Yeti Unleashed Page 12

  “No firepower, Doctor?” Hardin said.

  “No. I’ve got a flare gun in case we spot them. You should be able to see it from any point on the mountain.”

  “Okay,” Calder said, “Chief Drayton and Andy will head north from here. Ben, you and Louis search east. Doctors Olson, you both head west, and I’ll go south. Take these walkie-talkies and sing out if you spot anything.”

  “Please,” Harry said, “don’t shoot unless it’s absolutely necessary. Once we find the Yeti, we’ll get Dr. Siscom who is waiting here at the main complex to shoot them with his tranquilizer darts.”

  “Doctor is right,” Calder added. “These animals are valuable scientific specimens so let’s try and capture them alive, okay? All right, let’s go.”

  They each mounted a horse, Harry a dun gelding and Dixie a bay mare. Getting more used to these animals, Harry thought. Mongolia was good training for horsemanship. As they all went in their separate directions, Harry shot a final look at the compound, already shimmering in the sweltering morning sun.

  He guided the gelding over a narrow trail with Dixie right behind. The trail, made rugged by numerous rocks and roots protruding out of the soil, wound down the western mountain slope in a gentle fashion. They had a clear unobstructed view of the desert plains below that appeared as a patchwork quilt of greens and browns. In the far distance, a blue dot interrupted the plain, signifying a lake or reservoir.

  Cinder Mountain was mostly granite rock and low-lying vegetation. In the Sierra Mountain Range, it was forested by mountain evergreens. An occasional gnarled Joshua tree punctuated the arid landscape. Now and then Harry turned in his saddle to check on Dixie who gave him a repeated thumbs up as they rode.

  The Sierra Nevada, a major mountain range of western North America, running along the eastern edge of California, lay between the large Central Valley depression to the west and the Basin and Range Province to the east. Extending more than two hundred fifty miles northward from the Mojave Desert to the Cascade Range of northern California and Oregon, the Sierra Nevada varied from about eighty miles wide at Lake Tahoe to about fifty miles wide in the South.

  Geologists had long recognized that the Sierra Nevada was an up-faulted, tilted block of the Earth’s crust. A major fault zone bounded the block on the east, and it was along this that the great mass that became the Sierra Nevada was uplifted and tilted westward. This explained the asymmetry of the range. As the block was uplifted the abrupt, east-facing escarpment was cut into by the erosive action of wind, rain, temperature change, frost, and ice, and a series of steep-gradient canyons developed. On its western flank, streams flowed more gently down the geologic dip slope, creating massive alluvial fans that encroached into the Central Valley of California. Though the massive uplift began many millions of years ago, much of it occurred during the past two million years.

  In the days of the dinosaurs, a chain of volcanoes similar to the present day Cascade region coursed the Sierra. Much magma flowed out to the surface as lava through these intrusions, while even more solidified deep underground amidst immense pressures to form the characteristic ubiquitous gray-white granite common in the range. Over time, erosion scoured off much of the weaker volcanic rock above the granite, revealing domes and the widespread granite intrusion into the Earth’s crust that extended the length of the range. Less than five million years ago, the Sierra Nevada began to rise as the Pacific plate pushed under the North American plate. This created a massive tilted fault along the eastern edge of the range, raising the Sierra and sinking the land to the east. This ongoing process raised the elevation of the range yet higher with each slippage of the fault.

  Harry guided his horse down the trail, all the while searching the rock outcroppings and overhangs as well as the dense brush for signs of the Yeti. Not seeing any, he and Dixie continued until they reached a sheer drop off next to a narrow ledge. Harry dismounted and helped Dixie off her horse. Together they sat perched on a large flat boulder looking west into a searing sun. Harry doffed his pack, found a water bottle, and handed it to Dixie.

  “Thanks,” she said after a big gulp.

  Harry took a drink of the water and replaced the bottle in his daypack.

  “You can see forever up here, can’t you?”

