The Rose of Tibet (31 page)

He had not told the girl that his traps had gone, and he didn’t therefore tell her what he planned to do about it. He thought she would object to the plan. He was not very keen on it himself. All the same, three days later Houston made another journey.

He travelled fast, recklessly spending energy for he meant to replace it before he returned. He took Ringling’s pistol with him. His plan was to barter the pistol for food. It seemed to him that if the nomads wished to hand him over to the Chinese, they would not let him buy food first. If he bought food he was going to eat it, a lot of it, right away.

A group of them had been cooking when he was there last. They had been cooking a yak steak. They had hung a bowl beneath to catch the drips as it was basted over a fire, and they had dolloped the contents of this bowl over the steak before eating it.

Houston could smell it still. He felt his mouth dribbling as
he smelt it. The thought that he would within a few hours be fastening his teeth into such a steak was so golden that it fairly lent him wings. With the wind pushing like a wall straight into his face and so light-headed with hunger that all his hesitations were dispersed, he made the journey in five hours flat.

He got to the plain at midday. It was not snowing. It was only slightly overcast. He could see for miles across it. He could see not a soul.

His shock and disappointment were so great that he felt his knees buckling underneath him.

The nomads had gone. It had simply not occurred to him that they could have gone. Where had they gone? Why had they gone?   

They had gone because of the law promulgated in 1948 which forbade them to winter at the foot of the mountains. It was a taboo law, the only kind they obeyed, and they had gone as a matter of course as soon as the first heavy snows had set in. The Chinese, aware that they would do so, had not bothered to post among them the description of Houston that was now circulating in every village for a hundred miles. It was the only reason why he had not been apprehended earlier, when he had gone to buy food with the boy. He would otherwise most certainly have been; for there was a price on his head of a million old yuan (about
£
70, a fortune in money), and the Chinese were no longer enemies.

The fighting had finished in December, two months after the invasion and just a few weeks after Houston had taken up residence in Bukhri-bo. The ex-enemy was now treating quite amiably with ‘ruling circles’ exiled in Chumbi who were cautiously seeking ways in which they might without too much loss of face return to the comforts of life in Lhasa. One of these ways was by handing over certain specified ‘criminal elements.’ Houston was such an element.

He did not know this at the time. All that he was aware of as he looked across the plain was that there was some six feet of snow upon it, and that it was unlikely that the nomads would be returning to it for some time.

That seemed to leave him with only one alternative.

It was several days before he could screw himself up to it. His food, cut it as small as he would, was inexorably shrinking. His love for the girl was put nightly to an acid test as he watched her exercising a healthy appetite. He nerved himself to do what he must.

As reluctant as he had been to go to the nomad camp, he was still more reluctant to go to the village. He knew he dare not go during the day among people who had shown themselves so well disposed to the Chinese. He would have to go in the dark, and steal, with the gun as an ultimate persuader. The idea was so unattractive that he thought he had better try some others first.

He tried to eat wood and leaves. He boiled them to make a soup. The soup was bitter, bitter with the resin that enabled the wood and leaves to burn even when wet, and it merely made him vomit. He had to stop that quickly, for he could not afford to waste what he had already eaten.

He tried to fish. He nerved himself to return to the frozen river. But either the hook he fashioned from a buckle was unsatisafactory, or the bait unattractive, or the fish simply not there. For he found no trace of life.

There was no life anywhere. Nothing moved on land or water or in the air. The country was frozen hard, and there was nothing in it for him to eat.

By the 16th March, Houston saw that he could put it off no longer. He had a fragment of hare left and a few crumbs of meat extract. At the rate he was eating, there was enough for two days. He boiled them up, ate the solid parts that night, and in the morning set off with a cruse of the soup.

He had not been outside for a couple of days, and he realized right away that he was very much weaker. He had scarcely the strength to pull the sled. He thought he had better take a rest every hour.

