Blanca Mountain

　

　

Tetch, an Enron executive, bought Blanca Mountain a three years before scandal ruined the company. The ranch encompassing the mountain was acquired from a previous owner, Williams. Blanca Mountain is a few miles from Colorado’s border with New Mexico, an isolated summit on the southern flank of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, a great white brow of rock and snow standing apart from the main range. Title to the tract was rooted in a 17^th century Spanish land grant. It was rumored that once there had been a silver mine in one of the steep ravines under the peak but that area of the mountain was prone to avalanches and land-slides and no trace of the workings had ever been found.

Williams, the mountain’s previous owner, was an oil and gas lawyer in Denver and he had acquired the ranch and peak through some remote relatives, a branch of his family with Spanish last names that had died out in the sixties. Williams retired to the ranch and, after a dispute with some local cowboys, refused to renew contracts affording grazing rights to the local people who owned beef that ranged the valleys to the east and south of the big mountain. One afternoon, when he was hunting on a plateau jutting out of Blanca Mountain’s slopes, someone took a long-range shot at him. The bullet starred the windshield of his jeep. Three days later, someone shot a half-dozen slugs through an outbuilding on his ranch and wounded one of Williams’ quarter-horses. Williams filed a police report with the County Sheriff, a burly Latin man with a big, grey beard. The Sheriff didn’t seem particularly interested in solving these crimes and Williams withdrew from his ranch cupped in a picturesque hollow under the mountain to his townhome in Denver. He never returned to Blanca Mountain or Blanca Vista ranch and, after a few years sold the peak and surrounding lands to Tetch. Tetch, in turn, put the land into a trust held by a limited liability corporation nominally managed by his wife. During the crisis at Enron, Tetch lost his job and, much of his fortune, but was able to maintain his interest in the peak and Blanca Vista Ranch. For half the year, Tetch lived in Houston in Afton Oaks, not too far from George W. Bush’s house; he spent his Summers and most of the Fall in Colorado at the Blanca Vista Ranch.

Tetch had begun his career as a salesman and he liked to please people. He renegotiated grazing contracts with the local ranchers and, even, established a several weekends when mountain climbers were allowed to use a jeep trail on his ranch to access the lower talus slopes west of Blanca’s rounded and snow-capped peak. At the base of the talus field, a little creek flowed under the boulders and, then, cut a gorge downward descending through aspen and pinon pine forests to the high chaparral terraces where the local ranchers grazed their cattle. Although Tetch was uninterested in mountain climbing, he sometimes led the caravan of jeeps and landrovers up the ragged, old trail to the base of the boulder field, a place where an experienced hiker could ascend to the summit by walking briskly for two hours. Tetch charged one-hundred dollars per mountaineer and made the people hiking to the peak sign a waiver. This paperwork concluded Tetch shook hands with the adventurers, wished them well, and, then, descended the switchbacks to his ranch-house. On the ascent, there were a few scrambles over loose stones at the upper elevations and, often, the rocks were slick with lichens so that once a climber, broke his ankle and had to be carried down from heights by those with whom he was hiking. As Tetch perceived the situation, the principal danger was weather and not the summit itself – in fact, a complicated arrangement of peaks arranged in a four-leaf clover array. From his ranch house, he had seen storms suddenly appear from the west, claw across the top of the mountain, stabbing hard at the rock with pitchforks of lightning. In the Spring and Fall, Tetch clouds might appear from nowhere, envelope the peak, and, then, suddenly flee away to the east, leaving the high country covered in white glistening snow. It was these conditions that comprised the main danger on the mountain heights, although there was also a thousand-foot escarpment dropping down from the western-most summit to towering sand-dunes that the prevailing winds had piled against that mountain – at the point where the federal National Monument land protecting the sand dunes began, Tetch’s land ended, a boundary zigzagging through a bad lands of pinnacles and eroded hanging valleys comprising the western edge of his land.

Above Tetch’s ranch house, there was a pulpit-shaped outcropping of pink granite. It was any easy climb to the top of the big, knuckle-shaped formation and Tetch thought that he would build a small observatory there. He acquired a 6-inch Questar and asked a local contractor to provide an estimate for a concrete slab and a dome to protect his telescope. As they were surveying the site, the contractor said that he had to pee and, so, as Tetch averted his eyes, the man urinated against a smooth wall of rock.

"Look at this," the contractor said. He stooped to peer at the stone slab that his urine had moistened.

