Near Pangobche, Nepal. 1975.

Dozens of human-like forms stood motionless in the knee-deep snow, only the starlight from the moonless sky making their silhouettes discernable from the dark rock and ice of the mountain. Miami froze, wishing she could conceal her breath, but hot clouds of mist from her nose betrayed her.

I don't believe this. I didn't really believe I'd see even one.

Though she'd been hiking solo for days, only now with these presences so close, did she feel alone and vulnerable. She slowly slid her gloved hand down along her white and gray camouflage snowsuit, reaching for the camera hooked to her belt.

Sun will kill me if I run now. Somehow he'll know.

Her hand closed around the camera. She raised it to her eye and held the trigger. A series of rapid flashes lit the night, sending artificial light reflecting off ice and rock, their twisted shadows flowing up the mountain; but the forms remained unexpectedly still.

A hollow howl resounded from the rocky crags, the only motion a small whirlwind of powder conjured by the gusting wind. She flicked the spelunker flashlight on her forehead on. The beam sparkled on a one of the forms, an almost human statue of ice; too-long arms spread wide like a scarecrow, animal mouth open in a frozen scream. Its melted and refrozen lower body gave the appearance of being fused with the ground.

Ice. Men of ice. Real snowmen. Not abominable wild men of the mountains. I'm such a fool.

Miami laughed out loud. She feared Huang, or even Sun himself would come charging down the slope to tease her. Huang had joked he'd build a snowman along the way to the monastery for her, but she never guessed he had been serious.

She wondered if any yeti were really out there. Would she come across one, casually sitting on a rock or eating berries? Maybe she'd hear inhuman cries in the night and awaken to find enigmatic tracks passing by her tent, just like in other accounts.

Even the Sherpa term meaning 'manlike thing that is not a man', Meh-teh, intrigued her. The first Westerner to report an encounter with a yeti, had mis-transcribed the Sherpa words, which were then mistranslated by the newspapers as "Abominable snowman."

These snowmen don't look so abominable.

The wind gusted again. This time she felt the cold and tasted the dry, clean air. She dug into her pack and checked the map.

Shouldn't be far now.

Miami stuffed it back into her pack and checked on her precious cargo. Though it was wrapped in burlap and cloth and tied with twine, she knew inside rested the Tojkibi Prayer Wheel, a holy Tibetan artifact that Huang had somehow procured and smuggled out of China. They were under orders to trade it for the Yeti's hand, a supposed actual hand of a meh-teh the monks kept in the remote monastery she was heading to, somewhere up the mountain. The hand was off limits to outsiders after the son of a wealthy railroad tycoon, had attempted to steal it in 1959 by removing the thumb and replacing it with human bones. Miami knew, thanks to Sun, the real hand was kept hidden in the monastery, and the stolen bones were from a fake kept by the monks for such encounters with Westerners.

She shone her light on the icy garden of sculptures, searching for footprints. There were none. Huang was only supposed to have been a day or two ahead, to negotiate the trade. He didn't have time to play in the snow. If it wasn't Huang, whoever had made the snowmen had covered their tracks expertly.

Whatever the case, Huang was real and he was waiting for the cargo. She set her pack and trudged up the mountain.

The clouds glowed red in the predawn sky. In the dim orange light, Miami spied Huang standing in one of his weird yoga poses next to a small round igloo fifty yards away from the monastery -- a simple brown building, which somehow looked more in place on the mountain than the half melted snow dome.

She kept her face composed and expressionless as she neared, glancing at the ice hut just long enough for him to notice.

"They won't let me inside till I show them the cargo," Huang said.

Miami kept her face blank, seizing the opportunity to pay him back for his teases and hazing.

"All this excitement and time to build me an army of snowmen," she said.

Huang gave no sign he understood, but she knew he wasn't stupid. He spoke perfect English, but she had heard him speak Chinese, Spanish, and the language of the South Pacific island they had stopped over at.

"Hear from him?" Miami asked.

"Nothing," Huang said. "Got any food?"

Neither knew the real name of their enigmatic employer. Last job, he had gone by the name A. Nubis, and the time before that, her first, H. Houdini.

J. Sun. Is this his real name?

"What's he really like?" Miami asked.

She pictured Sun on the day he had first shown up on her Houseboat at the Keys, an imposing and emotionless man, looking for a boat to take him into the Bermuda Triangle. He wore heavy black clothes and despite the Florida sun, it seemed as if a dark cloud hung around him.

"I want to know what you saw, out there in the triangle," he had said.

On her smuggling runs she had seen many strange things, blue lights, rain with no clouds, even an entire rum-runner disappear, but she had told no one. How could he have known?