  He nodded and put an arm around her. “It’s beautiful. Can you believe, honey, that those animals that we risked our lives getting over here are now loose and somewhere out there? They could be anywhere.”

  He used the binocs to scan the western horizon and shook his head.

  “Nothing. I don’t see anything.”

  They remounted and continued their way down Cinder Mountain while a number of hawks sailed through the blue sky above them. As the sun began its downward course toward the horizon, a few scattered clouds formed overhead. They continued on in a spiraling switchback fashion toward the plain. Near the base of the mountain the orange ball of the sun dipped below the horizon and the temperature turned cooler. Harry hopped off his mount and stretched his legs. Dixie followed suit.

  “Harry,” she said, “have you ever wondered why one of our graduate assistants would turn bad, like Jimmy? I mean how did we miss something in his underlying personality that led him to do such things to his Yeti as Millie described? My god, we entrusted the animal to his care! How could he treat the thing like that? I am so ashamed for our program, I don’t know what to say.”

  “Do you think it was a flaw in his basic character or personality or do you think he was conditioned over time by repeated dealings with the Yeti?”

  “I don’t know, but whatever it was, we, the faculty, missed it. We either missed it when we were selecting persons to come up here or Dr. Radner missed it in his daily dealings with Jimmy. Either way, I feel it was our responsibility to protect those animals and we failed. I’m sick about it and will be sicker still if anything happens to them.”

  “Honey, there’s nothing we can do now but try and find them and bring them back safely to the facility. But it’s starting to get dark so we need to get back up the mountain. We haven’t heard from anyone today so I guess the search is a bust.”

  “I think in the future, if there is a future for the primate facility,” Dixie said, “we need to make sure the grad assistants have the right personality for this job. This place.”

  That evening over dinner, the Sheriff outlined his plans for the next day. Since the Yeti were not on Cinder Mountain, the search area needed to be enlarged. He had put out an APB describing the Yeti to all county sheriff departments in the state and all police departments.

  “So, first thing in the morning,” he said, “we’ll be moving the command post down to the base of the mountain.”

  Radner pushed his plate away and sat back in his chair. “I cannot believe they made it off the mountain,” he said. “I just can’t accept it.”

  “Dr. Radner,” Drayton cleared his throat. “We found where they tore through the security fence, left a huge hole. The amazing thing is that it was between the visual field of two adjacent security cameras, in a blind spot, if you will. Something I never noticed before. The blind spot, I mean. They must be incredibly strong to tear a hole that size in a steel fence. Hard to believe.”

  “Interesting how they knew where the blind spot was located,” Radner said and he took a sip of his coffee.

  “I am always amazed,” Harry said, “when someone who isn’t familiar with the Yeti is surprised at their unbelievable strength. And intellect. I’m sure our veterinarian can speak to innate animal intelligence.”

  Dr. Siscom put down his fork, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and nodded. “It seems that every time we humans announce that we’ve discovered something that makes our species unique, we find nestled in some far corner some other species that renders our opinion obsolete. You would think we’d have learned to be more cautious over the years.

  “Going further, people have always viewed some animals as more intelligent than others--in European cultures, dogs, horse
s, great apes, and, more recently, dolphins, and parrots are seen as intelligent in ways that other animals are not. Crows have been attributed with humanlike intelligence by almost every culture that has encountered them.

  “A number of recent survey studies have demonstrated the consistency of these rankings between people in a given culture. A common image is the scala naturae, the ladder of nature on which animals of different species occupy successively higher rungs, with humans typically at the top. Comparative psychologists have sought in vain for ways of providing an objective underpinning for these subjective and anthropocentric judgments.

  “Part of the difficulty is the lack of agreement about what we mean by intelligence even in humans. For example, it obviously makes a big difference whether language is considered as essential for intelligence or not.

  “But in any case, different animals, including humans, seem to have different kinds of cognitive processes, which are better understood in terms of the ways in which they are cognitively adapted to their different ecological niches, than by positing any kind of hierarchy.