"What is it?" Tetch asked.

"Pictograph," the contractor said.

Tetch looked at the wet stone and saw that someone had pecked a faint outline of a stick figure into the rock. The figure had a round head and seemed to be wearing a crescent crown.

"This is an archaeological site," the contractor said. "Paiute or something."

"You’re kidding me," Tetch replied.

"It’s protected, you could never pull a permit on this... but...well...I suppose, we could make the evidence go away," the contractor said. He grinned at Tetch.

"I don’t know," Tetch said.

"You maybe built your house on some sacred ground or a burial place or something," the contractor said. "Bad voodoo."

"Just what I need," Tetch said.

Tetch decided not to build the observatory. There was trouble in Houston and he didn’t want to attract undue attention to his estate. He even considered closing the peak to climbers, but thought that this might create a backlash – the mountain was a "fourteener", that is, higher that 14,000 feet, and there were climbers who collected those summits like butterflies.

In fact, it was an unauthorized climber, someone trespassing on his land, that discovered the shaggy corpse caught in a small ice-field under the westernmost-lobe of the summit. Someone had ascended the peak from a base-camp hidden among the dunes under the escarpment. Above the pinnacles of the bad lands, a maze of rock crumbling into grottos and castellated dikes, the ascent was technical. Tetch looked at the You-Tube video documenting the climb, a feat accomplished by pounding spikes into the escarpment and, then, inching upward on long nylon ropes. At the top of the big wall, there were several notches where great rock falls had punched holes in escarpment. In one of those notches, the steep channel gouged in the stone wall concealed a little snow-field, a house-high scab of glacier clinging to the north side of the big rock groove – the glacier hung like a bat, upside-down, in a place where direct sunlight only reached the snow for a few minutes a day. At the base of the snowfield, where boulders were embedded in the ice like chips of chocolate in a cookie, there was a scum of fur, matted hair haloing a yellow crescent of bone, and a brown limb angling out of the snow. The person who had secretly, and illegally, climbed the mountain posted a few minutes of cell-phone video showing the corpse from various angles and making the claim that the dead thing looked like a "sasquatch." Indeed, the You-Tube video, images that had been posted and re-posted a half-dozen times, were labeled "Colorado Yeti" and, several long shots clearly showed that the snowfield was hidden in a deep crevasse on Blanca Mountain.

The Navajo Indians named Blanca Mountain, "the white dove" or, even, sometimes, the "white god". To them, the mountain marked the very edge of the world that they had known before the White men came to the West. A voice commenting on the fragmentary corpse extruding from the ice field said that the Navajo believed the mountain was sacred, particularly because it stood apart from other peaks in the range and was topographically prominent, rising more seven-thousand feet above the dunes caught against that flank of the peak. "The Navajo have always said that there were strange men living on the mountain, messengers from the gods," and added that this shattered corpse, caught in the grip of the hidden glacier, was evidence that these beliefs were based on the truth.

Tetch was concerned that the You-Tube video would call undue attention to the mountain, and, by association, to his ownership of the peak. In particular, he was afraid that creditors of the defunct Enron Corporation might consider his 60,000 acre ranch an asset, perhaps, subject to collection although, of course, technically the property was held by his wife’s trust and foundation. He contacted his attorneys on retainer and asked them to take action to have the You-Tube images removed from the web. You-Tube ignored these requests. So Tetch decided to have the video images analyzed so that they could be proclaimed fraudulent.

The world is full of experts and such people, Tetch knew, had their uses. He contacted the department of Zoology at the college in Boulder. Because it was summer session, most of the professors were off-duty but he was able to speak to a retired teacher, a professor emeritus specializing in primates. On the telephone, the man sounded old and his hearing was poor – several times, he asked Tetch to repeat himself. Tetch said that he would pay a retainer in the sum $2500 and additional hourly fees at $150 an hour if the old man, Professor Gladwell, would analyze some images and, then, render him a report. The old teacher said that he was game for the assignment. Tetch referred him to the You-Tube videos of alleged Sasquatch half-extruded from the snowfield. "I need you to look as closely as you can and see if you can identify the animal in the footage," Tetch said. Gladwell agreed and Tetch sent him a check. Gladwell told Tetch to wait for a week and, then, call him at home on the weekend.

