‘Now you’re talking,’ said Boyd.
Jameson probed the track with the tip of the tape measure and said, ‘Depth, about thirty-eight centimetres.’
He squinted inside the indentation like a golfer sizing up a putt, trying to determine a contour. Then he moved on to the next track and did the same.
‘It’s hard to get a clear view,’ he said.
Swift started to take notes again.
‘The snow has tumbled into each hole. But generally speaking, it’s a fairly long footprint with short toes and a longish big toe. Not as broad a footprint as I might have expected, but there are definitely no claw marks, and I’m one hundred percent certain that this is not a bear track. It’s hard to be more specific, but it certainly looks like some kind of higher anthropoid at any rate.’
There were several whoops of excitement. Mac punched the air in triumph. Jutta hugged Lincoln Warner.
‘What a great start,’ said Swift. ‘This is better than we could have hoped.’
‘These look exactly like Shipton’s photographs of the tracks he found on Everest’s Menlung Glacier,’ observed Mac. ‘For that matter, they’re the same as the ones Don Whillans photographed on Annapurna.’ He chuckled delightedly. ‘Christ, we’ve only just got here, eh?’
The sirdar squatted over the footprints for a moment, smoking thoughtfully.
‘Please, sahib,’ he said, flinging his cigarette away after a moment and holding his hand out to Miles Jameson. ‘May I take the Stanley Metro, please?’
Realizing that Hurké Gurung was talking about the tape measure, Jameson handed it over and watched him measure the distance between the footprints. Finally, the sirdar stood up and planted his own Berghaus boot in one track and then another.
‘Good King Wenceslas,’ joked Warner.
Gurung wobbled his head from side to side, as if uncertain about something, and said, ‘Maybe almost two metres. And not very heavy. I think pretty small yeti. Maybe not full-grown. Or maybe female.’
‘Do you hear that?’ Mac demanded triumphantly of Jon Boyd, who stood and watched the forensic examination of the tracks with an amused, detached interest. ‘The man said a yeti. Not a langur monkey. Not even the bloody Loch Ness monster. A yeti.’
‘If you say so, Mac,’ said Boyd. ‘But like you say, it’s still early.’
‘A young one or a female,’ Swift repeated.
‘Hajur, memsahib. It could be.’
‘We won’t know until we track it,’ said Jack.
‘The question is, which way?’ remarked Jameson.
‘How do you mean?’
‘The tracks lead from a source. Do we follow the animal, or do we trace the tracks back to the source?’
Jack followed Jameson’s eyes up the icy ridge connecting Hiunchuli with Annapurna South, from where the tracks had originated. The sky was still clear, but the gusts of wind carrying gossamer sails of spindrift snow were so strong that they seemed to promise yet more bad weather.
‘One is usually inclined to follow the tracks back to the source,’ said Jameson.
‘I figured on us all being here at ABC and becoming used to being above four thousand metres for a couple of days before we started going up any higher,’ said Jack. ‘It’s about twelve to fifteen hundred metres to the top of that ridge. Hard going if you’re not properly acclimatized.’ He shook his head. ‘Besides, the tracks lead toward Machhapuchhare and our major search area. So I guess that settles it. On this occasion, I think you’d better follow the animal. Swift, Hurké, Miles? The three of you had better get going before it snows again and you lose the trail.’
‘Aren’t you coming?’ said Swift.
‘We can’t all go. Besides, there are plenty of things that need to be done here.’
The sirdar nodded.
‘Jack is right, memsahib. Make better hunter to be small party.’
Jameson straightened and spoke to the sirdar in Nepali.
‘Huncha. Kahile jaane?’
‘Turantai, Jameson sahib. Right away.’
‘Good,’ said the Zimbabwean, and smiled at Swift. ‘Right then. I’d better go and get my gear together.’
Everyone began to trudge back to the campsite, Jameson, Swift, and Hurké outpacing the others in their eagerness to get started, leaving Mac behind to take yet more pictures. Jack walked slowly abreast with Warner, Boyd, and Cody.
‘You mentioned some things that needed to be done,’ said Boyd. ‘Anything I can help with?’
‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘if that chicken wire arrives today, I thought I’d start on the avalanche barriers. Thanks for the offer, but the Sherpas will help. You might as well get started on finding your core samples.’
‘Thanks, I think I will.’
‘It was an avalanche up there that wiped out you and your buddy, wasn’t it. Jack?’ said Warner. ‘There was something in National Geographic about it.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Must have been terrifying for you. I can’t imagine what it would be like, to be caught up there in an avalanche. Not that I would be.’ The black American shook his head warily. In his brightly coloured wraparound sunglasses and expensively furred parka, he looked like some kind of rap artist. ‘I like my big feet on flat ground.’
‘It’s hard to be sure, but I always reckoned that the actual avalanche was caused by a meteorite.’
‘A meteorite, eh?’ said Boyd. ‘Interesting.’
‘I’ve always wondered if that’s how life got started on this planet,’ said Warner. ‘A few molecules on a piece of intergalactic rock? Did you know that the earliest reports of meteoritic phenomena are recorded on Egyptian papyrus, around 2000 B.C.?’
Warner turned toward Boyd.
‘No offence intended,’ he said.
‘None taken,’ said Boyd. ‘Actually, I’ve always been interested in meteorites myself.’
‘If it was a meteorite, you were lucky, Jack,’ said Warner. ‘The one at the Hayden Planetarium in New York weighs thirty tons. Any idea where yours might have come down?’
‘Are you thinking of looking for a souvenir?’ laughed Boyd. ‘Thirty tons of rock is a lot of excess baggage to take back to the States.’
‘I was just curious.’
‘Hard to be sure,’ admitted Jack. ‘But I had the idea that it came down behind us, somewhere on the glacier to the south of us.’ He pointed in front of them, along the line of strange new tracks, beyond ABC, toward the entrance to the Sanctuary itself. ‘That way. Toward Machhapuchhare.’
‘Fish Tail Peak, eh?’ mused Cody. ‘Yes, it does kind of look like one, doesn’t it? What is that? About six or six and the half thousand?’
‘Six thousand nine hundred and ninety-two,’ said Jack.
‘One hell of a walk, anyway,’ Boyd guffawed.
‘Technically speaking, it’s not a particularly difficult climb.’
‘They really believe that it’s a holy mountain?’ said Warner. ‘The sacred home of the gods and all that jazz?’
‘They do believe it,’ affirmed Jack.
‘That kind of stuff hardly seems possible in this day and age.’
‘The longer you stay here,’ said Jack, ‘the more it will seem possible.’
The use of drugs for the restraint and immobilization of wild animals was routine for Miles Jameson. During his time at the Los Angeles Zoo, Jameson had drugged everything from an Indian elephant to an axolotl. He had used many of the chemical agents in his arsenal for two decades, almost as long as they had been around. But his preferred system for delivering a chemical restraint — a blowpipe — had been around for much longer. Working in the zoo, Jameson most often used a blowpipe that had been presented to him by some Ecuadorian Indians on one of his many specimen-hunting trips to Central America: a two-metre length of hollowed bamboo, the blowpipe had an effective range of fifteen to twenty metres, offering silent projection-anaesthesia with minimum trauma upon impact. Jameson had brought the blowpipe with him to the Chitwan National Park, but faced with the task of immobilizing an animal in the high winds of the Himalayas and over large distances, Jameson thought he would have little choice but to use a rifle.