The Abominables

15 The Attack

On the terrible, bleak ice of the Antarctic, the yetis had given up all hope. It was their third night on the ice without food and shelter and it didn’t seem possible that Lucy could live through another one. She was quite unconscious; her breath came in shallow, rasping pants and even in that terrible cold she burned with fever. Grandma’s teeth were chattering so much that Uncle Otto had had to jam a piece of ice between them to stop her jaw from breaking. Clarence lay beside Lucy, despairing and as still as a stone. Only Ambrose, who had loved people so much, still believed that somehow they would be rescued.

“When an aeroplane comes we must run and shout and wave our arms,” he said for the hundredth time.

None of the others answered. They couldn’t hear him. Their ear lids had been iced to their ears. The yetis had cried easily but now there were no tears frozen to their furry cheeks. The despair they felt was far too great for tears. And at last Ambrose, too, lay down and waited for the end.

It was their iced-up ear lids that stopped them, at first, from hearing the drone of engines coming towards them. Five engines. Five snowmobiles: huge, armoured monsters, part tank, part sledge, purpose-built for the hunt, pushing steadily onwards through the desert of snow and ice.

In the first of the snowmobiles sat Colonel Bagwackerly, the president of the Hunter’s Club, and the MacDermot-Duff. Their eyes shone with greed and excitement, their automatic rifles were loaded and ready, and on the floor beside them was a sack. Not an ordinary sack. An outsize one, especially made so that it could take the dead body of a yeti. There were five such sacks, one for each yeti, one in each snowmobile.

“You don’t think that mealy little worm Prink’ll blow the gaff, do you?” said the MacDermot-Duff. He had stuffed his kilt and sporran inside a quilted flying suit and looked like a large and lumpy liver sausage. “We ought really to have shot him.”

“Dash it, man, he is human,” said Bagwackerly, flicking the ice crystals from his sticky moustache. And when his companion looked a bit doubtful he added, “Anyway, I was at school with his cousin.”

They pressed on, their specially built snowmobiles negotiating the broken surface and ridges of ice with ease. This was going to be the hunt to end all hunts! There weren’t going to be many clubs in the world with five stuffed yetis on their walls — perhaps the only yetis in the world! Why one skin alone would be worth a king’s ransom!

“Spilt blood is glorious, killing is grand, hunters victorious conquer the land,” sang Bagwackerly above the noise of the engine. It was the club song and a perfectly disgusting one, but then the Hunters were disgusting people.

Behind them, in the second snowmobile, was the Sheik of Dabubad with some of his friends. The sheik had murdered all the swift cheetahs and tawny lions and fleet-footed gazelles in the golden plains around his palace and now thirsted for a new kind of slaughter. Behind him came Herr Blutenstein, gibbering with excitement. This was better than schtick-pigging!

“There!” said Bagwackerly suddenly. “Do you see?”

He pointed forward to where some dark shapes could just be made out against the featureless ice.

“It’s them all right!” said the MacDermot-Duff, his black eyes popping with excitement.

“Get out the guns,” ordered Bagwackerly. And the snowmobiles came steadily on…

“Oh, look! People are coming! In those funny black things. It’s Con and Ellen! We’re going to be rescued,” cried Ambrose the Abominable, leaping to his feet.

The others lifted their weary faces. Making a great effort, they forced their ear lids open. Then, stiffly, without hope at first, they raised their shaggy arms and waved.

“Ambrose is right. It is help after all,” said Uncle Otto unbelievingly.

“God has heard us,” said Grandma. “It’s me singing all those hymns.”

Lucy was too weak to move, but for the first time since her illness she opened her eyes and a shy and hopeful smile appeared on her gentle face.

“They’ve got some sort of stick things in their hands,” said Ambrose. “I expect it’s bamboo shoots because they’re our favourites.”

And then it happened. Spattering the ice, the bullets bounced and ricocheted, a hail of death.

“Bullets!” said Grandma unbelievingly. “They’re shooting from those sledge things.”

The snowmobiles came closer. There was another burst of fire.

“But there’s nothing to shoot at here,” said Ambrose, peering at the empty, desolate waste.

“Yes, there is,” said Uncle Otto, and he spoke in a voice they had never heard him use before. “There is something to shoot at here. Us.”

“Damn it, missed,” cursed Colonel Bagwackerly. “It’s this darned machine jigging about. Can’t you hold it steady?”

“I am holding it steady,” snapped the MacDermot-Duff.

“Well, I’m not letting those cross-eyed wallies behind us get in first. They’re blasted foreigners and I’m the club President. We’ve got to move in closer.”

So the MacDermot-Duff jammed his feet down on the accelerator and the armoured sledge lurched forward.

“There! Winged one!” shrieked Bagwackerly. “Look, he’s fallen, the hairy brute. It’s a big one, too! We’ve done it! The first yeti ever, and I, Cyril Bagwackerly, shot it!”

“It’s nothing…” said Uncle Otto, as Grandma and Ambrose ran up to him. “Just… my leg.”

