of this region, hoping to find something more substantial than the old fireside stories. It became a kind of obsession for me, to be honest. I went to natural history museums in London, Paris, Switzerland, and Germany. I spoke with professors who have studied the history of the Alps. I went to archives and read all the personal accounts I could find.
“There was a remarkable conference on cryptozoology last year in Lausanne. Cryptozoology is not only about sensational creatures like the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot. You may read about those kinds of monsters in the tabloids, but there are more ordinary discoveries all the time. For example, a new variety of jellyfish, one that had never been documented before, was recently discovered in the Mariana Trench, thirty-seven hundred meters underwater. Antarctica and Africa are full of undocumented life-forms. Cryptozoologists estimate that fifteen to twenty percent of the animals in the world are unknown to us. There is so much in nature we haven’t seen yet.”
She stood and went into the other room and returned with a backpack. She opened it and pulled out a worn paperback book, Sur la piste des animaux inconnues, by Bernard Heuvelmans. “Bernard Heuvelmans was the founding father of cryptozoology, the science of studying and identifying animals of more or less unverifiable existence.”
“You mean extinct?”
“Sometimes,” she said. “But more often they are animals that have not been documented by science.” She pulled a second book from her backpack. “This was published by Oxford University Press just this year. It is a scholarly investigation into Yeti, Sasquatch, Almasty, and Bigfoot accounts. It examines the eyewitness reports, the videos, the DNA analysis done on hair samples, and, to my mind, the most interesting part of this variety of scholarship: Eric Shipton’s famous nineteen fifty-one photographs of Yeti footprints.”
“I didn’t know such scholarship even existed,” I said.
“Not many people do,” she said. “The Yeti is a topic most often associated with crackpots and B-movies. Not serious scholarship.”
I picked up Justine’s book and paged through it, skimming over pictures, graphs and charts, and story after story of Yeti sightings. There were the photographs from Sir Edmund Hillary’s expedition to the Himalayas and an essay about Sasquatch sightings in Oregon. As I paged through it, nothing in the book seemed to offer definitive proof. Footprints could be faked, photographs doctored, blood samples altered. If I hadn’t seen Vita myself, I would have tossed the book aside without giving it a second thought.
As I handed the book back to Justine, a business card fell to the floor. I picked it up and read:
Ludwig Jacob Feist
Cryptozoologist
Museum of Zoology
Lausanne, Switzerland
Justine plucked the card from my fingers and tucked it into her pocket. Then she turned to a series of photographs in the book. “Here they are,” she said. “These were taken at Menlung Glacier in Nepal. They changed the way the world thinks about the legend of the Yeti.”
I looked at a series of exceptionally clear photographs of footprints in snow. They showed a large, wide foot with two big toes and three small ones.
“Shipton’s pictures are so clear, and so perfectly composed, that there could be no doubt about their authenticity. Some later scholars have tried to argue that ice melt caused the enlargement of the heel, but that has been effectively dismissed. In fact, it is hard to argue with Shipton’s evidence. There were a number of witnesses at the site—the prints were actually discovered by Michael Ward and their authenticity verified by Sir Edmund Hillary, who led the expedition. There were many Englishmen as well as native Sherpas who saw the prints and verified Shipton’s account. The scientific community accepted the Shipton photographs, and they are now the most concrete evidence that a species of simian–Homo sapiens still exists.”
“At least in nineteen fifty-one,” Pierre added.
“After thinking it through,” Justine said, “I have come to the conclusion that the creature I followed, the creature my grandparents had always warned us about—the Beast of Nevenero—is related to the Yeti, or a similar creature. The Sasquatch in North America, the Almasty in Russia—they all have similar traits, leave similar prints, have been described to have similar behaviors. Which leads me to believe that they are one species that has spread over numerous continents and evolved in different ways. Although, in fairness, the beast that I found diverged in very significant ways from traditional descriptions.”
“How so?”
“There were physical differences. Descriptions of the Yeti are more or less uniform—the monster is gigantesque, for example. But