity’s relationship with the wild. By ‘wild’ I mean life uncontrolled by humans, that which makes Nature alive. For, aside from being a footprint-making animal, the Yeti is also an icon of wild humans.

  I grew up in the 1950s along the edge of India’s jungles. That was a wild from where animals attacked, an exciting world, and under my grandfather and father’s tutelage I learned to navigate in it. That wild, though, like the jungles, is almost gone, and the search I ended up finding is of a new wild still with us. Life’s threats now are human-made. You and me are what is dangerous for we reshaped the earlier wild to create a new—microbes our medicines do not cure, economies that are unpredictable, societies where people offer their bodies to carry bombs, a changing climate that changes everything.

  Having left a Nature that once nurtured us but we could not control, we now enter a new reality which we also cannot control—one that gives true existential threat. Once we feared a natural wild, now what we should be fearing is a human-made wild. As the wilds change, the footprints of human existence show a consistent trail of our lives through the greater life that we never could control. This journey is the core dimension of being alive. In this glass-screen world we have now made, whose images may be real or ‘special effects’, beyond that glass screen, living in greater existence, rises a growing wild we did not intend and we most certainly have made.

  For after explaining the footprints, and discovering vestiges of the old wild where the animal lives, my journey undertaken with many colleagues created national parks. We approached this not in the then customary mode of protecting species (in this case the Yeti and its jungle neighbours) but by finding a new approach with which national parks are managed. For if the nature of Nature has changed because of people, to live with this new, a new method is needed to ground human actions.

  In Nepal and China’s Tibet, lands between Earth’s greatest human populations of India and China, was implemented a new way of living with Nature. Makalu–Barun National Park in Nepal, where the Yeti’s secret was unmasked, pioneered this approach. That informed a year later Nepal’s Annapurna Conservation Area; these two projects began a new preservation strategy for all of Nepal, led by Nepali scientists and officials, going beyond the approach where the army ran the parks. In the Tibet Autonomous Region of China adjacent to the Yeti’s jungles, this approach trusted people even more. Qomolangma (Mt Everest) National Nature Preserve (QNNP) was established, then the largest protected area in Asia. The momentum went on with eighteen other parks across Tibet, some of which now are among the largest in the world. Together they can be said to protect ‘the highest place on Earth for the highest need for the Earth’.

  A human-centred approach to conservation was then near heretical (even though articulated a few years before in speeches at the Third World Conference on Protected Areas in Bali). Major conservation organizations and distinguished scientists had talked about the idea but had not yet implemented it. The need for a new participatory relationship with the wild is not just for park creation but global. With a people-centred approach, protection can engage conservation at larger, true planetary scale, and at the same time lower cost. As evidence has grown across a quarter century since then, the human-centred approach has become the accepted way.

  By 1985, we had plaster casts to match the unexplained footprints. By 1992, the trail had established the national parks and protected the heart of the Himalaya. That personal story I described in an earlier book, Something Hidden behind the Ranges (San Francisco CA: Mercury House, 1995). I have written the story of national park creation, especially its extension across the Tibet Autonomous Region, in two other books: Chapter 20 of Just and Lasting Change: When Communities Own Their Futures, 2nd Edition (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). Also, Chapter 8 of Empowerment on an Unstable Planet: From Seeds of Human Energy to a Scale of Global Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  Still, though, the Yeti kept drawing me on, not as animal but as icon and idol. Icon and idol are powerful because of the ‘I’—the I am who I am, the call of larger existence. This trail of Yeti was exploring issues out of the three-million-year cavalcade of humans who everyday separate from the old wild. So, in 2010 I went again on a continuing Yeti search; it was fifty-five years after my first. I walked in now-familiar forever-protected valleys we had mapped during the park creation decades. In these personal quests in now protected valleys, I found wild animals to be more numerous and wilderness more vibrant than when we ‘discovered’ the valleys.

  Is the Yeti a masquerade—yes, of some ‘thing’ needing explanation. Is the Yeti a mascot—yes, of a symbol of our evolutionary missing link. So, is the Yeti still a mystery—again yes, of awe. For in these pilgrimages I was touching where the planet rises uniquely into the heavens, walking within the greatest wildness on earth. Discovering understanding there happened because I ‘went and looked behind the ranges, went worn out of patience, stole away with pack and ponies … and the faith that moveth mountains.’

  And today that call to understand can keep coming if we individually keep searching. Nature is beyond our control; life processes embrace forces bigger than DNA. Profound double helixes coil this invitation, interlocked spirals of myth coupled with science, leading to a definition of meaning that describes not protoplasm but the ground of all being: God, Brahma, Qi, Allah, Gaia, The Way, whatever. These forces give answer to those origins from where you and I have come, clarity to the lost and waiting … something hidden, towards where we all must go.

  When in nice coffee shops or city apartments temptation comes to believe what has been crafted for our living is a better place than Nature, this human grown world of cities and inside them our homes. But the truth is that manufactured environment still lives in Nature. Forces live still outside our shut doors, potencies so vibrant that a billion years ago they turned stark atoms into sentient life. Those forces are not gone that created the very nature of Life itself. They started the wild from some great energy that we can yet drink from. I might believe I am alive inside those doors, but do I truly live when I expect my days to be walked without getting feet muddy, or when I control microclimates up (or down) no matter how overheated the planet. No, the wild has never left; it is coming, indeed even through closed doors.

  So, on those two expeditions when I went back into the Yeti’s homeland on pilgrimage, I opened the door and stepped out, going into valleys protected. In going back into the old wild, searching the jungles and glaciers again, I walked beside the highest of mountain
s and deepest of valleys, searching for the wild man still living. I discovered something I had lost when as a child I played amid the wild. This book tells of that journey.

  Conversations recorded here as conversations are drawn from memory. When those discussions occurred across the years of my quest, their lessons imprinted. In many instances, literal wording is retained in the quotes, for I keep a private diary in such times. In other instances, the words embody reflections from my field notes that encapsulate an event at that time but amplify meaning across time for how a story of a mystery I saw in the newspaper at age eleven led to larger learning about the challenges of life.

  As the reader enters this story, I make two introductions. First, let me introduce the animal ‘Yeti’, but now spoken of as a named animal. Yeti in this book is a persona with triple identity: animal, mystery, and icon. Hence, it is written with a capitalized first ­letter. Additionally, I introduce the land, the Himalaya, where Yeti leaves its footprints, a place, the abode of snow (Sanskrit: hima = frost and laya = dwelling). When the British came, they fixated on the mountains, turning the name to Himalayas, summits for further conquests. But to the people who had long lived in the heat at their base this was a place, a renewing dwelling where pilgrims went, where animated spirits lived, and life cures could be found (such as those by the Yeti-like Hanuman). This book, in such understanding, speaks of the Himalaya, the place: not the Himalayas, the mountains.

  Into this mystery and magic the reader is invited. In this quest is some ‘thing’ (the Yeti) that is more than the ‘I’ (you, the reader, as well as me, the seeker). That animation and animal calls: ‘In one everlasting Whisper, day and night repeated: Something hidden. Go and find it.’

  one

  Arriving at the Yeti’s Jungle

  1.1 The Shockpa (Yeti) Summit at the Entry to the Barun Valley

  Source: Author