Every cookfire above the Tavorsk snowline loses its fuel pile by midwinter, and the owners blame the yeti. It does not eat the wood. It carries split larch off the stack in armfuls and sets it in a neat row in the snow a quarter mile away, as if to inspect it. The row is always straight. Herders walk out, collect their wood, and say nothing about it.
Autumn is the quiet season. The yeti keeps to the Murrowen scree fields below the glaciers, where it digs for marmots and a pale root the herders call candle tuber. It stands nine feet tall and is built like a wardrobe, with arms that reach below the knee and a coat of white fur that goes yellow at the chin and the palms. The face is bare, gray, and surprisingly flat, with a heavy brow and small dark eyes set close. Tracks are the usual way to find one: a print sixteen inches long, with the big toe splayed outward like a thumb. In October the prints wander. By December they run in straight lines toward the high huts, and the wood begins to move.
The winter notes are shorter, because the weather permits fewer visits. In deep snow the yeti walks on the crust without breaking it, which no herder can do, and it travels in the hour after a blizzard when the wind has packed the drifts hard. It hums, a low drone felt in the chest more than heard, and goats go rigid when it passes. Vessa Kline, who runs the highest hut at Tavorsk Gap, leaves a flat sled of dried pears on her roof ridge each first frost and says the yeti has never touched her stack since. The custom along the pass is the same: never whistle after dark above the tree line, because the yeti answers a whistle by coming to look.
A trade has grown up around it. Print-readers, hired by caravans, walk ahead of the mule trains in January and judge from the depth and spacing of the tracks whether a yeti is crossing the route that week. They carry long poles and wear felt over their boots so they can listen. Since my last visit, two years ago, the Murrowen fields have lost their lower marmot colonies to a warm summer, and the prints now come down almost to the timberline. The print-readers say their work has doubled. Vessa Kline watched me measure a track outside her door, then tipped her head toward the ridge. "He's early this year. Bring your wood inside."
- Classification
- Giant snow-dwelling ape
- Habitat
- Glacier scree and high passes
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 9 ft tall, 700 lb
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Beasts and Monstrosities
- Binomial
- Cryopithex albifrons
- Diet
- Marmots, roots, stolen larch
- Temperament
- Solitary, curious, wary