A year earlier, a couple climbers had told Tetch’s ranch foreman that they had seen some unauthorized mountaineers far away, across a col between two of the peaks. The climbers had paid their fees at the ranch gate and, since no other cars were parked there ahead of them, they had assumed that they were alone on the mountain. The climbers told the foreman that the others were far away and seemed to be wearing fur coats and that, when they halloed to them, the unauthorized people vanished into a boulder field, fleeing as it to avoid pursuit. The foreman checked his clipboard and verified that there were no other people authorized access to the mountain, but there was nothing more that he could do – the sun was setting. Before the two climbers departed, they told the foreman that they had experienced an eerie sense of being watched, particularly as they had ascended a talus-couloir near the top of the peak and that, while coming down the mountain, they had heard a weird shriek, almost like a baby crying.

Tetch remembered this account and wondered about it and he thought to himself that the mountain soaring overhead had now become his albatross, that it was yoked around his throat, and that the rumor of strange creatures living on its heights would draw unwanted attention to his investment in the ranch and his other investments as well. So far as he knew, none of the people living at the crossroads eleven miles from his ranch, a scatter of trailer houses and dilapidated frame shacks in a grove of parched trees, knew that he had once been employed by Enron – indeed, those people had no way of knowing that he lived half of the year in Houston. He was cordial to them and they were polite in return and he went to the village only every couple of weeks, when it had become insufferably dull on the slope of Blanca Mountain, and his wife was lonely and depressed and needed to see someone other than himself and the foreman and the two sullen cowboys who spent their days mostly riding ATVs along the fence-line or poisoning prairie dogs. There was a small supermarket, a hardware store, two bars and a gas station – a couple churches hung back from the Main Street as if ashamed by it and, on a stony ridge, a half-mile away, beyond a water-course that was clogged with sand and sage-brush, a nursing home with big windows that glinted at sunrise brooded over the empty high desert and the dusty grove of wind-tormented elms and willows marking the village. The people in the town didn’t seem exactly human to Tetch and he knew only one of them by name, the veterinarian that he hired to manage his small herd of Angus beef, the border collies, and the horses that his cowboys used when the ATVs were being serviced or when the country that they were riding was so broken that the vehicles could not cross it. Tetch’s wife sometimes had her hair done by a woman who operated a salon in a small quonset hut that smelled of barley and insecticide. Tetch asked his wife to make an inquiry of the beautician as to whether anyone in town had heard of strange hominid creatures living on Blanca Mountain. Tetch’s wife said that he was crazy and obsessed, but she asked, nonetheless, and was told that someone casting a line into one of the lakes on the mountain high above the tree-line had once seen something slinking through a ravine and had encountered some heaps of guts from eviscerated fish on the flat stones by the icy, shallow lake. But that was when fish and wildlife had stocked the mountain lakes with steelheads and cutthroats, and, therefore, a recollection of a time when the peak was open to all and so that must have been fifty years ago or more. There was a slight reproach in the beautician’s voice. Tetch made a similar inquiry of the veterinarian. "Do you know the Spanish name of the mountain?" the vet asked. "Blanca," Tetch said. "No, the other Spanish name?" the vet replied. Tetch shook his head. "Hombre peludo," the vet replied. "What is that?" "Hairy Man," the vet said.

Tetch couldn’t sleep. He thought of the cold, barren heights of the mountain that somehow he improbably owned. What if there were creatures up there? What if they were about to be discovered by the world? A wholly unknown species of hominid. He recalled the hullabaloo when the skulls and femurs of hobbit-men were discovered in Bali or some island in the south Pacific. What if that hullabaloo came to him, here in his peaceful ranch, and directed the harsh scrutiny of the media onto his affairs? He saw a gorilla’s bestial face roaring at him like a lion. He awoke clawing at his sheets. His wife grunted: "What is the matter?"

He told her.

"It’s your imagination," she said. "You’re too gullible."

"You don’t run high-finance, investment banking, hedge-funds without being willing to believe in the impossible," Tetch told her.

On the weekend, Tetch called the zoology professor’s house. A woman answered. She said that her Professor Gladwell was stricken with shingles and that he had taken to his bed and was not doing well.

"Can I talk to him?"

"Not at this time," the old woman said. "He will call you when he gets better."

Tetch asked his foreman to scout around and see if there were other people expert in the lore of the mountain and its animals. The foreman said that he knew an old prospector who had rambled around the mountain for more than fifty years and that he would bring the old fellow to Tetch’s ranch-house.

