Paula Reynolds, age 11, of San Diego, California, for her question:
Who is the abominable snowman?
His fantastic story began centuries ago but, so far as we know, the abominable snowman never really existed, although every generation hears him mentioned and naturally wants to learn all the details.
The Sherpa tribesmen of Nepal call him the Yeti, a name that means the Devourer. The people of Tibet named him Metoh Kangmi. We are not certain what this name means. But long ago when a newspaperman was reporting the story, he translated it as The Abominable Snowman. Mast of us find the Tibetan name too hard to pronounce. So we call the fantastic character a yeti or an abominable snowman. But no matter what name we give to him, we cannot prove that he exists. In fact, the serious scientists who have probed the weird tale are almost certain that there is no such thing as an abominable snowman and that there never was.
The story filtered down from the snowy slopes of the Himalayas, rumor by rumor. At about 13,000 feet, the trees are left behind. Scrubby bushes cling to the rising, rocky slopes and the chilly air is getting thin. Goats and gazelles, deer and a few shaggy yaks manage to live off the scrawny vegetation. Meat eating foxes, wolves and snow leopards make a living from the vegetarians. In a few places, there are lonely monasteries and remote settlements of mountain people.
Most of the people of these lofty slopes firmly believe in the yeti and fear him. He resembles, they say, a huge hairy ape with the face of a man. He walks upright on sturdy legs and his shaggy arms reach down below his shaggy knees. The dreaded beast man is said to live in icy caves that are higher, much higher in the region of perpetual snow. He is rumored to devour travelers and stray children. This is said to explain why no one has lived to take a picture or report a close up description of the devouring yeti.
But the terrifying tale was kept alive with bits of so called evidence. Scraps of shaggy hair were gathered from bushes and monster footprints were photographed in the soggy snow. Someone even claimed to find the hairy top of a yeti skull. Newsy.. rumors of the horrifying snowman spread around the world. But few travelers ventured up there to investigate.,
At last, in 1960, a party of reliable observers, sponsored by your World Book people, climbed the slopes to trace down the truth of the weird tale. The tufts of yeti hair, they suspected, were snagged by thorns from passing goats. The sun, they found, tends to melt huge holes around even small tracks in the soggy snow. The yeti footprints most likely were the melting tracks of deer or even rabbits. The yeti skull, they reported, once belonged to a goaty gazelle or to some other type of mountain sheep. No one now has a scrap of evidence to prove that the yeti exists. However, nobody has proved that the gruesome monster does not exist.
Scientists of the 1960 expedition tried hard to track down a real yeti. They failed to find a reliable trace of him and believe even a monster would find life impossible in the higher caves where he is said to live. The weather is bitter cold and the air is too thin to provide breathable oxygen. If we go by the sensible facts, we must conclude that the abominable snowman appears to be just a legend.