‘Ugh, what’s that?’ she said.
Jameson gave it a cursory glance.
‘Dead marmot. Eagle probably had it. Lucky him. There’s not much meat in these mountains.’
Swift sat up slowly and took the cup of steaming tea that Miles handed her. She wanted to say that someone else should go, that she was physically finished, and she might well have, except that she knew she didn’t know how to put up a tent. Besides, it had been her idea to push on after the yetis in the first place. Instead she said:
‘We’re spending the night here, Jack?’
‘That’s the general idea.’
Swift looked at the tent and frowned. After the luxuries of the snow-buried lodges and the heated clamshell, the Stormhaven tent looked as flimsy as a paper lantern. She sipped her tea noisily and stared back across the valley toward the octopus-like shape that was Annapurna. She saw that Jack was right. It might as well have been thirty kilometres. There was no way to track the yetis and get back to ABC before nightfall.
She finished her tea and searched the flat dip on top of the Rognon for the yeti tracks. It was then that she saw that there was more ice field between the Rognon and the foot of the mountain and that the tracks led straight into it.
‘From here on we’ll need crampons and ice axes,’ said Jack and, hauling Swift’s legs out straight in front of her, strapped two sets of lethal-looking yellow points onto the soles of her boots. Then he helped her to her feet.
‘How do they feel?’
‘My legs? Like they used to belong to someone else. Someone old and crippled.’
‘I meant the crampons.’
Swift lifted one foot and then the other.
‘Okay, I guess.’
‘Let me know if they ball up under your foot, and we’ll adjust them.’
He put the rubber-covered nonslip shaft of a DMM ice axe into her gloved hand.
She hefted it experimentally and nodded, but the sight of Jack climbing into a chest harness and then collecting a slug of rope off the ground did nothing to allay a sudden sense of anxiety.
‘What’s this? Are you planning to give me a tow?’ she asked hopefully as he passed the rope around her waist.
‘Only if I have to.’
Expertly he tied a single figure eight about four feet from the end of the rope and half a fisherman’s knot back onto the main rope. Then he hooked it on to a karabiner that was hanging off the chest harness.
‘The figure eight will act as a stopper knot,’ he explained. ‘Just in case you need to stop suddenly.’
‘Jack, it’s not the stopping I need help with. It’s the getting started. Tie me a knot that will make my legs move.’ She shook her head with exasperation. ‘Why the hell should I want to stop suddenly?’
Mac guffawed loudly.
‘She doesn’t bloody get it. Jack.’
‘Get what?’
‘It’s in case you fall down a crevasse, darlin’.’ Mac laughed again. ‘That’s the kind of bloody sudden stop he’s on about. So you don’t go all the way to the bottom!’
‘Oh, great.’ Swift swallowed a mixture of fear and injury. To her greater chagrin, Mac suddenly produced a small compact camera and, still laughing, took her picture.
‘One for the album that. Come on, darlin’. Have a bit of faith. Don’t you know? Faith can move mountains.’
‘Oh yeah?’ She smiled thinly. ‘To do what?’
Jack shouldered Jameson’s Zuluarms rifle.
‘Swift, you go first. That way if you do fall, I can pull you out.’
‘Very reassuring.’
He shouldered his rucksack and then handed her a coil of spare rope.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘You can carry this. Now just take it nice and easy. Keep in the yetis’ tracks. Chances are they have a better idea of where the concealed hazards are than we do.’
Swift adjusted her sun goggles, zipped up her storm jacket, and sighed uncomfortably.
‘Why do I feel like I’m being staked out for something?’ she grumbled, and set off toward an ice corridor that ran through the upper part of the glacier to the point where it was divided in two by a ridge running down from the centre of the rock face.
The second search party was exploring a valley to the northeast of ABC that led up to Annapurna III when Lincoln Warner radioed them with the news that five Sherpas had been killed and two yetis sighted.
‘I don’t suppose there’s a chance that any of those men could still be alive?’ said Cody.
Jutta shook her head. ‘People don’t normally come out of a crevasse alive. It’s like falling off a cliff.’
‘It’s too bad this had to happen. What’s the normal procedure, Tsering? Do we go back, try to help recover the bodies?’
The young assistant sirdar shook his head slowly.
‘I doubt that such a thing would be possible. Indeed it might well cost the lives of yet more men. But what better place of burial could a Sherpa have than to lie in the snow and ice where he fell? There will be a time for formal ceremonies. But it is not now, and you will find, Cody sahib, that those who survive will behave with dignity and make no excessive show of the grief they feel.’
Cody nodded politely but thought Ang Tsering was a pompous ass. He disliked the assistant sirdar, thinking him conceited, and could not understand why Jutta seemed so keen to help him improve his German. Or perhaps it was just that like many of her race, she felt an English-speaking world to be a slap in the face of a German one. Either way he was tired of hearing the proper way to order a meal, or to count, or to ask for a hotel room in German. Even Tsering, he suspected, was showing signs of a general weariness with things Teutonic.
Tsering walked on a short way, to the top of the slope on which they stood. Warner’s radio message had interrupted them in the act of using the map to identify this slope as Gandharba Chuli, a long ridge that slowly ascended the more precipitate heights of Machhapuchhare, where the other team was headed.
Cody sighed.
‘He’s a moody sonofabitch.’
Immediately Cody regretted saying it, expecting Jutta to leap to the Sherpa’s defence and point out that five of Tsering’s fellow Sherpas had just lost their lives. Instead he found her agreeing with him.
‘I keep trying to be nice to him, but I know what you mean.’
‘I shouldn’t have said that. Five of his people were just killed.’
Jutta shrugged. ‘But I think his mood was like this before we found out about those others,’ she said. ‘His mood is always not good.’
‘I think I prefer the company of apes to someone like Ang Tsering,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean to be racist or anything. It’s just that—’
Jutta smiled. ‘Don’t apologize. I know what you mean. Have you always worked with apes?’
‘Oh, I’ve done everything with apes. Everything except mate with one. And believe me, it wasn’t for lack of offers. Female gorillas can be very insistent. Back in the seventies some friends of mine in the CIA even tried to enlist my help in setting up a program to exploit large primates for the military. Teaching chimps to drive car bombs. Training gorillas for jungle warfare, that kind of thing.’ Noting the look of shock on Jutta’s face, he added quickly, ‘Not that I agreed to do it, of course.’
Jutta nodded her approval.
‘So what do we do now?’ he asked. ‘I guess if they’ve sighted two yetis, there’s not much need for us to go gallivanting off down this end of the Sanctuary.’
Tsering was waving at them to come up the slope.
‘Now what’s he want?’ grumbled Cody.
They trailed up the slope after the assistant sirdar and found him staring down the valley through an ancient pair of binoculars. Silently, Tsering pointed into the distance. His keen eyes had spotted something — a tiny figure in the distance heading up the valley, toward Tarke Kang, the Glacier Dome.