The prospector lived on the high windswept saddle between Blanca Mountain and the Sangre de Cristo peaks to the north. His cabin was hidden behind a pyramidal mound of rubble extracted from an old silver mine on the ridge, a spiky peak of spoil that glinted with fools’ gold crystal and that sheltered his home. Some collapsed headframes squatted like tarantulas on the barren hills. It had rained recently and the foreman was concerned that the seven mile jeep-track uphill from the gravel county road would be impassable, but Tetch was adamant that he try to retrieve the prospector, pay him for his time, and bring him to the ranch compound. The trail was passable until the steep incline the last quarter-mile, a a series of switchbacks requiring three-point turns and partly washed-out. The prospector’s two labradors ran out to meet the foreman, their tails snapping happily back and forth.

It was warm in the sun behind the mountain of spoil and the old man was stripped under his coveralls, his chest bare and covered with white hair, puttering around in the pile of stone in which he sometimes found ore-bearing boulders. The prospector said that he was happy to ride up to Tetch’s house in the foreman’s four-wheel drive pickup and had been meaning to stop by, in any event, to welcome the new fellow to the neighborhood. He put on a yellowing tee-shirt under his coveralls and they walked down the winding trail to the pickup.

At Tetch’s house, they sat in the sun-room under a bright, paint-splashed painting made by Andy Warhol, a silk-screened image of a Bengal tiger that the Houston zoo had auctioned twenty years earlier at a fund-raiser. Tetch’s wife brought them cans of beer on teak-wood tray.

The prospector said that he spent a dozen years or more exploring Blanca Mountain and that he had often camped on its slopes or by the little lakes in cirques where the snow-melt ponded.

"I know there’s an old Spanish silver mine, workings up in the big hollow ravine under the middle summit," the prospector said. "You can see an old Spanish high-road cutting right along the hilltop. At least, I can see it, an old camino – you gotta have the eye to pick it out, but I can tell you, it’s up here. The Spanish workings are usually very high – up on burro trails. They followed the nuggets right up to the source."

"Did you find the mine?" Tetch asked.

"I was there once, but couldn’t find my way back. No, the ravine is subject to avalanche in the winter and landslides when it rains and every time I go up there, the whole place has been rearranged. I keep thinking one of the slides will show something, but it hasn’t happened, not for forty years."

"How often have you gone up there?"

The old prospector shook his head. "Who knows? How many times can you count? It’s an easy mountain, not hard at all. A big old girl that you can climb and come down between breakfast and noon. Really just a knoll."

"There’s an immense escarpment on the west side," Tetch said.

"Yeah, you’re right, over there it does get a tad hilly," the prospector said.

Tetch asked him if he had ever seen any strange animals on the mountain.

"Nah," the prospector said. "Pronghorned antelope, deer, marmosets up in the rock fields. Some hawks, an eagle maybe. Shit-loads of mosquitos by the lakes at the wrong time of the year."

"Nothing more?"

"What do you mean?" The prospector said. "Kids climbing, whole families sometimes, I don’t know."

Tetch led the prospector into his study and turned on the computer to show him the You-Tube video. The prospector squinted at the screen, a couple times shielding his eyes as if the light from the monitor was painful to him.

"What do you make of that?" Tetch asked him about the tangle of fur and bone in the ice.

"A little black bear," the prospector said. "Ain’t nothin’ but a little black bear, got killed in an ice-fall maybe."

Tetch thanked the prospector and paid him for his time and the foreman took the man back across the saddle between the ranges to his cabin.



A few days later, the old professor called Tetch. He apologized for being under the weather. "Those shingles," the professor-emeritus said. "Ever had ‘em?" "No," Tetch said, "I can’t say that I have." "It’s bad, the old zoology professor said. "Real bad." He told Tetch that he was doing better and that he wanted to speak with him in person. "If you allow it," the old professor said, "I will drive down the coming weekend. What is it? Five hours?" "I don’t know," Tetch said. He gave Professor Gladwell instructions as to how to reach the ranch gate. "I will have my foreman meet you there," Tetch told him.

The foreman said that he knew another man who had spent his whole life on Blanca Mountain, a hermit who lived in an Airstream trailer tugged up to the end of one of the old logging roads. "Is he on my land?" Tetch asked. "Sure," the foreman said. "But he’s got squatter’s rights, adverse possession."