"Who the hell are you?" she had said.

"I'm the one who comes when there are secrets."

She wasn't sure she believed his mad talk about ghosts, conspiracies, and secret worlds. In fact, she didn't know what to believe anymore, but she did believe her eyes and working for Sun she'd seen a lot more than she understood.

Huang grunted as he rummaged through her pack.

"He wants nothing more than to bathe the shadows of this world in light. You will learn this or you will go back to sleep, like the rest of the world."

Miami thought of the tourists who came to the Keys to fish and swim in tranquil shores, oblivious to the locations of the reefs that she knew so well. Sun made her feel that the nature of the world was like that, one submerged coral city after another, just out of view. For a moment she wished she were sleeping on her houseboat, with the gentle waves rocking her into another carefree day of the simple life.

The red clouds lightened to pink as the first rays of the sun crept out from behind the mountain.

"You have your weapon?" Huang whispered, his eyes fixated over her shoulder.

"Yeah."

Miami turned to see orange and yellow robed monks silently filing out of the monastery like a line of ants.

"Just follow my lead," Huang said. "Do as I do, and if things go to hell don't let them get the cargo."

A fire crackled in a big iron ring in the center of the spacious, uncluttered common room of the monastery. They sat cross-legged with the monks in a wide circle around it. Tendrils of smoke rose to the ceiling before disappearing through a smoke hole hidden somewhere in the sturdy, crisscrossing wooden beams.

Huang spoke quickly in Chinese to the monk next to him. The Tibetan man's black eyes never left Huang. His ageless face, which could have been twenty or fifty Miami couldn't tell, showed no sign of emotion. Though he wore a smile and spoke with a friendly tone, or at least as friendly as Miami had ever heard in Chinese, small veins on the sides of his bald head were raised with tension.

A soft mewing seemed to emanate from the shadows. Huang and the monks didn't react. Miami wondered if she were the only one hearing it.

The conversation paused and Huang turned to her. "Open your pack and show them the cargo."

"It's tied and wrapped," she said.

"Just do it. They don't believe we have it."

Miami dug into her pack and produced the burlap-covered bundle. She slit the twine ties, unwrapped it, and handed it to Huang. He held the old prayer wheel aloft using the burlap as a mitt. The handle's old brown wood looked brittle and the metal ball, meant to spin prayers on the wind in every direction, oxidized with age.

The monks stretched and craned their necks to glimpse the relic. The one who had been conversing with Huang examined it closely and carefully, though never touched it. He spoke softly to himself as he did.

"He says he saw it as a child before the Chinese came," Huang said to Miami. "Now wrap it up and put it back."

She didn't like Huang barking orders to her. She sighed and unzipped the front of her snowsuit, hoping to cool down, not sure if she was just steaming mad or truly warm from the fire after days in the cold.

The monks reacted as if they had just seen another prayer wheel. Reflexively Miami checked her thermal top.

The lead monk, (she still didn't know any names), moved closer to her and reached for her neck. She raised her arm, blocking him, her muscles tensed to fight.

"Cool it," Huang said, "They just want your necklace."

Miami ran her fingers along the necklace- a string of periwinkles and tiny clamshells strung together with heavy weight fishing line. She wore it everywhere, for luck. Along with the boat and knowledge of how to live on the ocean, it was the only thing her father had ever given her.

"Tell them it's personal and not for trade," she said.

"Nothings personal," Huang said. "Give it to them. Sun will buy you a thousand."

"It's not that, it's just…"

She didn't want to share her memories of her father with Huang, here on the mountain, surrounded by these strange men.

A look of recognition came over Huang's face. He nodded, as if he too had already made such a sacrifice for Sun.

"He knew," Huang said, exhaling a short puff of a laugh, shaking his head like a poker player who had just watched a master win an impossible hand. "He sent you here knowing you must choose."

"Well I'm not giving it up."

"They're not accepting any trade that doesn't involve it. Do you want to be the one to tell him what happened?"

Miami stood listening to her heavy breaths and the crackling fire. The mewing started again and this time one of the monks stood and picked up a white cub from a basket just outside the circle.

Probably a snow leopard this high up.

The monk cradled the tiny cat like an infant.

Miami touched her necklace, remembering the day she watched her father gather and string the shells. "For whenever you are far from the sea," he'd said. Though today she was here among the clouds, she knew her heart was not far from the sea. It never would be. But these monks were as far as could be, living ten thousand feet above it. The rolling blue and the face of her father would always be with her. This chance to do right for Sun, would not.

