YETI
The Yeti is a species of Bigfoot that lives in the Himalayas. The word derives from the Sherpa Yeh-The, which only describes one of three species of Yeti, the others being called the Dzu-The, which is the largest and attacks yaks, and the Meh-The, although European explorers called it 'the Abominable Snowman' since it lives usually above the snowline. In 1938, a Captain d'Auvergue, curator of the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta in India, was travelling in the Himalayas when he became snowblind. He says he was saved from exposure and hypothermia by a 9-ft Yeti who nursed him back to health. The first European explorer to see and record it was NA Tombazi, a Greek photographer on a British geological expedition. He saw a creature moving across the mountain slopes, clearly standing upright, which stopped and picked at dwarf rhododendron bushes as it went. What clinched the sighting for the photographer was that the creature wore no clothes. Unable, in those days of early cameras, to set up a shot of the creature, nevertheless he went after it, camera in hand, to take photos of its footprints, which he found to be 7 ins long and 4 ins wide, with 5 distinct toes. The instep was clear but not the heel, due to the slope that the creature had been traversing. The prints were 1 ½-2-ft stride. The locals said he had seen the 'Kanchenjunga demon'. The best tracks were found by Eric Shipton and Michael Ward in 1951 who found them on the slopes of the Menlung Glacier between Tibet and Nepal at an altitude of 20,000 feet. These were clearly bipedal footprints, 13 ins wide and 18 ins long; even allowing for the sun spreading the melting snow of these prints, there was no creature that could have made them in the district, for what man would walk in the snow barefooted? Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, the first people to climb to Everest's summit, also found giant footprints on the way up their triumphant ascent in 1953.
The King of Nepal keeps a court official whose task is solely to keep up with sightings of the Yeti. A recent expedition in the 1990s was guided by the Nepalese Yeti Finder to a tree in a wild and unfrequented part of the deeply-gorged forests where hunters have reported hearing the humanoid. Samples of hair were taken for analysis from the tree where the Yeti seemed to have rubbed itself. Back at the laboratory, the hair did not match with any known DNA hair samples of animals from that district. It was concluded that, although the scientists had been unable to catch sight of a Yeti, they had indeed found some of its coat. On the same expedition, they were introduced to an elderly woman who, it was said, had lived with a Yeti as its wife. She spoke a language which the Yeti Finder said was no known dialect of the region; the people in the village treated her with care and respect, entirely believing that her long absence from the village had been due to her sojourn with the Yeti.
Text from The Element Encyclopedia of Magical Creatures by John and Caitlin Matthews (HarperElement, 2005)