After three hours an unpleasant suspicion began to dawn on him that he was not going to make it. He had a constant headache and there was a sensation of floating about his knees. He saw that he had run himself down too severely for such a
journey, that he should either have made it days earlier, or have availed himself of the girl’s food.

Houston tried to put the idea out of his mind for he realized that even at this juncture it would be all too easy to persuade himself against the mission. But once there, the idea grew. Why, after all, had he not shared her food? Could she survive if he starved? It was joint food. It was not only meat that he was after in the village. There was more likely to be tsampa there than meat. He would be getting food for both of them.

It was not yet time for Houston to have another rest, but he took one. He saw he had been foolish not to eat properly before attempting such a mission. By not eating he was jeopardizing them both. Unless he built himself up, the mission had no chance of success. He had much better go back and eat.

By half past ten, he had quite convinced himself, and he got up and went back. He carried the pistol in his hand as he walked, for he carried it with him now wherever he went. He had still not lost hope that some animal might be moving, and that Providence might set it in his path. And on that day, 17 March, at about eleven o’clock, Providence did.

Providence set the bear in Houston’s path.

It was a very old bear, a hungry one. Houston calculated later that it had not eaten enough before hibernation, and had awakened early in the savage winter. It had blundered down the mountain looking for a meal.

At eleven o’clock it saw one.        

Houston had not been using his goggles, but when his eyes began to ache with the snow glare, he put them on. The moment he did so, he was aware that he was being watched.

He stood drunkenly on the track trying to comprehend this phenomenon. A couple of old men were watching him. They were watching him from the track fifteen yards ahead. They were bulkily clad in furs, leaning against each other. They were not only leaning against each other, but into each other, and then away again. He blinked and perceived that there was only one old man, and that he was not an old man but a bear.

Houston had never in his life seen a bear, except in a zoo. He had seen men dressed up as bears. This looked like a man dressed up as a bear. He knew all the same that it was not, and he felt in his pocket for the knife to increase his armoury.

The bear began to walk towards him, quite slowly, forepaws raised like a somnambulist, snout sniffing against the streaming wind. Houston couldn’t fire the pistol with his glove on, so he took it off, and waited till the bear had covered half the distance, and then fired. He pressed the trigger four times. The gun did not fire on any of them.

Even at that moment, he could recall years later, he had not been in the least frightened of the bear. He thought he was too exhausted for fear. The bear came on slow painful pads. Its fur was stained with dried blood, and had fallen out in places. Its little eyes looked sightless, and were discharging, the teeth in its open mouth worn down to rounded stumps. Houston saw that an agile human would have no difficulty in evading it. He did not himself try to evade it. Dizzy and stupid with hunger, he stood swaying on the track, seeing intermittently one and then two bears, and his only thought was that so many hot meals were advancing towards him, and that if he kept them in focus he might have them.

The bear seemed to come upon him with love, whimpering a little, leaning its mangy, stinking old paws upon his shoulder and nuzzling his face, for all the world like some grandfather come to kiss him.

The bear was not trying to kiss him. It was trying to eat him, there, as he stood, too dazed and hungry to kill him first, taking his head in its mouth and mumbling ravenously.

Houston felt his cheek bruised and crushed as if in a pair of giant nutcrackers, and withdrew the knife he had plunged into its breast and stabbed upwards into its face. He found that he was on the ground. The bear was on the ground also, the pair of them too weak to stand and strive against each other. The blunt teeth had not penetrated Houston’s furry balaclava, and the animal’s wet pad of a nose snuffled round to find some more promising mouthful. There was an abominable reek on the bear’s breath, an animal reek of excreta. It
smelt the ungloved hand holding the gun and came gobbling hungrily at it.

Even in his reduced state of sensitivity, the pain of his frozen fingers being crushed was so agonizing that Houston cried out, and stabbed savagely, ignoring and tearing with the knife. The bear growled and released a paw and batted him with it, the claws viciously ripping the cap and scoring his face. Houston managed to release both arms in this moment. He got the one with the knife under the animal’s throat and plunged it in, but could scarcely move the other with numbness, and the bear returned to it, ripping the sleeve with its paw, and grasping the whole arm.

