Yeti- The Ecology of a Mystery Read online

  February 1983. I stand at the entrance of the Barun Valley. ‘No jungle in Nepal is as wild as the Barun.’ His Majesty, the king of Nepal, had told me two years earlier. His advice was no surprise, for it was here, ten years before, that Ted Cronin and Jeff McNeely had made their Yeti discovery on the ridge above. Since their discovery, no other Yeti hunters have explored these jungles. Permissions were not denied to them, but none others asked. Searches had concentrated in the high snows where Eric Shipton had taken his iconic photograph of the abominable snowman footprint in 1951.

  His Majesty had told me, ‘The Yeti may be called a snowman, but whatever makes the snow footprints, that animal must live where it can hide. And of all my jungles the Barun is the wildest. If I were Yeti hunting, that is where I would go.’ The king was smoking his pipe as we sat in his study at the end of a palace workday, our feet resting on the pelt of a snow leopard. We had become friends in graduate school. The king went on, ‘And, if for some reason the Yeti needs snow, few glaciers are as isolated as those that feed the Barun River. Snow there constantly blows off Everest, Lhotse, and Makalu creating huge glaciers.’

  As I look down at the Barun River, marks on the gorge below show little fluctuation in the water levels. This is a surprise. Usually, river volumes in the Himalaya surge a hundred-fold with the monsoon. But the marks below do not show a great change of height. So, about to enter the valley, I am already finding mysteries.

  ‘Full of bears and bamboo,’ Ted had described the Barun when I’d asked on the phone. I was pressing for information. He went on, ‘Unbelievably hard to make progress. No trails in that jungle. We hacked our way for days, and got only miles.’

  In my talk with Ted, I had found it hard to believe that no trails existed, for trails are everywhere in the Himalaya. But as I look into the valley, I do not see where a trail might run. Cliffs block the way. To get around them the route might climb to the ridge and enter mid-valley. My altimeter says 3,100 feet here, and my map shows near ridge tops at 10,000 feet rising to 26,000 feet where they connect to Makalu, Lhotse, and then Everest.

  Makalu, the closest of these summits and the world’s fifth highest, is only 15 miles away. But all before me is an extremely dense jungle. A weather phenomenon occurs in the Barun and in the valley just to its north that happens nowhere else. This is the only place where the earth rises into the jet stream that races around the planet. As it whips off Everest, Lhotse, and Makalu, it creates a low-pressure zone. That pulls the warm air from India up the Arun Valley, one of the deepest valleys in the world. The air turns where I stand and goes up the Barun. When it hits the chill from Everest, Lhotse, and Makalu, it snows, snowing more than anywhere else in the Himalaya. The snow is not coming from the moisture in the sky but from the air sucked up from below.

  Walking back to camp, I pay off our porters. It took our team five days to get here, but at the pace the porters depart, running down the trail, their families will greet them tomorrow. Around me now is my expedition, not intrepid ‘Everesters’, not renowned scientists, but my family: my wife Jennifer, her twenty-one-year-old brother Nick, and my two-year-old son Jesse. Two others, Bob and Linda Fleming, will join in ten days. Bob is the leading natural historian of the Himalaya. Together, he and I have been planning this expedition for three years. I’ve been on the Yeti’s trail for twenty-seven years.

  And there is another, now-evident puzzle about the valley. Here, at the confluence of the Barun and Arun rivers, up and down the Arun Valley, we see villages with their terraces high on these slopes, slopes that cannot squeeze in another field, and homes obviously distant from water. With so many people packed on to what appears to be very difficult Arun slopes, why is there not one field in the lush Barun? Indeed, no trail? The whole Arun Valley is domesticated. The lush Barun has no homes. What keeps even local people out?

  The next morning, from our tent I hear Pasang kindling the cook fire. Stepping into the morning, on a rock 50 yards away I see a man dressed in green, a muzzle-loading rifle beside him. His eyes, careful and curious, are uncovering the unknowns of our camp. Holding out a mug to him, I motion him to come down. Pasang blows on the coals of the cook fire. With no motion in the bushes, a minute later the stranger strides into the camp. Where’s the muzzle-loader?