"No one ever tried to run him off?’ Tetch asked. "He don’t bother no one," the foreman said. "You wouldn’t even know he was up there, it’s a nasty little canyon like an ice-box. None of the hikers ever even seen him."

"Bring him here," Tetch said.

To reach the hermit, the foreman had to drive to the village and, then, north on the county-line road to a dirt path marked by a sign painted with some Spanish words. A half-mile up the trail, there were small wagons parked in a coulee, a goat-herders encampment. Where the dirt lane climbed out of the coulee, the foreman could see a low ridge, some flame-shaped pines marking a tiny graveyard above a sandy draw, and, beyond, three rough-hewn crosses on the hilltop. A penitente meeting house built like a long windowless chicken coop stood below the hill with the crosses and a couple of old men with yellow whiskers were sitting on fruit-crates in front of the church. The hermanos watched the foreman suspiciously as he navigated the wash-outs and outcroppings of rock on the uphill way past their meeting house. Two miles farther up the mountain in broken land, incised with narrow gulches, the foreman came to Tetch’s fenceline, needing repair he noted, and, then, the steep path climbing to the hermit’s canyon. From this slope the mountain overhead was invisible. Above him, there was a chaos of low, broken cliffs, stony pits, and, then, great, wind-polished heights bare and brown as the flesh of a naked woman.

The hermit came out of his Airstream, cradling a rifle in his arms. He lifted the rifle and sighted and the foreman saw that he intended to frighten him away so he stood stock still, both hands upraised. As expected the hermit lifted the gun and fired almost straight up into the air.

"You got a warrant?" the hermit shouted to him.

"Nope," the foreman said.

"You got a summons or subpoena or something?" the hermit shouted.

"Nope," the foreman said.

Tacked to a tree above the Airstream there was a grey satellite dish. The foreman knew that the hermit used the satellite dish to access stations that broadcast bible studies and prophecies and programs about the revelations contained within scripture. A wolf-like grey dog with arthritic hips limped down the trail, wagging its tail. The foreman saw that the hermit had made signs quoting scripture from the Book of Revelations and posted the placards on the trees growing through the rock-fall rubble around his trailer.

The foreman explained his mission. The hermit seemed almost grateful for company, although he sputtered protests at the imposition. He entered the Airstream and put away his long gun and, then, went with the foreman to Tetch’s ranch-house.

Tetch’s wife brought a vase of sun-tea to the little courtyard inside the ranch-house. Tetch sat with the hermit at a wrought-iron table. The tiles underfoot were expensive, made in old Mexico, and the color aged leather. In several of the tiles, there were paw-prints. In a niche in one of the walls, there was a Santo, a carved wood image of St. Michael brandishing a sword and the scales of justice.

Tetch asked the hermit if he had seen figures like human beings on the mountain heights. The hermit said that angels came to visit him but that no one could possibly mistake them for mere human beings – they were great and terrible figures of light. He said that bandits sometimes roamed the gulches and wild country where the mountain shed its boulders and had ripped open the hills when it sprouted up in this place. The bandits were responsible for all sorts of devilment – they played vicious pranks and ripped down bible verses posted in the sacred groves of trees and made his dog bark at midnight. Some of the gangs of bandits were Mexicans and they hid cartel drug money in the rock-fields. Their cousins operated the meeting house for the Penitente brotherhood and, the hermit said, that they also sold marijuana and heroin out of the church.

"They use the mountain to dump corpses," the hermit told Tetch. "I come upon bones all the time."

Tetch opened his lap-top and showed the hermit pictures of the alleged Sasquatch oozing from the ice.

"That’s what I mean," Tetch said. "You can see clear as day – that’s some Mexican gangbanger that they executed up in the hills and shoved into the snow."

Tetch shrugged.

"There’s crimes,’ the hermit said. "There’s crimes and you know it. Crimes hidden up on this mountain."

Tetch agreed with him and they walked through the living room, a cool place with Navajo rugs under the furniture and Spanish Mission-style chairs surrounding the whitewashed masonry of the big, black hearth, and they paused for a moment by the floor-to-ceiling windows, the venetian blinds drawn open at this time of day, that looked down hill, across the great basin: the winding driveway to the house flanked by newly planted trees leading away into the distance and the little isolated pines showing the places on the vast slope where water seeped near the surface.

"You think you own all this?" the hermit asked.

"I’m its steward," Tetch said.

"You can’t own this," the hermit said.

