I will elaborate on this information later, but for now, let’s discuss their conversations, which included speculations about what kind of creatures might be active in the snow. At that time, based on my experience, I asked Tashi if there were any such creatures mentioned in the various folk legends of Tibet. The information we could find online generally pointed to the legends of the Himalayan Yeti, which can be more professionally referred to as the “Snow Ape,” a term commonly used in fantasy literature.
However, the insights gathered from local people often turn out to be quite unexpected. Tashi almost immediately said that such a creature would be the brown bear. Brown bears sometimes hunt in snow dens. I wanted to immediately object because that seemed absolutely impossible. Altitude wasn’t an issue; brown bears can live at elevations of five to six thousand meters, but the area where the young man encountered danger was almost entirely covered in deep white snow, with no signs of life at all. How could brown bears survive in that region?
It wouldn’t be possible for them to have just one opportunity to hunt someone like the young man. Besides, if it were indeed a brown bear, who knows who would be hunting whom? The biggest problem was that I was sure the young man wouldn’t make a mistake; the Tibetan must have been signaling him. Why would he wave at a brown bear? Was it something like, “Hey, watch out for your bear paw”? Was this person foolish?
Chen Xuehan suggested that perhaps the Tibetan was trying to warn the young man not to stay in that spot because it was dangerous. That was indeed a possibility, I thought. At that moment, Tashi told me not to doubt it; it must be a big brown bear because he knew that in the past, there were people in Tibet who kept brown bears to guard temples. Brown bears are very intelligent animals; they can recognize who protects them and who are strangers. He also heard about a lama from a certain temple who, during years of food scarcity, fed a brown bear living near the temple with food scraps. Later, when the British invaded Tibet, several British soldiers were attacked by the brown bear when they confiscated that temple.
The ferocity of brown bears is terrifying. Someone once saw the largest brown bear in Hoh Xil, measuring 2.5 meters in length—taller than Yao Ming when it stood up, and those British soldiers were instantly killed and dragged into the woods. Later accounts also confirmed that Tashi’s claims were highly likely; this brown bear might have been one that the Tibetans kept near the lake to guard the entrance to it. Waving at the brown bear might have been a habit of the caretaker. However, the brown bear noticed the intruder, so it did not approach the Tibetan but chose instead to attack the intruder.
In this case, it was quite a feat for the young man to have saved Laba from a brown bear. We could only truly understand what that creature was through various speculations at the beginning of this knowledge, and it wasn’t until the later part of the story that we realized what it was. Throughout the narrative, we continued to believe it was a brown bear, without harboring any doubts. After this segment of the account, Laba became mentally unstable, and it was not until two months later that he could continue recounting the story. Thus, another porter became a rather important character.
The name of the porter is Luodanzhuoma. Yes, you heard it right; she is a woman, but the young man actually didn’t pay attention to the other person’s gender. Luodanzhuoma is a girl from a family of Tibetan medicine practitioners. Her experiences have been quite tumultuous, with poverty being her greatest hardship. Otherwise, a woman wouldn’t have fallen to the level of being a porter.
In such harsh weather, there’s really not much difference between men and women. One cannot discern gender from faces; the biting cold wind wipes away all charm and beauty. Luodan always stayed five meters behind the young man and Laba because she couldn’t keep up with their pace.
Though she is just in her early thirties, Luodan looks like a middle-aged woman in her fifties. When she saw the changes ahead and ran up, everything had already ended.
发表回复