  My eyes can’t leave his feet. Through years in the Himalaya I’ve seen feet thick with calluses, toes splayed like a bird’s claws, and bare feet forming to ground the instant they touch. These feet, though, are different. Toes slipped aside pebbles and reached the solid stone underneath, showing a personality spontaneously seeking a secure footing.

  We squat close to the fire. Nestled in the coals, Pasang’s teapot gurgles, and in the pot tea leaves swirl. The newcomer watches as Pasang pours milk powder into a mug and then ostentatiously adds a double serving of sugar. We are three: a man who owns a muzzle-loader, therefore a poacher; a former Tibetan nomad now working as a cook; and a white hunter seeking some animal. The poacher’s toes, though squatting, keep moving—is he poised for action or just nervous?

  My brother-in-law Nick exits the tent. Pasang stirs up sweet milky tea for Nick, himself, and for me.

  ‘Where is your village?’ I ask the hunter.

  ‘Shyakshila.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘There, on the ridge.’

  We are silent as the pot gurgles.

  ‘What is your name, my jungle friend?’

  ‘Lendoop.’

  ‘What are you doing so early in the morning?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve just been walking.’

  ‘Why do you carry a gun, Lendoop?

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘What was that you had then a few minutes ago on that rock?’

  ‘Why have you people come here?’

  ‘We are looking for animals in the Barun Valley.’

  ‘You won’t find them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you cannot go into the Barun.’

  ‘But we have permits to go.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter, you still won’t go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There is no trail. White folks cannot walk without a trail.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there is no trail.’

  ‘Can we make a trail? It is only a jungle.’

  ‘You won’t know where to put the trail.’

  ‘Can we find people who will know, who can help us make it?’

  ‘How much will you pay?’

  ‘Twenty rupees per day.’

  ‘You won’t find anybody.’

  ‘How much is required?’

  ‘Thirty-five rupees per day.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll pay twenty-five.’

  Lendoop looks into his mug. It is empty. Pasang fills it. Lendoop smiles with the second helping of sugar. Pasang adds a third.

  Casually, I resume my questioning. ‘What animals are there in the jungle?’

  ‘All types.’

  ‘Like what types?’

  ‘Serow.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Ghoral.’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘Red panda, leopard, wild boar, barking deer, musk deer, bear, snow leopard, thar, three types of monkeys.’

  ‘Blue sheep?’

  ‘No, those animals are found in Thumdum, two valleys to the east.’

  ‘Any jackals?’

  ‘Sometimes, not always.’

  ‘What animals do you hunt?’

  ‘I don’t hunt.’

  ‘Are there any small cats in the jungle?’

  ‘Yes, two types of jungle cats.’

  ‘Any fish in the river?’

  ‘In the Arun, yes. In the Barun, no. The Barun is too fast. It is a dangerous river.’

  ‘Are there wild men in the jungle, bun manchi?’

  ‘No.’

  Lendoop looks at the bottom of his cup. Pasang refills it, and adds the two spoonfuls of sugar.

  ‘Any villages in the Barun Valley?’


  ‘How can there be villages? I told you there are no trails,’ he says scornfully.

  ‘Do you ever go into the jungle?’

  ‘No, there is no need.’

  ‘How do you get your meat to eat?’

  ‘We kill a sheep or goat.’

  ‘Isn’t it cheaper to shoot a wild animal with your gun?’

  But Lendoop knows what I want, and so finally, he breaks off a twig and a man whom the outside world would call illiterate, draws arching lines in the dirt. Pointing to the longest, he says, ‘This is the Barun. Big mountains are here, high above the valley, all ice and snow. Makalu here, another big mountain, Lhotse, here.’ Slanting lines run through the dirt. Check marks are going down some of them. ‘Another river, the Mangrwa, joins here. At the top of the Mangrwa are no big mountains but a pass into Tibet and China, very easy to cross, where there are no border guards. After where the Mangrwa and Barun join are streams, like this, the Hinju and the Payrenee.’