On the wall, there was a museum-quality Baselitz painting, a dense impasto of paint applied like jam to the canvas. The image showed a working man in empty space, the figure dressed like a janitor, painted upside-down.

"You got that picture hung wrong," the hermit said. Tetch replied that he would see to it.

A few days later, Professor Emeritus Gladwell arrived at the gate on the ranch road. It was still early in the morning, dew glistening brightly in the grass and the mountain bathed in a rare radiance, wispy strands of cloud like a wreath around the summits. Tetch said that he was surprised that Dr. Gladwell had arrived so early in the day.

"I set out before 4 am," Gladwell said. "I wanted to be through Denver, at least, before the traffic got too gnarly."

"What’s your drive time?’ Tetch asked.

"Five-and-a-half from my driveway to your gate," Gladwell told him. Tetch showed the old man to the toilet near the front door. Gladwell declined an offer of tea or coffee. "I am swimming in coffee," Gladwell said. "I got a couple thermoses in my pickup. Never leave home without it."

Gladwell was a tall, skinny man, with an exuberant grey thatch of hair. Tetcn noticed that he had scars on the back of his hands and nose and forehead where skin cancer lesions had been removed. He wore round glasses slid down on his nose and he peered over the bright lenses of his spectacles when he looked at Tetch. The coffee and the highway, particularly the last sixty miles of two-lane black top sweeping westward between the thrones of great mountains, had wound him up as tight as could be and he spoke in rapid bursts of words, stuttering a little, the graft-sites on his forehead pale against his otherwise raw, red complexion, a tremor just faintly perceptible in his fingers and hands. Tetch thought the front of the old man’s temple was marked as if an accommodating surgeon had removed horns that had suddenly sprouted from the old professor’s brow and he amused himself imagining those knuckle-like and keratinous protuberances.

"You’ve got something here," Professor Gladwell said. "You’ve got something here indeed."

"What is it?"

Professor Gladwell opened his valise and spread on the table screen-shots taken from the You-tube video.

"I’ve run them through some software that enhances detail, improves the resolution. So we can see better –" the old man said.

Tetch looked at the creature entrapped in the snow. The powerful opposing forces seemed to have been at work on the corpse and it was stretched and twisted and pulled like taffy. At higher resolution, the beast seemed less substantial, more like a furry scum embedded at various depths in the shimmer of white ice. The creature seem to be all surface, nothing but a film of pelt rotated like a ballerina en pointe.

"Let me orient you," Professor Gladwell said. "Here (he pointed) we’re looking at a wrist or hand. From the side, you see."

"I see," Tetch said.

"Pentadactyly – five fingers – and opposable thumb – that’s primate anatomy," Gladwell told him.

Tetch squinted at the picture but couldn’t make it out. Gladwell took a mechanical pencil from his pocket and outlined on a print of the screen-shot, the fingers and the shadow in the ice that he took to be the thumb.

"Here," Gladwell said, sliding another picture across the table, " collarbone – that’s the white blade-shaped thing – here in the pelvic girdle. That’s a characteristic of a great ape."

Tetch saw a ridge of yellowish bone extruding beneath a blackened open mouth. In the open mouth, there was something white posted like a sign.

"I can see a tooth," Tetch said.

"Yes, I think that’s a tooth, although compromised, there are black flecks on it – probably wear."

Gladwell stacked up the screen-shots, nearly aligning their sides and bottoms.

"I know what it is," Gladwell told Tetch. "It’s not really a cryptid because I can make an ID."

"What is your ID?"

"Something akin to a Gigantopithecus blacki – by the scale, I would say, a female or immature specimen. We know fully mature males stood about eight feet tall and this isn’t on that order of size but — "

"So it’s a Sasquatch?"

"That’s what some people might call it." Gladwell said. He made a disapproving sound and grinned at Tetch. "I call it a revolution, a total revolution, in primate science."

"So now what?"

Gladwell was stuttering with excitement: "We’re not ready to publish. Not yet. You have to mount an expedition to get the thing out of the ice and conserved. I’m too old to make the climb but you need to get a team that will keep their mouths shut and that will know how to conserve the specimen. I can advise on that – Then, we study it up close, we write up our findings, and we pub-pub-publish – This will change the whole paradigm. This is a ...a ...a para... para... "

"Dime," Tetch said.

"Thank you, a paradigm-changer."



