The Abominables

Chapter 3 Footprints In The Snow

UCY GOT BACK SAFELY TO THE VALLEY—sleep-walkers usually seem to get back to their beds. But the glacier she had walked across had just had a new fall of snow. And right across it, from end to end, she left a row of footprints. Huge, clear, dachshund-sized prints: eight toes, rounded heels, and all. There is nothing like a portly yeti with flat feet for making marks that even a nitwit could identify.

If only it had snowed, then things might have gone on as before. But it didn’t snow, not the next day or the next. And on the third day a couple of climbers came across the prints.

Within a week, photographs of Lucy’s footprints were on the front pages of newspapers all over the world. All the old stories about Abominable Snowmen were dragged out again: how fierce they were, how huge … how they could swallow three goats at a gulp, how just to see one was to die within the week.

The owners of the Hotel Himalaya, who knew all about how to make money, set to work at once. The day after the climbers had burst breathlessly into the hotel dining room with their news, people were sent out to find the footprints and preserve them, by roping them off, putting up signs, and covering them with tarpaulins in case it snowed. And a few days later full-page advertisements appeared in all the travel magazines and brochures, saying, Enjoy the Experience of a Lifetime! A week at the luxury Hotel Himalaya with guided Yeti Safari to the famous footprints! And underneath a picture of a hairy monster with fangs and blood dripping down its chin were the words Who will be the first to meet the Abominable Snowman face-to-face? IT COULD BE YOU!

But it wasn’t a photographer or a journalist or a thrill-seeking tourist who found the secret valley of Nanvi Dar. It was a boy; quite a young one. And his name was Con.

Con was a page boy at the Hotel Himalaya in Bukhim, opening doors and running errands for the guests. He was, perhaps, the smallest page boy in the world, and in Britain he would not have been allowed to work at all because he was far too young.

When Con’s father, who ran a restaurant in London, had been offered the job of chef in the new hotel in Bukhim, he had tried to leave Con and his sister, Ellen, behind at nice boarding schools in England. But Con had dug in his heels. He was not, he said, going to spend his time rushing about on cricket pitches in silly white pants, or letting idiot boys hit him on the head with pillows in the dorm, when he could be living in one of the most exciting places in the world.

“And anyway,” he’d said to his father, “I might see a yeti.”

Con’s father didn’t believe in yetis, but he believed in Con. And when Con and Ellen both promised to work very hard at their lessons, he agreed to take them along.

And the children kept their promise and worked very hard indeed. Even so, because they didn’t have to stand about in Assembly having headmasters make speeches to them, hang around in drafty schoolyards waiting for whistles to blow, or fight for their school dinners, they had lots of spare time. So in the afternoons Con put on a red uniform with silver buttons and helped to look after the visitors, and Ellen, who was very domestic and liked to be busy, worked with the maids. The children’s mother had been killed in a car crash two years earlier, and it helped Ellen to do the things she’d done with her.

When Con had told his father that he might see a yeti, he hadn’t been joking. Ever since he’d first read about yetis, he’d had a special feeling about them. When people had scoffed and said there weren’t any such things, Con had simply shrugged. He just knew there were and that one day he would see one.

So when Lucy’s footsteps had first been seen on the slopes of Nanvi Dar, Con had been incredibly happy and excited. He longed to join the groups of visitors on the trek up to the glacier. For the Yeti Safari was a huge success. People arrived at the Hotel Himalaya from all over the world. But soon Con stopped being happy and began to feel quite sick. The hotel manager did everything he could to cash in on the yetis, selling yeti pajamas and yeti scarves and yeti postcards that made them look like dim-witted baboons. And finally, when Con had spent some time helping groups of tourists get ready for their trek, running backward and forward with Thermoses they had left in their rooms, tying their bootlaces, polishing their snow goggles, pulling on their padded mittens, and smearing suncream on their noses, he stopped feeling sick and began to be frightened.

In one of the tour groups there were a couple of beetroot-faced army officers drinking rum out of silver hip flasks who talked about “getting a potshot at the brutes, eh?” In another there was a very thin woman wearing boots that Con was absolutely sure were made from the skin of the terribly rare snow leopard. She kept laughing like a hyena and telling her husband that she “must have a yeti-skin coat, daah-ling.” When a third group departed that included a fat little man who seemed to think a yeti was a kind of elephant, because he did nothing except wonder how much one could get for a pair of tusks, Con had had enough.

That night he couldn’t get to sleep. He was just too horribly angry. He knew what would happen if one of those rich, bored, stupid people really did stumble across a yeti. Nobody who cared deeply about those mysterious creatures could even afford to buy a cup of tea in the Hotel Himalaya, let alone go on the ridiculously expensive Yeti Safari. So it was only a question of time.

“I wish they had never found those footprints,” Con said to himself. And then he knew what he had to do.

He woke an hour before dawn, dressed quickly in the warmest things he had, and began carefully and methodically to pack his rucksack. He had been out hiking many times and knew what he would need. But he also knew that he was planning something very dangerous, and probably very foolish. He left a note for Ellen and his father. Then he slipped out of the hotel.