She took off the necklace and threw it to the monk next to Huang. He gracefully caught her wild throw with one hand, despite his look of surprise.

"Bring the hand," she said, then added, "the real one," over Huang's echoing translation.

The monk laughed. "And why do you want the hand?" he asked in clear but accented English.

"You speak English?" Huang exclaimed.

"Harvard University," the monk said with a mischievous smile. "I too, have been around the world."

Huang shook his head in surprise.

Miami kept her wits and continued the bargaining by answering the question. "We want proof. Proof the yeti are real."

Huang smiled.

"And what will you do with such proof? Sell magazines? Do you think it will bring fame? Or do you seek a trophy for your mansions in Texas?"

An obvious reference to the '59 fiasco.

"I just want to know," Miami said. "I need to know. But my employer, and I tell you I'm just a shadow of the intensity of this man, he needs to know with a desire that is not of this earth."

The monk's forehead furrowed in contemplation, then he nodded approvingly. "The hand is a sacred relic to us," he said. "Left here hundreds of years ago by a wild man of the mountain to affirm our bond. We, like them, are stewards of this mountain."

"My necklace," Miami interjected. "It's just about the most sacred thing I have."

"I could see this," the monk replied calmly. "And this is why I trust."

"What about the prayer wheel?" Huang asked.

"Recovering the wheel was no small task. If you want to see the hand, I can show you, but you cannot have it. Any attempt to steal it would be foolish.

"We didn't come here to steal," Miami said.

"I know. Which is why I make this offer. Give us your shells and the wheel, and we will show you a wild man of the mountain."

"That's a fool's bargain," Huang said. "How are you going to do that?"

The head monk clapped and the one who had been tending the cub, returned it to the basket and left the room. He returned a minute later, leading a disheveled man by the hand.

Though dressed in the orange and yellow robes of the other monks, the man's face bore none of the same serenity. His mane of unruly hair hung down his back and over his primitive face. He eyed the kitten as if no one else were around.

"This is no meh-teh," Huang said. "He's human. Insane looking, but human."

"He is one of us," the monk said. "Though he walks both in our world and the world of spirits. Since he was a child, the meh-teh answer his call. He will take you out on the mountain."

"Give us a moment," Miami said.

She and Huang retreated to outside the circle.

"How many do you count," Huang asked.

"Fifty-two, you?"

"The same," he said.

"We're not going to take it by force. Are we here for the hand, or for the proof?"

"The hand is only a stepping stone to the proof. If they can produce a real meh-teh, then all the better."

"Alright, then," Miami said.

They walked back over to the circle. "You've got a deal," Miami said to the monks. "But I'm keeping the prayer wheel with me. It's yours after we see a meh-teh."

The wild monk looked away from the kitten and smiled, revealing a mouthful of crooked yellow teeth.

The monk climbed over rocks and plowed through drifts with a strength his scrawny build did not show. Miami and Huang struggled to keep him in their sight.

If the tough going bothered Huang, he didn't let on. He trudged along holding a small silver dish above his head, its wires trailing into his pack; stopping only to scratch notes onto a rough map he was drawing.

"What's it do?" Miami asked.

"Guiding a satellite making a computerized map of the mountain." He smiled. "We're about to move into an un-mapped area."

"This is the end of the twentieth century," Miami said. "How can there be any unmapped place left?"

As soon as the words left her lips, Miami realized she was wrong.

"The face of the mountain is always changing. Melting. Drifting. Sliding." Huang said. "What rough maps exist are inaccurate. Products of human failures. Like the one I'm drawing now."

Though the reefs and ocean floor are charted, the sea is ever changing. No map could chart the turbulence of wave cells and the great drifting kelp beds. The same could be true for the collapsing ice walls and drifting snow of mountains.

"Why?" Miami asked. "We're here for the yeti."

"Since there are no real maps of the mountain it remains truly uncharted. This is why the meh-teh are able to exist here."

Miami wiped snow off her face. "So you're killing them."

Huang smiled.

"Sun sent us here to kill them," Miami said, more to herself than to Huang. She pictured tourists' flippers scraping fragile coral heads.

"Sun wants proof they're real. I want them dead."

Miami stopped. "But why?"

Huang started to speak but then halted. Miami recognized the look on his face, his eyes open but seeing something far away. She imagined this was what she looked like when she thought of her father.

If they're not real, I can't be helping to kill them. But who built those snowmen out on the ice?

She realized she had not been paying attention and had lost sight of the wild monk.

"It's getting dark," she said. "Where's he gone off to?"

Wet snowflakes drifted lazily in the air. An animal cry pierced the quiet. A few hundred yards away, the monk crouched on a rock looking out at the last rays of the sun.