  The sketch is simple, also different from any US, British, or even secret Indian Army map, all of which I’ve studied. In the dirt is accurate cartography of the Barun, and it looks like it’s done with consistency of scale.

  ‘How long would it take to walk to where the Mangrwa and Barun meet?’

  ‘You cannot. There is not a trail.’

  ‘How long does it take you?’

  ‘One day.’

  ‘How long if you take us?’

  ‘If you are strong and we make a trail, three days.’

  ‘Three days? We can walk to Khandbari in three days.’

  ‘No. It took you four days to get from Khandbari to here, and one day before that to get to Khandbari.’

  He is right. Our movements must have been communicated through the valley, particularly among people walking the Arun given the questions I had been asking.

  ‘Do people ever find the Shockpa or the po gamo in the jungle?’

  ‘No,’ says Lendoop. ‘The Shockpa is not an animal.’ The statement is like ice-cold water on a hot day. Suddenly, Lendoop stands, hands his teacup, and walks out through the bush. Is that terse statement the end?

  All this way, and now we learn that the animal doesn’t exist. For years, I’ve kept saying that the villagers would know once we came to the right place. I’ve been saying that we would have to spend days just listening, that we shouldn’t rush into the jungle, that we should avoid searching ourselves when they’ve searched across generations. Nick heard the question just now. His Nepali is good enough to understand Lendoop’s ‘No’.

  Grandpa always said, ‘Listen to the local people; they know their jungles.’ It was on Grandpa’s dining-room table, twenty-seven years earlier, that I had first met the Yeti staring up at my eleven-year- old’s curiosity. Eight years before that when I was three, he and my father had started taking me into the jungle. We tracked tigers to protect villagers, shot wild boar for meat, but, most importantly, the jungle became a familiar place where we moved in comfort and care.

  ‘It’s all part of the quest ahead,’ Nick says, breaking my reverie. ‘Some animal made Cronin and McNeely’s footprints. The place where they camped that night is just above us on that ridge. The Yeti may or may not exist, but footprints do. Something walked across the ridge above.’

  Maps were made long before the written word came into use. For 10,000 years maps have explained the human experience, a form of expression nearly as old as human painting, millennia older than the use of written words. Making and understanding maps is the first literacy used by humans.

  Cave-wall maps accompany graphics of great hunts showing clearly that ‘we went there and got this’. Millennial-old maps combine the earth with graphics of the stars—‘I am here located by this out there’. To define place, from the time when our species came out of the wild people used this ability to connect with place.

  1.2 Lendoop’s Sketch of the Barun Valley System

  Source: Copied from Author’s Field Notes

  People then guided their travel as individuals today use GPS. Locating resources, they described the world. Early Greek maps from Anaximander in the seventh century before the Common Era show that the farther one ventures from the civilized world (Greece), the wilder the people encountered. At the fringes of Anaximander’s map people are animal-like. Homer’s two epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, confirm this view.

  Maps centre logically on where people consider home to be. When the British claimed their empire, presuming their definition of the world, they prescribed the centre for all maps through the foyer of their Greenwich observatory as the prime meridian. When Pei Xiu, the great Chinese cartographer in the third century of the Common Era, made his maps, he followed the same practice using grids that expanded across the Chinese empire. The great Arab maps in the ninth century placed the centring meridian, the qibla, as the direction towards a place (Mecca) rather than from a place.

  Maps’ purpose is to shrink the world into comprehension, and even 4,000 years ago they flattened three dimensions into two. Before people could fly, maps gave people a bird’s-eye view. For 2,000 years, they were doing this for Europe, China, India, Africa, and the Middle East. Before mathematicians, mapmakers solved the challenge of proportionality, shrinking the world according to scale (an inch, for example, to indicate a mile). Representing the world in two dimensions allowed it to be rolled up, taken under one’s arm—this mastery of transferable knowledge (essentially a portable library) dates back 2,000 years, long before we had computers.

  Layers of information can be conveyed: directions for travel (here is the pass, the crossing of a river), location of resources (timber or minerals or fields), dangers (an enemy to be avoided, a swamp). When headed into the unknown, and the world a confusion of possibly hostile people, plants, mountains, and rivers, a map organizes the uncertainty.

