Emerging from the shaft that led down to the appropriately named Hotel Snowland, Byron Cody found the wind literally taking his breath away. Even through his pioneer’s beard it felt like a sandblasting machine against his face, and he was glad that someone had thoughtfully erected a rope handrail between the lodge and the clamshell.
‘What a night,’ he muttered, and fired a flashlight in front of him, picking out the various surrounding supply dumps tied down with ground sheets — shaking in the wind as if the earth was racked by a violent fever — and then picking out the clamshell itself.
A sound like a footfall made him stop on the rope and point the powerful beam of light around the campsite. He peered into the gloomy blizzard to see if the mysterious noise would come again.
‘Is someone there?’ he shouted.
But there was nothing. Taking hold of the rope again, he bent into the wind and carried on walking to the clamshell. It was a distance of less than twenty metres, but by the time he had covered it, wearing a Berghaus fleece and a pair of thick ski pants, Cody felt quite numb with cold.
The first person he spoke to as he came through the airlock door was Jack.
‘I thought I heard something out there,’ he said, rubbing his hands together and shivering.
‘Oh? Want me to come and take a look?’
Cody shrugged. He didn’t relish the idea of going back outside and hunting around for something in the storm.
‘No, I guess it was nothing,’ he said, grinning nervously. ‘Airy nothing. Except perhaps my own imagination. How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear! Or maybe a yeti. Ever since I could read I’ve been afraid of the dark, and believe me I was a precociously early reader. This place is rather spooky in the dark. It’s got me jumpy already.’
‘The wind blows all kinds of shit around up here,’ said Jack. ‘Some of it right through your head.’
‘It’s a hell of a night though,’ shivered Cody. ‘If it’s like this down here, then what the hell’s it like up on the south face of Annapurna?’
Jack grimaced. ‘A hell of a long way from comfortable.’
‘You tried to climb that sonofabitch, didn’t you?’
‘Tried and failed, Byron. And there’s no son that comes into it. It’s just a bitch, all the way. Annapurna means Goddess of Bountiful Harvests. It may have been someone’s idea of a goddess, but it sure isn’t mine.’
Cody sniffed the air like a hungry dog. ‘What’s for dinner?’
Jack grinned and jabbed a thumb back across his shoulder.
‘Microwave’s over there. Help yourself to an MRE.’
While the porters stayed wrapped up in their sleeping bags in the Annapurna Sanctuary Lodge, getting an early night after their exertions, the team and the two Sherpa leaders gathered under the clamshell to have their evening meal, listen to the radio, and talk. Chairs and tables had been borrowed from the lodges, and with the temperature inside the inflatable building a reasonably warm fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit the team sat around eating their MREs and trying to ignore the storm outside on the glacier. Now and then they would hear an especially loud, howitzer-sized gust of wind and someone would emit a quiet whistle and lay a hand on the fabric of the clamshell, wondering how it managed to hold up against the storm.
As if to compensate for the inhospitable weather, everyone went out of their way to be pleasant to one another, although it was clear that the altitude had already left one or two members of the team feeling restless and irritable. Boyd produced a bottle of bourbon, and it was not long before they started to debate the subject of their expedition.
‘I don’t figure he’ll come tonight,’ said Cody. ‘Not in this storm at any rate.’ He took off the rimless glasses that lent him his Karl-Marx-in-the-British-Library look and started to clean them vigorously.
‘Who?’ asked Jutta.
‘The yeti, of course.’
Boyd laughed scornfully and knocked back his drink. He said, ‘I don’t figure he’ll come at all,’ and poured himself another generous shot.
Quickly the team divided itself into three groups of opinion: Swift, Jack, Byron Cody, Dougal MacDougall, Hurké Gurung, and Ang Tsering, who all believed in the existence of the creature; Jutta Henze, Miles Jameson, and Lincoln Warner, who were all agnostics; and Boyd, who dismissed the yeti as a traveller’s tale or, at best, some kind of local phenomenon for which there would prove to be a perfectly rational explanation.
‘I don’t see anything particularly irrational about believing that these mountains might be home to an undiscovered type of great ape,’ said Cody. ‘I must say I find that possibility a great deal more likely than some of the other explanations I’ve heard for the yeti. Freak atmospheric conditions, giant sloths and lemurs, and that kind of thing.’
‘You know, I’m a little surprised at you people,’ said Boyd, absently brushing his short moustache with the edge of a forefinger. ‘I thought you were scientists. But this—’
He moved off his moustache and started to rub his bullet-shaped head with apparent exasperation.
‘I didn’t say anything back in Khat, when you told me that you were hunting something more than just a few old bones. But frankly, I think you’re all on a wild goose chase.’
‘Have you ever been on a wild goose chase?’ asked Lincoln Warner. Underneath the clamshell his deep voice sounded like Darth Vader’s.
‘I can’t say I have,’ admitted Boyd.
‘Back in Wisconsin, we used to see a lot of Canada geese. Me and my daddy used to hunt them sometimes. Dumbest bird I ever saw. Driven by greed and not much brain.’ He grinned a dazzling white smile and wagged a long dark poker of a finger at Boyd. ‘Therefore, my friend, speaking as someone who has been on a wild goose chase, I have to tell you that it’s not half as difficult as it sounds. Those birds were easier to shoot than an empty beer bottle.’
Swift was silent for a moment. Back in Washington she had quite liked Boyd. But in Khatmandu, he had made a halfhearted pass at her in the hotel after a night of drinking, and Swift, who had had a few drinks herself, told Boyd that there was more chance of her sleeping with a yak than there was of her going to bed with him. Now, out here, his scepticism struck her as plain rude, not to mention potentially demoralizing for the team as a whole. She wondered if there was something personal in this mockery of their aims. If in some small-minded way he wasn’t getting back at her for turning him down so abruptly and with such crushing sarcasm.
‘You know, I’ve been collecting old bones, as you put it, for quite a while now,’ she said calmly. ‘Ever since I was a child. I was never much interested in collecting stamps or coins or whatever. I could never see the point of that kind of collection. I used to say that collecting fossils, especially human fossils, was the one kind of collection in which the proximity of individual artifacts could create a greater meaning. Well, Jon, here I think the point is that there’s a possibility that we have the chance of finding, for want of a better phrase, a living collection. Maybe a living specimen. The search for a new truth often starts out as the most unlikely proposition. But I don’t see how that endeavour can be described as a wild goose chase.’
Boyd shrugged and shook his head as if dissatisfied with his earlier figure of speech. ‘A wild man chase, then.’ He smirked. ‘I dunno. Something crazy at any rate.’ It was clear that he hadn’t really been Listening to what Swift had said.
Swift decided that perhaps Boyd had just drunk too much bourbon.
‘So what would you say to the two people sitting here who have actually seen a yeti?’ she asked. ‘Jack and the sirdar.’