Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

Bob's Yeti Problem

Written by Lawrence Person

Illustrated by David Maier

One morning Bob Krusden stepped outside his cabin to discover three yeti carcasses embedded in his front yard.

He was pretty sure they were yeti rather than bigfeet, as their pelts were a handsome silver-white rather than brown. Two of them were semi-naked, wearing only some sort of weird loincloth and bandoleer arrangement, while the third wore what seemed to be a dull brown uniform. All three were suffering from what Bob had learned to describe, during his three seasons writing for St. James Street, as "massive blunt trauma." Two were planted face down a good half-foot into the pine-needle covered loam outside his cabin, and the one in uniform seemed to have come down on top of the others. All three had broken limbs and were surrounded by copious quantities of dried blood.

Bob was, to say the least, surprised. Though it had been getting close to dusk, he was sure there had been no dead yeti in front of his cabin when he had come home from his afternoon hike the day before. From the looks of things, they had fallen from a great height sometime during the night without him waking. That didn't surprise him. Trish, his ex-wife, had always said he could sleep through an air-raid siren. Certainly he had slept through her loading up their downstairs furniture and leaving divorce papers on the pillow.

When he had rented the cabin for the summer, he was pretty sure the real estate agent hadn't mentioned any yeti, dead or otherwise. Moreover, the fact that yeti were generally thought of as mythological creatures, and ones native to the Himalayas rather than the Rockies, merely heightened the odd nature of the situation.

Bob wondered what to do. He had come up to Colorado to spend time cranking out screenplays far from Hollywood's clamoring Babel, and had already finished two with a third in progress. Dealing with cyrptozoological remains wasn't part of the plan.

He finally decided to head on into town. Ed might know if anything like this had happened before and who he should contact. Besides, he was out of cornflakes.

****

Bob pulled up in front of Ed's General Store, Hunting Emporium and Internet Café. Ed Ridley was a man of many talents, most of which involved avoiding real work. The general store portion of the business offered staples at only moderately usurious prices, while the hunting supply portion sold lures, bait, ropes, hand-warmers, ammo, etc. for a good three to five times what you would pay at your local sporting goods store. The Internet café consisted of four Formica tables with old, battered iMacs hooked up to a landline upload and satellite download for a princely $10 an hour (one hour minimum), mostly for hunters who wanted to send E-mail or check their stocks. But these days Ed's biggest cyberspace venture was swapping deer and elk leases online, leaving the store's actual grunt work to his sullen teenage son, Mike, who was busy stocking cans of beans when Bob came in.

"Hi, Mike," said Bob. "Nice day today."

"Yeah, whatever," said Mike, not looking up.

Ed nodded at him from the counter as he passed, cradling his phone with his shoulder and typing into his laptop with the other. "Three for Saturday night? Yeah, I think I can arrange that," he said.

Bob drifted around the shop, picking up a box of cornflakes, a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread, a can of Folgers, and a four-pack of toilet paper. By the time he brought it up to the register, Ed was off the phone.

"That'll do ya?" asked Ed, running a scanning wand over the items.

"Yeah. Say, Ed, you ever see any yeti up these parts?"

"Yeti?" he asked uncertainly.

"Yeah, you know, yeti, abominable snowmen, bigfoot . . ."

"Oh. Bigfoot! Yeah, we had ourselves a little bigfoot boom down in Silverton around 1977, 1978 or so, whenever they had that bigfoot on The Six Million Dollar Man. Since then I can't really recall too many sightings. Most of our crazies see saucers or black helicopters these days."

"Well, I don't think I'm crazy, but this morning I found three dead yeti out in front of my cabin."

Ed stopped scanning. "Yeti?"

"Yeah."

"Three of 'em?"

"Yeah."

"Dead?"

"Oh, yeah. Looks like they had fallen a long way before smacking into the ground."

Ed scratched his head, then finished bagging Bob's groceries. "Can't say as I ever heard about anyone finding any dead bigfoots around here."

"Well, I think these are more yeti than bigfoot. They've got silver pelts."

Ed nodded sagely, as though anyone knew what color yeti pelts were. "Well, I'd tell you call Sheriff Parker, but he's in Pueblo getting his gallbladder out. That'll be $18.46."

Bob fished a twenty out of his wallet. As Ed was making change he had another thought. "Say, do you suppose yeti are an endangered species?"

"I would suppose so, since no one ever found a dead one before."

"Well, maybe you better talk to the EPA then. I've got a card from one in Denver, a Melissa Speed. She handed 'em out when she was poking around here about that spitting tree spider thing." Ed tore off his receipt and wrote the phone number down on the back. "Here, you might give her a call and see what she thinks."