  “One question that can be asked coherently is how far different species are intelligent in the same ways as humans are; in other words, are their cognitive processes similar to ours. Not surprising, our closest biological relatives, the great apes, tend to do best on such an assessment.

  “It is less clear that the species traditionally held to be intelligent do well against this standard, though among them, the crows and parrots typically are found to outperform other groups, and among the carnivores, dogs generally show better performance than cats.

  “Despite ambitious claims, evidence of unusually high human-like intelligence among whales and dolphins is patchy, partly because the cost and difficulty of carrying out research with marine mammals. It means that experiments suffer from small sample sizes and inadequate controls and replication.”

  Dixie smiled. “Dr. Siscom, I didn’t realize you were such an authority.”

  The veterinarian blushed and looked down at his plate. He was rarely so eloquent.

  “You just make my point, Dr. Siscom, that we have barely scratched the surface when it comes to understanding animal intelligence.”

  “I guess I have a lot to learn about the field of animal psychology,” Radner said. “I have been so consumed with genetics, of late, that I have overlooked certain other fields.”

  “And the strength of these Yeti,” Millie said. “To think that they just ripped a huge hole in our chain-link fence. Wow.”

  Later, in their dorm room, Harry watched as Dixie wrote in a notebook.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Keeping a diary,” she said.

  “But why?”

  “Because later I want to be able to remember every detail of this experience. Who knows why? I just do, that’s all.”

  Harry shrugged and changed into his scrubs before retiring. As he lay in the bed, he watched his wife with amusement.

  Chapter 13

  The following morning Harry was back in the saddle on the dun gelding. Sheriff Calder had moved his command post and horse trailer to the base of Cinder Mountain. The command post was a small travel trailer that was parked on a wide spot off the dirt road leading to the mountain and a gasoline generator provided it with electricity. Drayton drove Harry to the command post and there he saddled the dun himself and headed northward, alone, across the plains. He persuaded Dixie to remain behind and go over the research projects with Millie and Radner. She had, predictably, protested, but in the end, Harry managed to have his way.

  Armed with a topographic map of the area and his GPS, he felt he was ready for any contingency and couldn’t get lost. Clouds hung in low billows over the plains, blunting the sun’s fury while a gentle breeze swept him and the gelding along. Dense rock formations and mesquite shrubs punctuated the plain. Only a lone Joshua tree every mile or so interrupted the monotonous landscape.

  The gelding kicked up small dust devils as Harry moved north. He had a vague idea of some ancient Indian ruins farther northwest that Radner mentioned on his earlier trip. Harry didn’t know why but he turned his horse in that general direction, hoping he might pick up tracks of the Yeti.

  He found nothing.

  Farther along, he came to a ravine, an arroyo, a dried streambed that was carved into the dried cracked earth and meandered in a northwesterly direction. Pushing his horse down into the arroyo, he followed its serpentine course for several hours, stopping periodically to drink from his water bottle. The clouds were now darker, with a line building into menacing thunderheads. In the distance, lightning sparked in dramatic bolts and thunder rolled across the plains like artillery.

  In the semiarid southwestern United States, water was an important ecological factor. However, most streams in the region were ephemeral--dry for much of the year and flowed only during flash floods or spring snowmelt. Many of these streams were confined to deep, steep-walled channels entrenched into alluvial valley bottoms. These channels were called arroyos and were found in drylands throughout the world.

  Most arroyos in the Southwest were cut between 1880 and 1910. Prior to this historic episode of arroyo-cutting, settlers characterized valley bottoms as marshy wetlands or grasslands with shallow channels. During arroyo-cutting, incision and subsequent widening of channels led to the loss of thousands of acres of farmland, destruction of roads, dams, and canals, and ultimately the abandonment of a number of communities.

  The one in which Harry plodded was not a particularly wide arroyo, only twenty feet wide at the most, with sides extending up six or seven feet. The floor of the arroyo was soft sand, a definite change from the rock and grasses of the plain.