  Mapmaking skills have grown since these early beginnings. Two-and-a-half millennia ago, Aristotle proved the earth was round, a key insight. A ship could be seen rising over the horizon, first the mast tip, then the whole mast, and finally the ship. Visibly evident is the ship climbing over the curvature of the earth. And from this came the understanding about how to shape the world into two dimensions. Watch a lunar eclipse. The sun is obviously round, and the moon also, then in eclipse can be seen the rounded shadow of the earth crossing the moon. And finally, Aristotle noted, some stars can be seen only from certain parts of the earth—if the earth were flat, the heavens would look the same from everywhere. And so the world’s shape came to be understood; the round earth became flat … yet it was understood to be round.

  Working to make more accurate maps, Eratosthenes, two centuries later, calculated the circumference of the round earth (to half-a-per cent accuracy). He took the lengths of shadows off known heights in different parts of Egypt. If a 100-foot tower at one place gave an 80-foot shadow at one location, and, at exactly the same time, that same height gave an 81-foot shadow at another location, the reason was the earth’s curvature. Eratosthenes went on to postulate the sun’s consequences on a round earth’s habitats. On a round sphere the central band would be warm where it received maximal sun, on either side temperate, while the temperatures were increasingly frigid at the poles—he originated the term geography.

  But maps of the Himalaya have been a problem. Two-hundred years ago the British started mapping the Indian subcontinent. Beginning at the Indian Ocean they built towers, sighting and measuring tower-to-tower, demarcating lands, deserts, jungles, even the tops of mountains they could not climb. Though they could measure the Himalaya, they were denied entry. So the Great Trigonometric Survey sent in spies. In prayer wheels were compasses, and the papers in these prayer wheels were draft maps, not prayers. The prayer-bead strings had a hundred beads (not the usual 108 for each blessed name of the Buddha). With each stride, the spy flicked a bead, and when a round of hundred passed, one of the ten beads hanging off the end was flicked. Valley after valley was mapped. But no spy ever attempted the Barun.


  Before coming I had checked the Barun Valley on every map I could find. Except for the king, I could find no one who had flown over this valley and studied what he saw. So the Barun maps that I studied had been built from guesses. The usual guess for the elevation of the river confluence here with the Arun was 3,700 feet (so now before entering the valley, I know the maps are off by a factor of one in seven). Guessing also that at Makalu’s base, it was determined that the river falls 11,000 feet in 15 miles. A tributary was postulated to join from the north. Lendoop has now told me it is called the Mangrwa.

  But everything was unknown for what must be 200 square kilometres of jungle inside the valley. Does the river bend? Probably, but a river losing 11,000 feet in 15 miles will move very fast. So maybe there are no bends. Standing at its entrance, we do not know what waits inside the valley—except dense jungle and mountain slopes rising to the highest places on earth.

  THOUGH WE STATE THE METHOD DIFFERENTLY, shared respect for village perceptions is what a self-appointed, scientifically marginalized group terms the cryptozoological method, the science of learning that about animals which traditional peoples already know. Richard Greenwell, the secretary of the International Society of Cryptozoology, advised me before we departed, ‘Dig for information hidden in local knowledge. Sometimes this knowledge coincides with our own … sometimes it doesn’t. The fun of cryptozoology is trying to determine if the native peoples are right or wrong in ways science will accept.’

  That evening two hunters came into the camp and accepted our offer of tea. They always hunt together, they said, because they share a muzzle-loader. Eleven years before, they were stalking ghorals along a stream bed, hoping to get close to the animals while the noise of the stream covered their sounds. By the stream’s edge these men saw two baby shockpas splashing water on each other. Their fur was grey, and it lay both ways on their bodies.

  ‘Shockpa’ is the local name we deduce for Yeti. Other informers come, and over their cups of tea, reports of shockpa’s long vibrating screams follow. Other visitors deny po gamo or shockpa. Others claim shockpas are ghosts. Some others bring no jungle tales but come out of curiosity and, of course, for the tea. Nearly all seem afraid of the jungle, entering in as little as possible even though they live on its edge.