Houston heard himself howling, howling like a dog with the insufferable agony of the hand and arm in the bear’s mouth. He stabbed with all his strength, twisting and turning the knife in the bear’s throat to make it stop. The bear, enraged, began to bite and shake his arm just as savagely, moving all the way up it to beyond the elbow.

The pain as his elbow was ground and crushed in the animal’s jaws was such that Houston passed out.

The bear still had his arm in its mouth when he came to. It was still shaking it, but no longer biting. He realized after a moment that it was not only the bear’s head that was shaking, but the whole bear. It was shuddering and coughing. Great gusts of the excreta smell was released as it coughed. Blood was running from its mouth, and from its throat. Its armpit and its breast were running with blood. The bear lay shuddering slightly, paws flexing and jerking as its life drained away. It did not gurgle from the wound in its throat as the Chinese soldiers had gurgled. It merely coughed, a slow tired cough, with several seconds in between, its whole body heaving like some great cat being sick, blindly and on its back.

Houston lay for over an hour with the bear’s blood congealing on him. He could not somehow organize himself to move. He had withdrawn his injured arm from the dead bear’s mouth, and with the sleeve torn back could see the bones sticking out.

He lay quietly, trying to work out how to pick it up. He thought that if he could do that, and hold it, he could get
quickly back to the hermit hole. He could have it tied up and return with the girl, and between them they could get the bear on the sled. He could drag the bear home and eat it. He could eat it for weeks and weeks.

He drew the arm delicately towards him. The hand was not unlike a bunch of hot-house grapes, purple and swollen. He took hold of the wrist. He saw that to pick up the arm he must roll over on his back, and he did so, and held it there above him, sickened at the sight of the bloody bone inches from his nose. He tried to sit up. He did not seem able to sit up. He fell into a mild panic at his inability to sit up; and in his panic, without thinking about it, began to rock himself up. He rocked as if he were lying on his back on a toy horse, rocking a little higher each time, until at last he made it and sat there, holding the arm and gasping.

He couldn’t think what to do with the arm. He couldn’t stand up while holding it. He saw that he would have to kneel first, and he placed it very carefully on his right knee, and got his left hand down on the ground and levered himself up. Then he picked up the arm and got on the other knee also, and knelt, holding the arm before him and plotting the next move.

Houston came up off the ground very slowly, holding the arm delicately before him like a contestant in an egg and spoon race. He stood bowed over it for a moment, and then began to move.

He had no recollection at all of the journey back. He remembered kicking with his boot at the entrance stone, and then coughing weakly in the blast of hot air, and then burping gently with an aftertaste of tea in his mouth.

‘Oh, Chao-li, Chao-li, what have you done?’

He was sitting against the wall, on the sleeping bag. He was in his fur jacket still, and sweating. He wondered why he had the jacket on in the hot cave, and then saw the bones sticking out and saw why.

He was helping her to remove the jacket when he remembered suddenly that he mustn’t remove it, that he had to go out again with it. He had begun telling her this, when he realized with alarm that everything had changed, that he was no longer sitting up but lying flat on his back, and that
his jacket was off. One arm was tied to his chest with a strip of cloth. The girl was dabbing gently at his face with a wet rag.

‘Lie still, Chao-li. Don’t move yet.’

‘Mei-Hua, I must go out. There is a bear.’

‘There is no bear, Chao-li. You have been dreaming. You are safe now.’

‘Mei-Hua, I’m not dreaming! There is a bear, a dead bear. I can eat it. It’s food, Mei-Hua –’

‘Yes, Chao-li, yes. See, there is tea and tsampa for you. Eat it and you will feel better.’

‘Mei-Hua, I don’t need your food. Keep your food!’ he said desperately. ‘I have my own food. I killed the bear. We must go and get it quickly –’