"How'd he get over there?" Huang said.

Miami wasn't looking forward to following over the rough terrain. She felt herself breathing shallower and getting less energy from the thin air.

They strapped their headlamps over their hats and flicked them on. Slowly they crawled over the rocks careful not to slip in the fresh snow.

The mountain felt different. Moving required more exertion, as if air in un-mapped territory were tangible and something to be fought through. Maybe she was just light headed.

In front of her, ice crumbled under Huang's boot, his beam of light wavering as he teetered, trying to regain balance before falling. His satellite dish landed softly in the snow next to him.

Miami rushed to him. "You alright?"

He gasped for air. Rapid shallow breaths.

"Deep breaths," Miami said. "Close your eyes, one breath at a time."

"Got to turn around," Huang mumbled.

"Not in the dark. Right now you need to rest."

Clouds pregnant with snow filled the sky. Miami's lonely beam searched the mountain for the monk, illuminating silent falling snowflakes. Something darted in and out of the light. She blinked, wondering if she were seeing things.

The monk?

She directed her beam back and forth quickly to try and glimpse him again. It was then that she saw them; tall and slender, long ape-like arms at the sides of their coarse, gray-haired bodies. A dozen meh-teh, all standing in a perfect line.

The line of between what Huang had mapped and what he had not.

Though she knew it could not be true, Miami felt if she squinted she would be able to see the line, but all she could see were the meh-teh, their faces obscured by long hair and falling snow.

She took a hesitant step forward, and reached for her camera. The meh-teh moved along the line, careful not to come closer to where they could not, or would not live. One brushed its frost-covered hair away from its face with its hand, and for a moment, she saw it regarding her with curious, almost sad, dark eyes.

Quickly she pulled the camera out and drew it like a pistol, the flash firing like lightening, but all she saw were blurry shapes scuttering into the darkness in wakes of swirling snow.

"W-what is it…" Huang said. He had stopped gasping and his breaths were slower and more regular, as if the meh-teh's absence had returned his wind.

Before Miami could speak, a gentle singing wafted through the darkness over the soft hiss of the breeze.

The monk.

She shone her beam but all she saw was the snow coming down harder.

"It's him," Miami said. "What's he saying?"

Huang sat up and listened. "It's to the tune of a hymn. Take me. I have brought this offering. Take me."

This is not good.

Huang wiped the snow off his hood and reached for his dish.

Miami crouched to reach for it too, not sure that letting him have it was a good idea, when something slammed into her. She fell forward, gasping out when she should have been breathing in. She coughed, a weight on her back pinning her, as hands ripped at the straps to her pack.

She bucked, throwing her attacker off. Sucking air, she saw the wild monk pull the prayer wheel from her ravaged pack.

As she got to her knees, Huang dove into view; tackling the monk with force Miami didn't think him capable of just a few moments ago. They rolled in the snow, Huang reaching for the prayer wheel, the monk growling and biting like a beast.

Miami stood up, took a calming breath, and drew her pistol.

"Kill him," Huang yelled, struggling to keep a hold on the thrashing monk.

Was he trying to attack us or just defending himself?

Miami wanted to know the mysteries of the yeti, but she wanted their secrets, not the yeti themselves, dead.

The monk broke free from Huang and tried to crawl away, dragging himself with his arms-- one hand clutching the prayer wheel-- while Huang held his ankles.

"Shoot," Huang yelled.

Miami stepped closer and kicked Huang's elbow. He let go of the monk who scrambled away into the darkness.

"You crazy?" Huang yelled.

She backed up, feigning surprise, purposefully crushing the silver dish as she did.

Huang groaned as if the equipment had been his hand.

"I thought you were him. It's the dark and all this snow."

"We have to get the prayer wheel back," Huang said.

"With them out there?"

The snow intensified. Miami and Huang's beams were eaten by the falling flakes and darkness.

After a moment, Huang's beam found the monk, standing on an outcropping of rock fifty yards away, spinning the prayer wheel.

Blurry shapes of the meh-teh surrounded him, as if they were made of the falling snow. The wind gusted and they all disappeared into an obscuring swirl of powder.

The landscape is changing; whatever maps Huang made would be losing their validity. Would meh-teh still be kept at bay? Maybe they're not interested in vengeance.

Huang stared into the darkness. She thought he would charge into the storm at any second.

"We've got to huddle together and let the snow bury us," Huang said, with a resignation that surprised her. "It's the only way to survive. It will insulate us."

