New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 2017. xvii, 392 pp. (Graphs, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-19-946938-5.
Daniel C. Taylor’s lifelong search for the Yeti concludes triumphantly with this endearing memoir and meditation on the search for the wild inside himself. As a boy, Taylor lived in the Himalayas as the son of medical missionaries when he heard tales of colonial tiger hunts and was fascinated by Eric Shipton’s 1951 photographs of mysterious footprints in the snow near Mt. Everest. Sherpa porters and guides told Shipton that the footprints were made by Yeti, and this Sherpa word soon displaced other local names for a jungle man or wild creature in the Himalayas and colonized the Western imagination.
Taylor’s enthusiasm for the Yeti never flagged but took a more mature form in systematic searches of remote valleys during repeated journeys in the Himalayas. In the 1960s, Taylor drove a VW bus nicknamed “Yeti’s brother” from Europe to Kathmandu by selling seats to hippies. He later worked in Nepal for the US Agency for International Development and returned periodically as a consultant. While searching for the Yeti with his wife and young son in 1983, he mingles tales of the Barun Valley of Nepal with those of Winnie the Pooh’s expedition to find Heffalumps and Woozles. Taylor asked the King of Nepal, whom he knew from graduate school, for permission to examine bear footprints in the Royal Zoo and to investigate villagers’ comparisons of Yetis to Himalayan tree bears, and the King was delighted: “Are you saying that science does not know something that Nepali villagers know?” (234).
In the mountains, Taylor bought skulls of Himalayan bears in local markets and compared them to museum specimens collected a century earlier. By the 1980s, he matched plaster casts of bear paw prints with Shipton’s photographs and concluded that the footprints were made by Himalayan bears whose hind paws overprinted tracks made by its front paws. When Taylor suggested that these might represent a hitherto unknown species of tree-bear, he was disappointed at the reaction of scientists and conservation organizations, whose self-confidence “reminds me of some missionaries I knew as a child” (180). Taylor eventually agreed that the differences between certain bear skulls or footprints did not represent a new species, but rather variations in age and maturity among the specimens. DNA tests later confirmed that the potential “Yeti” were not anomalous creatures but instead varieties of Himalayan or Tibetan bears.
Taylor’s deeply personal Yeti should be widely read not because he solves a riddle, but because he wraps this mystery in an enigma with dramatic tales: trekking and rafting in the Himalayas, adopting a daughter in Kathmandu, recovering a suitcase with a Himalayan bear skull inadvertently left at a US highway rest-stop, or stumbling into an encampment of smugglers on the Nepal-Tibet border. (Some of these accounts appear at greater length in Something Hidden Behind the Ranges by Daniel Taylor-Ide [San Francisco: Mercury House, 1995]). Taylor’s search for the Yeti inspired him to work with local communities to create new national parks and nature preserves, one in the Barun Valley of Nepal and another in the Tibetan borderlands of Qomolangma (Everest) in China.
Some passages oscillate between dispassionate scientific discourse and lyrical, new-age romanticism. Discussions of bioresilience, the Anthropocene, or minimal viable population mathematics appear alongside meditations on the human desire for the wild and the role of language and representations in shaping reality. Yetis do exist, he argues, in the space between the ideal and the real, manifesting and naming a primordial human desire for the wild. “The Yeti is neither fully present in nature nor fully absent. Like a novel whose words may be fiction, it tells a story of true meaning” (345).
Taylor set out to solve a mystery, and rediscovers something he knew as a child while playing in the wild or reading Kipling or Jim Corbett novels. He asks of Western mountaineers: “Might it be that people who go into such wilds are discovering the Yeti in themselves?” (43). Based on his quest, Taylor views the Yeti as a calling that is universally human: “For thirty years, I’ve been searching for a wildness that is inside me” (366).
Almost all his discoveries are made in dialogue with other people in the Himalayas, and his desire to locate a universal wild in our species sometimes makes it difficult for him to hear what they are saying. In the 1950s, he showed Shipton’s photographs of Yeti footprints in never-before-walked-on-snows to a coolie in the bazaar at Mussoorie, who tells him: “You are still a boy. You do not know that in these mountains, even high up, people always travel. Never think no one has passed” (91). After developing the theory that Yeti were Himalayan bears in the 1980s, he recalls that the King of Bhutan told him the same thing in 1961. Taylor was accompanied by a variety of local informants in the Barun Valley of Nepal, and at the end of the book Lendoop, his oldest friend in the village of Shyakshila, interrupts Taylor’s reveries at the end of a solitary journey in the Barun Valley by asking for help in making a walking trail for Yeti tourists.
Initially shocked, Taylor thought “the cathedral of Nepal’s wildness was holy: the Barun” (383). Lendoop explains that with the restrictions of a national park, tourists going to the mountains now bypassed the village, resulting in lost jobs for villagers and lost opportunities for tourists to see this special place. Taylor agrees to help and recasts the request: “The opportunity Lendoop was proposing was for the world to join in making the Barun sacred” (384). Taylor buys shovels and equipment and provides funds for “the Yeti Trail,” which he sees as a central aisle in a natural cathedral, “and the people of Shyakshila are this basilica’s sextons” (384). In the end for Taylor, the mystery of the Yeti is the search for “being with the Divine” (386).
Peter H. Hansen
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, USA