The route up to the glacier was not hard to follow. It had been well trampled the last few weeks, and there were fixed ropes at the more difficult places; it was certainly no harder for Con than for the little fat man. He reckoned on making better time than the tour groups, because they moved very slowly, with frequent stops for tea and tidbits. And in the early afternoon they stopped at a specially prepared campsite with fires blazing and servants rushing about with hot meals and drinks. Even so, Con was expecting to spend at least one night well above the tree line at a dangerously high altitude.

By midafternoon, exhausted and breathing with difficulty in the thin air, Con was standing on the glacier in the shadow of the huge, towering rock face that made up the eastern shoulder of Nanvi Dar. It was easy to find the footprints. Already hundreds of tourists had shuffled around them. But now the fun was over. When Con was finished, the mountains and their secret inhabitants could find peace again.

He had to hurry. If he did not get off the glacier and find shelter before nightfall, then he would die, no doubt about it. All he needed to do was remove the protective covering and let the snow clouds that were gathering in the west do the rest. He pulled the heavy tarpaulins aside and then, to be absolutely sure, he started kicking snow into the prints, tramping in them, so that they were completely obliterated. He followed the prints, kicking and stamping, all the way to where the snow of the glacier ended and the footprints (if you followed them the right way, letting the heels lead you) stopped. Over this great cliff of rock the yeti must have clambered, but a human being could not hope to follow. No less than three mountaineering expeditions, with the newest equipment, had tried to conquer the eastern ramparts of Nanvi Dar and failed.

Afterward, Grandma said it was the will of God, because why should Con have come to the sheer rock face just at that moment? The moment when there burst out of the space between two boulders at the base of the cliff a most extraordinary THING.

A sort of molehill it seemed to be. But were molehills hairy? And did they bleat?

Completely puzzled, Con scrambled up to have a closer look.

The THING was a head. The small, earth-covered head of a very worried baby yak.

Hubert had had a dreadful day. First he’d gone up to someone who he was absolutely certain was his mother, but she hadn’t been, and had been rude about it. Then he’d trotted back to find Ambrose, but Ambrose was helping Lady Agatha pick bamboo shoots and he wasn’t there. By this time Hubert was so muddled that he’d gone and buried his head in a hole, meaning to wait till things got clearer inside his head. But the hole hadn’t been like his usual holes. It had gone on and on and on. And now he had come out in this strange place and his back end was stuck in the mountain and it was all very difficult and very hopeless and very sad.

“Don’t worry, little boot face,” said Con, patting the yak on the nose. “I’ll soon get you clear.”

He took hold of Hubert’s shoulders and began tugging and pulling — carefully but with all his strength. For a while nothing happened except that Hubert’s bleats got more and more frantic. Then suddenly there was a popping noise, and in a shower of small stones, Hubert’s backside came out of the mountain and fell across Con’s feet.

“A tunnel?” said Con, peering across Hubert into the deep, black hole from which the yak had come. “It can’t be!”

But it was: a narrow channel through the side of the mountain that had once been the bed of an underground river.

“You must have come from the other side,” said Con wonderingly. “And if I lie down, I’m smaller than you are …”

He dropped onto his hands and knees and began to edge his way into the tunnel. The sunshine turned to gray twilight, then to darkness: pitch-darkness as Hubert, terrified of being left alone, turned back and followed him.

It was a fearful journey and agonizingly slow. Water trickled down the sides of the tunnel, jagged daggers of ice hung from the roof; Con had never been so cold. Often he wanted to stop and go back, but behind him, blocking off all retreat — puffing, dribbling, butting with his crumpled horn — came Hubert.

“I … can’t do it,” gasped Con. The passage was getting narrower now. It was like being in an endless, ice-cold grave. “I can’t …”

And then he saw it. A narrow chink of light. Golden light. Sunlight.

The chink grew bigger. It had grass in it; flowers; the flash of water … and something else …

“No,” breathed Con. “I don’t believe it.”

But it was true. On a tussock of grass sat a little old lady wearing a long white flannel nightdress. Beside her, his armchair-sized head within reach of her hand, lay an enormous chocolate-colored creature whose left ear she was gently scratching. Another huge beast — with a dreamy look and the largest stomach Con had ever seen — was sitting nearby, peacefully combing out her elbows. Three more of them were paddling in the stream or picking flowers and one — his bald patch gleaming in the sunlight — was leaning against a tree and reading a book.

“Tell it again,” came the voice of the chocolate-colored yeti. “Tell where the Ugly Sisters tried to cut off their toes to get their feet in the glass slipper.”

“That’s enough for today.” The old lady’s voice was firm. The creature lifted his head and began reluctantly to get up. Then he let out a great yell.

“Look, Lady Agatha! Look, everybody! It’s a funny sort of human dwarf thing. And it’s come out of Hubert’s hole!”