  Harry’s horse stopped.

  He kicked the horse’s sides with his heels but the horse didn’t move. He pawed the ground, threw his head.

  Suddenly, the gelding reared, throwing Harry from the saddle. He landed on his side, legs askew, against a boulder. When his right leg hit the ground, it sent a shock wave of pain through his ankle and knee and into his head, momentarily blinding him. He rubbed his eyes hoping to lessen the pain. The gelding was nowhere to be seen.

  Gone.

  Damn, Harry thought, what could have spooked the animal? Then he saw it. A brown snake coiled up against a rock, its flared head at the ready.

  Harry lay in the arroyo and eyed the snake until, apparently bored, it slithered away.

  Harry attempted to stand but the pain in his leg made him lightheaded and he fell back to the ground. Head reeling, he pulled himself against a boulder and propped himself into a sitting position, looked about.

  “Shit!” he yelled into the air. His water and lunch were on the horse as were his maps and GPS. At least the day was cooler than the previous ones or he would be cooked beneath a broiling sun. He knew he was in a precarious situation--alone, on foot, in the high desert, with no food or water, no weapon, and no one who knew the exact route he took. Dixie wouldn’t expect him back at the research facility until later in the day, and all Drayton knew was he headed north.

  He needed to find water and some shelter.

  But how? Where?

  The ache in his leg made concentration difficult. But if he just sat in this place he would become dehydrated and die before help found him.

  With considerable effort, he pulled himself to the top of the arroyo and peered over its rim into the vastness beyond. Nothing but sand, rocks, boulders, and mesquite for miles in every direction. Overhead, the storm clouds billowed and the wind picked up, blowing tiny grains of sand in his face. They stung like tiny needles. He gazed off to the northwest but saw nothing that looked like Indian ruins. They must be out there, somewhere, he reasoned.

  A loud clap of thunder startled him. He knew, when the rains came, the arroyo would become a raging stream so he needed to climb over the rim. He pushed himself onto an elbow, dug the toes of his boots into the arroyo’s crust, and inched his way over its crest. Pain racked his leg,
the throbbing pounded in his temples. With each step up the arroyo wall and each time he jabbed the toe of his boor into the hardened earth, a bolt of pain seared his brain. Where was that damned horse, he cursed. When he left Dixie earlier, the thought of dying in the desert never entered his mind. Now he was fighting for his life. Using considerable effort, he pulled himself out and lay on his back, panting. The energy expended left him exhausted but he knew he had to find the ruins before dark and the storm hit. He pulled himself along using his good leg to push, slithering over the ground like the snake he had seen earlier.

  It was backbreaking work and progress was slow, agonizingly slow. The desert plain, having acted as an oven, reflected its heat back into his pain-racked body, sapping his strength further. Perspiration covered his forehead, ran into his eyes--the salt stinging them. He was surprised that he was sweating. Figured he was dehydrated by now. He continued crawling at a snail’s pace, trying to concentrate, not on his predicament, but on moving forward. Mind over matter. His lips were swollen, his mouth parched. He couldn’t help thinking of Dixie. And how he hoped she would start worrying sooner rather than later.

  He hadn’t crawled more than a hundred yards when the rain began. A drizzle at first, it progressed to a frank downpour within a matter of minutes. Harry rolled over onto his back and opened his mouth, letting the large raindrops moisten his lips and tongue. It tasted like dust, but it was better than nothing. Feeling somewhat better, he continued on.

  Soon, his clothes were drenched. The temperature dropped, and the wind blew out of the north. It wasn’t long before he was chilled, but he kept moving, crawling, hoping that all the work involved would keep him warmed. Within an hour, however, his body shook with a violent chill. The sky continued to dump sheets of rain, punctuated by lightning strikes and booming thunder. Harry never heard thunder so loud. Out on the desert plain, with nothing to absorb, the sound his eardrums pounded with each booming rattle.