‘Jesus, I dunno,’ said Boyd and laughed. ‘H-A-D, maybe.’ He meant high-altitude deterioration.
‘Excuse me, sahib,’ said Gurung. ‘But I am born in these mountains.’
‘Sherpas need oxygen too,’ said Boyd.
‘Only not as much as the rest of us,’ said Jack.
‘Okay then, Hurké, answer me this,’ Boyd persisted. ‘When you went to the summit of Everest, was it with or without oxygen?’
‘Yes, you are right, sahib. First time of ascending, it was with oxygen. The second time of ascending, with Jack sahib, it was without oxygen, please. But the point is significantly made. Even Sherpas can see through things funny. And though I am most awfully sure that I saw what I saw, maybe Boyd sahib is being too polite to be stating the obvious, which is that many Sherpas are very superstitious fellows.’
Boyd nodded his approval.
‘Good for you, Hurké,’ he said, and refilled the sirdar’s glass.
For a moment none of them spoke. Then something struck the outside of the clamshell with a thud. Even Jack jumped a little and, anticipating the question, shook his head and said:
‘Piece of ice, probably. The wind throws all sorts of shit around up here. As soon as they bring up that chicken wire from Chomrong, we’ll build a fence. Just in case.’
‘Just in case of what?’ laughed Boyd. ‘A yeti comes cold calling?’
Jack smiled patiently.
‘Just in case of avalanches. That’s another reason we didn’t choose to pitch down at MBC. Some of that snow on the face of Machhapuchhare looked treacherous.’
He had good reason to be nervous of avalanches on Machhapuchhare, but he felt he hardly needed to expand on his caution.
‘H-A-D,’ MacDougall snorted angrily. ‘That’s just a lot of bollocks, and I’ll tell you for why. Because I’m bloody sure you couldn’t count what happened to me as a hallucination, pal, and that’s because I didn’t see a bloody thing. But I heard something though. Oh aye, of that I’m quite sure, no mistake.’
‘This was on Nuptse, wasn’t it, Mac?’ said Swift. There was hardly a single report of an encounter with a yeti that she had not committed to the memory of her laptop and with which she was not now familiar.
MacDougall nodded. ‘Nuptse, yes,’ he said.
‘Nuptse is one of the foothills of Everest,’ Jack said for the benefit of those who were not climbers.
‘At nearly eight thousand metres, it’s a hell of a foothill, is that not right. Jack?’
‘Right.’
‘Aye, well early one morning, we were maybe up at about five and a half thousand metres or so, I awoke to hear someone moving around outside our tent. I mean, proper footsteps like, y’know? Sort of slow and deliberate. Anyway at first I thought it was Jack. He and Didier had been leading and I figured they must have reached the summit early and come back down. So I called out to him. I says. Jack, is that you? No answer. So I calls him again. What, are you deaf or something, you Yank bastard? How did you get on? Did you make it? Still no bloody answer. So, I’m zipped up inside my bivvy, right? And I’m thinking to myself, what the hell’s going on here? Because now I start to hear whoever it is outside opening up rucksacks and going through our gear. And for a moment I think, Christ, we’ve got a bloody thief on our hands. I really can’t believe it, y’know? We’re five and a half thousand metres up the side of Nuptse and there’s some bastard tryin’ to rip us off.
‘So now I start yellin’ away like a bastard, telling this thievin’ shite what I’m going to do to him when I get my hands on him. But just as I’m about to unzip the tent, I suddenly stop like, because I hear something that doesn’t sound anything like a man breathing in and out. It’s something a lot bigger than a man. Know what I mean? Like it’s maybe not a man at all. And at the same time as that happens I get this musky sort of stink in my nostrils. Like an animal, y’know?’
‘I get it,’ said Boyd, interrupting. ‘You’re saying that whatever it was, the smell was abominable, right?’
MacDougall shot Boyd a homicidal look as the other man started to chuckle at his own joke.
‘Aye, maybe that’s right,’ he said through gritted and carious teeth. ‘Anyway, the next minute, whatever the bastard is it takes off. I mean really runs, and on two feet. Fast too. Very fast. Well, now I’m scared. And the guy I’m sharin’ the tent with, he’s heard it too and he’s as feared as I am. But I open the flap anyway and have a wee look out. So then. Whatever it is has vamoosed, right? No tracks, nothin’. It was too rocky, I guess. But the kit—’
Mac shivered visibly.
‘It still gives me the heeby-jeebies thinkin’ about it, even now. The kit, right? The kit is all spread out on the snow, as neatly as if you had laid it out on your bed for an army inspection. And on the rucksacks, wee buckles had been opened. Not broken or chewed or anything, mind. In fact there’s nothin’ damaged at all. But the buckles have just been unfastened. No animal could have done it. Except maybe some kind of ape or monkey. Nothin’ with claws anyway. This was a job for fingers.’
Mac shook his head and stuck his small hand inside the pocket of his fleece.
‘I took a picture of the scene, just as I found it. Come to think of it, probably a whole roll of film. But this one was the best. For obvious reasons I’ve been keeping it on me since I came on this bloody tour.’
Swift had already seen Mac’s picture. Like his story it would appear in the book she was planning to write about the yeti. Even if they didn’t actually find a living specimen, the skull had given her more than enough material to make some informed guesses.
Mac fixed Boyd with an accusing stare, and handed him the photograph as if daring the other man to contradict him now.
‘A picture, mind? Not a hallucination. Not high-altitude deterioration. Not a Hammer horror movie. A bloody photograph.’
Mac jabbed a finger at the photograph Boyd was holding, his pale face reddening as if someone had plugged him into the Semath Johnson-Mathey fuel cell.
‘You tell me what kind of hallucination could have laid out my kit like that, pal? You just tell me that.’
Another piece of ice hit the clamshell, making everyone jump with fright once again.
‘Can I see that picture?’ Jameson asked Boyd when he had looked at it for a few moments.
‘Perhaps a langur monkey,’ said Boyd, handing him the photo.
‘Langur monkey, my ass,’ snarled Mac. ‘This was a big animal.’
‘It was you yourself who said that it could have been a monkey,’ argued Boyd. ‘And by your own admission you never actually saw it, so you can’t be sure that it was a big animal any more than a small one.’
‘I believe you, Mac,’ said Jameson, clapping the Scotsman on the back. ‘I’ve never heard of a langur that was more than a meter high.’
‘Me neither,’ echoed Cody.
‘Nor for that matter have I heard of one that strayed very far from the forest. A langur up a mountain that high would be easy meat for a snow leopard.’
For some of those who were gathered under the clamshell, Jameson’s Zimbabwean accent, which sounded to an untrained ear exactly like a South African accent, was sometimes so strong that they had to strain hard to understand what he was saying. Swift thought it was another reason he and Mac seemed to get along so well. Mac’s accent was equally strong and, on occasion, equally unintelligible. Their close friendship was as ineffable as it was hard to understand.
‘You’re Scotch, aren’t you, Mac?’ said Boyd.
‘The word is Scottish,’ he snarled. ‘Scotch is something you drink, you daft Yank so-and-so.’
‘Good point,’ said Boyd, refilling Mac’s glass and then his own. ‘I was just wondering if you also happened to believe in the Loch Ness monster.’