"I’ll have to get someone up on top to yank the monster out of the ice," Tetch said.

A sense of gloomy foreboding grasped him and, for a moment, he felt as crushed and twisted and tugged as the dead beast in the icefield. He couldn’t breathe exactly right and felt like he had just emerged from being under water for a long time. He blinked his eyes to clear his head and saw Gladwell’s scarred face and head billowing toward him like a balloon, a little tremulous, and seemingly untethered from his body.

"This will make us famous," Professor Emeritus Gladwell said.

"I don’t want to be famous," Tetch replied.

"We will need confidentiality agreements," Gladwell said. "I don’t want anyone to beat us to the punch."

"Do you think they are living up there?"

"Almost certainly," Gladwell said.

When Professor Gladwell left it was mid-afternoon and the sun had traversed the sky and was, now, to the west of the mountain. The peak’s long shadow extended down across the vast, grassy slope leading to the ranch-gate in the furrowed country at the base of the mountain. Tetch had drawn a half-dozen agreements on a legal pad and had them signed, his wife looking on silently as a witness. Gladwell agreed that the creature’s physical remains were Tetch’s property and that he would not publish or disclose anything about the animal without Tetch’s express written consent – "that consent not to be unreasonably withheld." They shook hands and Tetch sat on the swing on his porch, watching Gladwell’s pickup ease its way down the washboard corrugating the gravel road – the pickup towed behind it a yellow-gold comet of dust.

Later, Tetch called his son in San Jose. Jeremy was a venture capitalist involved in high-tech start-ups in Silicon Valley. But on weekends, he sometimes climbed in the Sierra Nevada and had once made an ascent of El Capitan at Yosemite. Jeremy had summited Mount Rainier and Kilimanjaro and Tetch knew that he was in training for Everest. In part, Tetch had purchased the ranch and Blanca Mountain in the hope that Jeremy would spend summers climbing on the peak with his wife and two boys. In fact, Jeremy had not been to the ranch. He and his wife were separated, although not yet divorced, and she had custody of the Tetch’s two grandsons.

Jeremy was intrigued by Tetch’s story and said that he would fly out with a couple friends and reconnoiter the mountain top.

"I need you to get this thing out of the ice," Tetch told him.

With one of his business partners, the owner of a medical device company, and his new girlfriend, Jeremy flew by chartered jet to the airport at Taos. Tetch drove down and met them. Jeremy’s girlfriend, Sorinne, was a Norwegian personal trainer. She was relentlessly cheerful and optimistic. Jeremy and Coogan, the medical device manufacturer, mostly ignored her and spent the ride up the ranch talking business with Tetch. Jeremy suggested a few Silicon Valley investments that interested Tetch and he said that he might commit some funds but had to do his "due diligence" first.

At dinner, Jeremy asked Tetch about the local weather conditions. Tetch looked on the computer and saw that it would be clear in the morning with a chance of thunderstorms later in the day, although most probably to the east of the mountain. Jeremy said that they would climb to the notch on the peak’s west escarpment, then abseil down into the stone chute to the snowfield. Tetch had acquired black polyvinyl body-bag from the local veterinarian in town that Jeremy rolled tightly and put in his back pack.

Tetch drove the three climbers up to the boulder field before dawn. His jeep huffed and puffed, coughing heavily on the steep inclines over the dew-wet stones clogging the trail and, when Tetch looked in his rear view mirror, he saw in the red-tail-light glow, little slides of rock and gravel spurting out and down the hill. In the grey light, the boulder field was grim and vast, like a huge cemetery with the gravestones pressed so close together that they were touching, embracing, leaning against one another. The boulders were grey and the alpine meadows above them were shrouded in dense, wet fog and there was no color anywhere in the landscape except the racing stripe on the Norwegian girl’s spandex jumpsuit and the red silk scarf jauntily tied around her throat. Hidden birds made strange and uncanny cries and Tetch dreaded the long descent down the steep jeep track, slipping and sliding on the loose rocks.

The climbers picked their way through the boulder field and, then, ascended a bare knob of rock toward the meadows. They moved silently and the only sound was the breathing. Soon enough they were lost in the mist and Tetch drove back to the ranchhouse.