Miami looked at the raging snow. As unpleasant as the prospect of moving closer to Huang seemed, the alternative was risking getting lost in the freezing darkness with the yeti. She lay down, moved her body against Huang, and let the snow cover them. The wind howled. She closed her eyes. The meh-teh were real. The world was indeed a series of submerged reefs. If she did not survive the night, at least she knew this much.

Miami woke up, warm. A horrible smell, body odor and the faint reek of garlic -- the smell of Huang-- met her as she opened her eyes into a world of white.

She rolled away from him and stretched her back, breaking out of the insulating layers of snow.

Sunlight from the cloud-free sky glittered on the fresh ice around her.

Another garden of snowmen, more melted and malformed than the ones she saw two days ago, surrounded her snowy bed. Melted snow and moisture beaded on her snowsuit. Her camera had survived worse conditions, but the snowmen were melting too fast, unnaturally fast, even for the beautiful day. As she snapped the photo, her instincts told her they'd be blurs of light, or not even on the prints at all.

Huang sat up, took off his hood, and brushed snow off his shoulders. He looked at the melting snowmen surrounding him, then walked over and touched the nearest one. Snow crumbled off it unremarkably.

"Come on," Miami said, heading down the mountain. "The monks will know where to find him."

They hiked in silence until they came to the monastery.

Smoke drifted from a gaping hole in the wall. Miami ran inside. The fire ring had been overturned and small fires smoldered on the floor. The monks were nowhere to be found. Huang took out his pistol and disappeared into the shadows.

Outside, a mechanical whir of engines whined. Miami peered out of the broken wall to see a black helicopter rise over the mountainside and land behind the monastery. Snow flew in all directions, spraying against a row of empty wire cages, their open doors flapping in the turbulent air.

The chopper's rotors slowed. Sleek doors in its side lifted open and two men wielding machine guns jumped out followed by a man all in black, his long trench coat trailing in the wind. J Sun.

Sun strode up to her as if his presence on the mountain were quite unremarkable.

Miami ran to him.

"It was you. You killed them," she said, not knowing if she meant the yeti or the monks. Before she knew it, she was punching the air before him, surprised at her outpouring of emotion.

Sun blocked her wild punches easily.

"No," he said, matter-of-factly. "The meh-teh did this."

Huang emerged from the monastery. "There's no one here," he said, showing no surprise at Sun's presence. "And the hand is gone."

Sun nodded to the two gunmen, who promptly began to search for hidden doors and hiding places.

"The prayer wheel, boss," Huang said. "One of the monks took it from her and disappeared on the mountain."

Miami didn't care that Huang was trying to make her look bad. She didn't even want to tell him about her sacrifice of the necklace and about Huang's mapping device.

He either already knew or he'd find out. He always did.

"Promise me you didn't kill them," she said to Sun.

It was too opportune. A huge burning hole in the monastery. All the monks gone, and then Sun showing up with armed men in an attack helicopter.

"You've got to tell me. I can never work for you again if you did."

Sun put his hands on her shoulders; his dark, almost empty eyes searching her.

"You believe," he said. "You've seen them. You believe."

I see only desire, not murder when I look back at him.

"There are no tracks, boss," Huang said. "Yeti or monk. Are all these men of the mountain lighter than air?"

Men of snow.

"All that matters is the end of the secret," Sun said. "We have killed one only to find another. What kind of creature can be seen but leave no footprints. Did the monks retreat with their secrets, or were they taken by the meh-teh?"

He turned to Miami. "You will find the answer."

I'm not sure what happened to the monks. Maybe Sun did kill them and take the hand, but I doubt it. Maybe the meh-teh exacted revenge for monks' failure in their stewardship.

"You," he said, turning to Huang. "You will stay here and rebuild this place."

It was clear from the way he spoke that when he had said, "stay" he meant indefinitely. One of the gunmen dragged a supply trunk out of the helicopter.

Looks like Huang is going to have company.

Sun stood still for a moment, his head tilted up as if he were listening or sniffing the wind. "This building will be a guard post against any who would pass into the unmapped lands."

I don't see the wisdom in leaving the fox guarding the hen house, but I no longer question him. His crazed theories don't seem so crazy anymore. I want to pretend that the world is a calm sea of tranquil water, but I can't.

Sun took Miami by the wrist and led her to the supplies.

Though he is not an abominable snowman of the mountain, he is a meh-teh none-the-less. Truly, a man-like thing that is not a man. I picture an ancient mummified yeti hand beneath his leather glove.

"Only come back when you can bring me this mountain's secrets," Sun said, extending his hand.

I stare into his eyes, blank and emotionless as the snow, and I know that I will.

The End

Story copyright Daniel Braum, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com