Bob laid the groceries on the floorboard and fished his phone out of the Explorer's glove compartment. He kept it there for the same reason he had erased the Internet software from his laptop: so he could actually get some work done. He deleted the waiting phone spam and dialed the number Ed had given him.

"EPA field office, Melissa Speed speaking."

"Uh, Ms. Speed, I have a problem, and I'm not sure if you're the right person to talk to." He started outlining the situation.

"Yeti?" she interrupted. "This better not be a prank call! We can trace your phone number, you know!"

"No, it's no prank! I've got three dead yetis in front of my cabin, and I don't know what to do."

After Ms. Speed warned him that she could have him in jail so fast it would make his head spin for filling a false report, she had finally agreed to drive down that afternoon.

As he drove back to the cabin, Bob felt a sense of relief that the whole incident was going to be resolved soon. It had occurred to him that he could have sold the story to the National Enquirer, but Bob hated the tabloids, having seen them lie about a few of his acting friends. He was also wary of any publicity for himself rather than his screenplays. Bob was short, overweight, balding and wore glasses, and knew he looked horrible on camera. The few times he had appeared on TV (right after his first, as thus far only, Oscar nomination), he was surprised at how unpleasantly nasal his voice sounded. When you came right down to it, he was a moderately shy person, and the idea of appearing on Dateline or the evening news filled him with a certain low-key terror.

However, his sense of relief was short-lived. When he got back to his cabin, he saw that there were now four dead yeti in his front yard.

****

Speed was a frumpy, overweight woman with frizzy brown hair and the deeply ingrained frown of the Permanently Disapproving.

"This better not be a wild goose chase, Mr. Krusden!" she warned, eyeing him suspiciously. "Where are these three yeti you talked about?"

"Uh, four, actually, and—"

"Four? You told me there were three! Did you kill another one?"

"No, uh, I didn't kill any of them. This one seems to have fallen from the sky like the rest."

"Fallen from the sky? Do you really expect me to believe that?"

"And I dragged the bodies over here to the side of the cabin so I could get in without having to walk around them. Plus they were starting to smell."

"Don't you know what sort of—" Speed stopped, looking at the four dead yetis laid out by the side of Bob's cabin, then slowly reached down to touch one of them. After a few minutes of pulling at their hair and opening their glazed eyes, she stood up.

"They are yeti, aren't they?"

"Yeah, that's pretty much what I was trying to tell you."

"I need to take a Haldol," she said.

****

It took Bob a few minutes to brew coffee, during which Speed raged into her phone at various other government functionaries, barking orders and making demands. When the coffee was ready, Bob handed her a mug.

"Thanks," she said briskly, swallowing a pill and chasing it with the coffee. "Without my Haldol, I get unpleasant." She went back to her phone. "No I don't want him to call me tomorrow, I want him to call me right now!"

After another twenty minutes of haranguing other bureaucrats and pacing back and forth across his cabin floor, Speed finally rang off and put her phone away. "Well, that's finally settled," she said. "The FBI will be here to secure the scene in an hour or so."

"Secure the scene?"

"An endangered species is being slaughtered right under my very nose!" she said. "You can be sure there's not going to be another yeticide on my watch! Which is why you'll have to vacate this cabin "

"What? I've still got more than a month's rent paid on it!"

"That's your problem, Mr. Krusden, not mine. My problem is protecting biodiversity, which is why I'm having the forest around this cabin declared a sanctioned protection zone. You should just be glad that I don't charge you as an accessory to an environmental felony. You have ten minutes to pack up and leave!"

Speed stalked out of the cabin and slammed the door behind her.

Bob looked around the cabin in dismay. How the hell was he supposed to get everything packed in ten minutes?

Suddenly, from outside the cabin, there was a deep-throated cry, soon joined by a woman's scream, both of which were cut off by a loud, wet WHUMP.

Bob opened the door to find out that Speed had been crushed by yet another falling yeti.

****

"Mr. Krusden, do you know what the penalty is for killing an agent of the federal government?" asked Agent Rollins.

"Look, I did not kill Ms. Speed. She just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"That's what you say. We have not ruled out foul play in Ms. Speed's death, and we still consider you a suspect."

"She was crushed by a yeti."

"Even if that is the case, we can't necessarily rule out that you used the yeti as an instrument of murder."

"Do you think I've got secret catapult or yeti-firing cannon out behind the cabin?"

"Never underestimate the devious byways of the criminal mind."

"Don't you think that's a little crazy?"

"Crazier than yeti falling out of the sky?"

He had a point.

Two hours after Ms. Speed's demise, two FBI agents had shown up at the cabin and had become quite perturbed at the most recent turn of events. Now Agent Hernandez was busy examining the