The climbers reached the peak in a couple hours. By that time, the sun had burned through the mist and the mountain was alive with the sound of melt-water trickling and gushing through tiny, twisting ravines like capillaries. The last four-hundred yards was a scramble through loose gravel and the Norwegian girl twisted her ankle. She reached the peak but said that it would be best for her to sit on the bare slabs of rock overlooking the stony prominences spreading out around them like a four-leaf clover. The view was magnificent – the mountain stood in proud isolation with slopes dropping seven-thousand feet to the raw and empty prairie.

Jeremy found the summit register, a metal tube that had fallen on its side by the cairn marking the true peak. Some Tibetan prayer flags were tangled up in the cairn. The tube that should have contained the summit register was empty. Jeremy tore a piece of paper from the moleskin in his chest pocket and each of them signed the note, dated it, and, then, slid the paper into the aluminum tube. "No summit register," Jeremy had written by way of explanation on the sheet of paper.

It took them a while to locate the vertical groove dropping down to the ice field hidden in the deep shadows of the angular stone chute. As Jeremy was mooring his rappel line to a rock, Coogan said that a thunder storm was approach.

"A thunder-bummer," Coogan said.

Jeremy saw a black and green congestion in the sky, ugly with outlier wall clouds hanging in tatters from the main cell. The storm growled at them from the distance.

"We need to get below the tree-line," the Norwegian girl said.

"It’s coming too fast," Jeremy said.

Thunder sounded, a deep, resonant roar. Coogan counted, but by fifteen there was another blast. Jeremy thought that he saw a tongue of lightning in the cloud steering straight for the peak.

"We should spread out," Jeremy said. "That way if one of us is hit, the others will be able to help."

The first damp mists, stinging with sleet whipped across the mountain top. Coogan saw Jeremy scramble toward the west and the gouge in the mountain where he had been setting his ropes. The Norwegian girl’s blonde hair suddenly stood on end, pulled up away from her shoulders. She squatted in a barrel-shaped depression the rock. Lightning flashed and the thunder crash came at the same time, a blinding roar. Then, the wind screamed across the peak and its four corners were lit by ball lightning like torches, then, the torches vanished as well, and the mountain blazed in all directions with lightning strikes.

The storm lasted for a eight or nine minutes. Then, the sky cleared. Coogan saw the Norwegian girl lying on her belly in a rock slit. She was crying but unhurt. Jeremy had vanished. They looked for him for an hour without any success. There was no trace of him except the rope looped around the boulder in and nylon rope harness for the abseil down into the vertical trench on the side of the mountain.

"We have to get off this peak before it gets dark," Coogan said. The descent was difficult because several smaller thunderstorms plagued them and the stones were slick and the Norwegian girl, who was crying inconsolably, was limping slowly because of the injury to her ankle.

A rescue team from Boulder was helicoptered to the mountain and climbers scoured the summit for several days without finding Jeremy’s body. Tetch was afraid that his wife would commit suicide and, so, he had her sedated and flown back to a private hospital in Houston. He stayed alone in the ranchhouse for another couple weeks, always expecting that Jeremy would appear, disheveled and, perhaps, a little bloody, his whiskers grown to a soft, red beard around his lips, the way that he looked in the cell-phone videos taken at the base of Mount Kilmanjaro after his adventure there. But the ranch-house was silent and no one came to him and, so, Tetch drove to the airport in Denver and flew back home to Houston.

The next year, Tetch went to his ranch alone. His wife stayed in Houston. One afternoon, a woman with an unfamiliar voice called him. The woman sounded distraught and elderly, perhaps, a little confused. She said that she had been trying to reach him for several weeks. The old woman said that her husband, an eminent retired primate specialist, had died during the winter. It was unexpected, a sudden and massive heart attack.

Another year passed. A TV show on the Discovery Channel called Fact or Faked: the Paranormal Files took an interest in the You-tube footage of the Sasquatch pinned in the snow-field. The show’s producers used state of the art imaging to analyze the footage. A computer-enhanced close-up of the creature’s mouth revealed that a white speck, thought to be a tooth, was in fact a tag – there were letters on the tag that said Made in China. Additional research revealed that the images showing Blanca Peak were unrelated to pictures purporting to show the creature, actually just a gorilla costume and some cow bones planted in a snow-drift. The footage showing the ascent and top of the mountain, but without the close-ups of the dead Sasquatch in the ice, had been posted a few years earlier on a mountaineering site devoted to Colorado "Fourteeners." The hoaxer (or hoaxers), persons never identified, simply digitally inserted the half–dozen shots of the gorilla costume in the snow into the video record of the ascent.