But the wound was a bad one. Blood poured in jagged spurts through the thick fur. An artery had been hit.

Desperately, the others tried to stop the bleeding, closing the wound with their fingers, laying their cheeks against it, but they had nothing. No cloth to make a tourniquet, no bandage.

“They’re closing in,” said Grandma. “It won’t be long now. At least we can die like Christians. Say your prayers, Ambrose, like Lady Agatha would want you to.”

But Ambrose was beyond saying anything. If people could do that — if they could come across the ice and shoot kind, good Uncle Otto — then let death come, and come quickly. Ambrose the Abominable was through.

But the men in the snowmobiles did not come on. Their machines had stopped, their greedy, glittering eyes were turned in amazement to the sky.

Aeroplanes. The sky had suddenly filled with planes, skimming low towards them across the ice.

“What the devil?” said Bagwackerly. “Those aren’t ours.”

“If anyone’s trying to get in ahead of us and bag themselves a yeti there’s going to be trouble,” snarled the MacDermot-Duff. “Those hairy brutes are ours, every one of them.”

All the Hunters were sitting back now, looking up through their snow goggles at the sky.

“Schweinehunde!” yelled Herr Blutenstein, shaking his fists. “You schall not schteel my yeti schkinn!”

“Pariah dogs,” screamed the Sheik. “Poachers! I’ll have you whipped!”

“Quickly, reload, everybody,” shouted Bagwackerly, gesturing to make himself heard above the roaring of the planes. “Move in for the kill. We’ll get in first. We’ll show ’em!”

And in all the snowmobiles, the Hunters, terrified of being done out of their spoils, reloaded their guns and started their machines.

“Ready!” screeched Bagwackerly, and the Hunters gunned their engines and set off at full throttle to finish the job.

But up above them, others were ready too. The aircraft, after circling once, now lined themselves up and flew in low over the snowmobiles. The fuselage doors opened and five long black muzzles emerged.

The Hunters did not have time to scream “Cannons!” or even to notice that it was not the yetis that were being attacked but they themselves before it happened.

“Uuugwaa! Blubble-hoo!” gurgled Bagwackerly. “I’m drowning. I’m choking! Uroo!”

“It’s poison, it’s… aauuua gug… I can’t see. I can’t move! Yak glumph,” spluttered the MacDermot-Duff.

“Hilfe! Hulp! I schtuck am,” yelled Herr Blutenstein. “I am schtuck.” He was indeed stuck. His behind was stuck to his seat, his gloved hands were stuck to his gun, his gun was stuck to his snowmobile, and his nostrils and eyelids were stuck together.

The other Hunters were stuck as well. However, the McDermott-Duff came unstuck again fairly quickly. His hands had stuck to the throttle of his machine, and it careered off at full speed straight into a big frozen ice block. With a cracking sound, the McDermott-Duff was wrenched free and flew like a guided missile before landing with a strange tinkling sound and spinning over the ice for about a hundred metres.

Bagwackerly had been leaning out of the snowmobile to get a clear shot at the yetis, and so much of him was stuck to various parts of the vehicle that even a head-on collision couldn’t budge him. The shock of the crash was pretty devastating, however, because it dislodged his nose from the barrel of his gun. Well, most of his nose (it was a long one). The rest of it remained attached to his rifle.

All the other snowmobiles came quickly to a halt as their engines spluttered and died. They had been black and fierce-looking machines, but now they were white and glittery like Christmas decorations. Inside them, the men mumbled and struggled for a while, and then stopped moving entirely. In one of them, the Sheikh of Dabubad was standing like a statue. He was childish and badly brought up, and at the moment of the attack he had been sticking his tongue out at the approaching planes. Now he couldn’t get it back in, because it was connected to his right foot by a long column of glittering ice.

The men and women of the British Antarctic Survey had been instructed not to kill and they hadn’t killed. But it seemed a pity to waste the latest tear gas or rubber bullets on men as vile and foolish as the Hunters. So they had decided on something much cheaper, simpler, and, in the Antarctic, effective. Water. They were intelligent young people, who knew that the speed of the snowmobiles would make the frozen air even colder, and that water would freeze in seconds. So they had simply pumped a few hundred gallons of water from high-pressure hoses, and encased everything in ice.

The young research assistant who jumped from the cockpit of the Twin Otter as it skidded to a halt on the pack ice found the yetis as still as statues, waiting for death. He walked across the rough ice towards them, his pack of emergency supplies on his back and then, as he saw the blood staining the ice, he started to run.

“It’s all right,” he shouted. “The Hunters are being rounded up and we have come to take you away.”

When he saw Uncle Otto’s wound he was white with fury. “Inhuman abominable monsters,” he muttered, and he certainly didn’t mean the yetis. He bent down and began to unwrap the disinfectant and bandages from the pack he carried.

“I… expect… it was an accident,” said Uncle Otto, good and noble yeti that he was.

But Ambrose, who had been so loving and trusting all his life, stared at the young man with his wall eyes and said: “It wasn’t an accident. They did it on purpose. People are bad.”