DORIS LESSING
and legs. Not hairy ... It lives at heights of 8,000 - 12,000 feet,
sometimes seeking refuge at much higher levels.
The
£1
m expedition will therefore be carrying a technological
panoply which includes infra-red cameras, miniature helicopter
"drones" containing cameras, motorised hang-gliders, four-wheel
vehicles and motorbikes. Their most important piece of equipment is
a gun which fires hypodermic darts. "Our aim is to capture an Alma
with the help of the local population. We want to take a mould of its
face, and specimens of its hair, skin and blood and then set it free with
a radio tracer band. There is to be no King Kong spectacle of bringing
it back."
-Excerpted from an article in
The Sunday Times,
London, March
29, 1992
by Stuart Wavell, "Expedition Goes Hunting Russia's
Elusive Ape-man." (Reprinted with permission)
11
The first time
I
went down past the snowline further than
I
had done be–
fore and saw the place of The Others, there was smoke coming through
the grass on a hut and
I
thought the hut was on fire.
I
was afraid. When
the earth is dry after the hot months sometimes everything burns, trees
too, and we have little food.
I
hid behind the rock on the
hill
behind the
huts and watched, but although the smoke did not stop coming through
the hot roof, the grass did not burn. Later
I
watched how They heaped
sticks together in a place between the huts and brought out in a hollow
stick the red stuff that makes fire and put it into the sticks and the fire
burned but did not run everywhere and burn the huts, or the grass, or the
trees. They
all
went off together to the river and Their place had no one
in it.
I
crept down and into the smoking hut and
I
put some of the red
fire-stuff into a big stick the way They did.
I
burned my fingers. Then
I
ran up fast to where we have our cave and said to my brothers, Look,
I
have brought the fire They have tamed so that it does not burn Them.
I
told you about it - do you remember? They did not remember, and
when
I
put the red stuff like light stones, which is what burns in the dead
trees after a fire has gone past, into a heap of sticks, it went dark and then
cold. What
I
thought then was, Why didn't we think of using fire, the
way They do? But my brothers did not believe me when
I
said They
make a place inside a shelter and there Fire lives like a bird and it is no
danger to them. That was when they first said
I
am not one of them now,
and they hit me when
I
said, But what
I
say is true and we could learn to
do it.
One other time I tried to steal the Fire away and again the hot red
was cold and black when I had climbed back up to where I and my
