But before long the celebrations came to an end, and Con and Ellen were on their way home to Perry’s little flat, hardly able to keep their eyes open, and still unable to believe that there was real hope for their threatened friends far away on the treacherous ice.
N 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 airplane 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 toward them. Five engines. Five snowmobiles: huge armored monsters, part tank, part sledge, built for the hunt, pushing steadily onward 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, specially made for 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 mustache. 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!
“Spilled 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 schtickpigging!
“There!” said Bagwackerly suddenly. “Do you see?”
He pointed 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 was 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 favorites.”
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 Bagwackerly. “It’s this darned machine jigging about. Can’t you hold it steady?”
“I am,” 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 armored 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, George 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. Their machines had stopped; their greedy, glittering eyes were turned in amazement to the sky.
Airplanes. The sky had suddenly filled with planes, skimming low toward 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 stopped 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 MacDermot-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 MacDermot-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 yards.
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 Sheik 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 toward 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 unpack 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 walleyes and said: “It wasn’t an accident. They did it on purpose. People are bad.”
HE HOSPITAL THEY BROUGHT THE YETIS TO was a very famous one in a quiet London square. The nurses were kind and skillful, the doctors clever and comforting, and the matron wasn’t the starched and stuffy kind but a sympathetic person who let Con and Ellen stay with the yetis all day long, because she knew that people can’t get well if they are separated from those they love.
The yetis had become very famous after the children’s protest outside the palace and the rescue by the seaplanes of the British Antarctic Territory Research Station, and the nurses were kept busy shooing journalists and cameramen out of the wards. Perry had gone down to Somerset to look for his pig farm, but Con and Ellen had to have a police escort when they went to and from the hospital because of the journalists dogging them. And every night on television there was a bulletin about the yetis, and when it was on, the streets emptied, as bicycles and footballs were abandoned and children all over the country went inside to watch the news.
At first the news was grave. Lucy was very ill with pneumonia, and Uncle Otto’s wound was so deep that he had to have a long and difficult operation to remove the bullet. Both his and Lucy’s beds had the curtains drawn round them while doctors and nurses hurried backward and forward with syringes and trays of medicine and thermometers.
But slowly they both got better. They could tell that Lucy had turned the corner when she asked the nurses for a mirror and started worrying about the state of her stomach. “It’s my braids,” she murmured groggily. “They’re all undone.”
So the nurses, neat as only nurses can be, made her two lovely braids all ready for Queen Victoria if they found her again. After that Lucy managed to say sorry to a bowl of soup that the ward maid brought her. The next morning she said sorry to a dozen eggs, some grilled tomatoes, and the bunch of marigolds in a vase beside her bed. After that she was reckoned to be out of danger.
Uncle Otto’s wound, too, healed well. Soon he was walking on crutches, looking somehow very manly and distinguished, as people on crutches are apt to do, and it was now that something very nice happened to him. The clever doctors had found something to rub into his bald patch that wasn’t toothpaste or honey or cream cheese but a real medicine that someone had just invented to make hair grow. And almost day by day, as he lay in bed reading the books the kind library lady had brought him on a trolley, they could see the soft, dark down that covered his domed head grow steadily longer and stronger.
Grandma, of course, loved staying in the hospital. Being old, she had quite a lot of interesting things wrong with her like heartburn and fibroids and wind, which everybody in the hospital took seriously instead of just saying, “We must expect a few troubles as we get older,” like Lady Agatha had done.
A lot of doctors came to see Clarence, too, and put electrodes on his brain and tried to make him read things. But when the others explained that Clarence’s brain had been damaged when he was little and that he was very happy as he was and that they all loved him, they very sensibly left him alone.
With everything going so well, with messages coming in that the hunters had been turned out of Farley Towers and the proper owner was coming back, with Mr. Bellamy phoning to say that the children could stay as long as necessary, Con and Ellen should have been as happy as could be. In fact, they were worried sick.
And what they were worried about was Ambrose.
In the hospital, when the yetis first came, they hadn’t taken too much notice of Ambrose. He didn’t have pneumonia like Lucy or a gaping wound like Uncle Otto. He wasn’t old like Grandma and bits of his brain weren’t missing like Clarence’s. A bit of rest and warmth, thought the staff, and Ambrose, who was young and strong, would soon be himself again.
But Ambrose didn’t get well and strong, and Ambrose wasn’t himself again. When Con pointed out to the nurses that he wasn’t eating—wasn’t eating at all—they told him not to worry. “Young people often go off their food, especially after a shock. Just take no notice.”
So the children tried not to make a fuss as Ambrose sent away trayfuls of egg and chips, of castle puddings and banana custard. They tried not to worry when Ambrose lay there with his blue eye dull and sunken and his brown eye glazed and staring at the ceiling. They tried not to worry when Ambrose wouldn’t even look up at the telly, though they were showing a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
“Shall I tell you a story, Ambrose?” Con begged.
But Ambrose just shook his great shaggy head and sighed.
From the first moment she had found him, walleyed and crumpled and desperate to be loved, Lady Agatha had known that Ambrose wasn’t quite like the others. “I really think you could kill Ambrose by thinking unkind thoughts about him,” she had said to Con in the valley of Nanvi Dar. Since then, Ambrose had seen people come over the ice with guns; he had seen his uncle shot; he had known hatred.
And n
ow he turned his face to the wall and prepared to die.
In a week or so the doctors and nurses became worried, too. There was talk of force-feeding and intravenous drips and things that made the children’s blood run cold when they heard of them. And on the news bulletins, now, it was announced that though the other four yetis were improving steadily, there was slight concern about the youngest, Ambrose the Abominable.
After a few more days, the “slight concern” was changed to “serious concern.”
At night, the doctors made Ellen sleep in a spare room because she was so exhausted from the strain. But nothing could shift Con. He sat by Ambrose’s bed murmuring to him, telling him jokes, begging him for Lady Agatha’s sake, for Father’s sake, to make an effort—to eat something, to get well. But Ambrose just said, “People are not my brothers,” and grew steadily weaker and more lifeless and ill. Until a day came when the television newscaster looked out from the screen in a very serious way and said: “It is feared that there is little hope for the youngest of the yetis, Ambrose the Abominable, now seriously ill at Park Square Hospital, London.”
In the silent hospital, Con sat by Ambrose’s bed, trying to believe the unbelievable. There was no hope. It was going to happen. Ambrose the Abominable was going to die.
All day, children had thronged the square outside and stood silently, their faces turned to the hospital windows, waiting for news. Now it was night. Out in the corridor the nurse on duty sat in her glass cubicle guarding the white, disinfected room where Ambrose lay.
Inside the room there was no sound—even the soughing of the ventilator had ceased. Ambrose’s eyes were closed; his breath would not have stirred a feather. It could not be long now.
Suddenly in the corridor outside there was a scuffle. Then a voice—high and sharp and bossy—saying, “Let me go! Let me go at once!”