Introduction/Apologies: First off, the inspiration for this short story came entirely from Neil Gaiman. In fact, if you’re going to blame anyone for this morbid little tale, it should be him. He is probably one of the most wonderful, completely fantastical writers of our time, and this story wrote itself one afternoon shortly after I read the introduction to his collection of short stories in Fragile Things. In it, he said that he’d recently learned that the word Yeti can be literally translated into “that thing over there.” And I knew I had to write a story about a Yeti.

But something Neil Gaiman also does is write stories for people. He even wrote a story as a birthday gift for his daughter ( he was a year and a half late with it, and I think maybe he and I could be friends and procrastinate together ), and another that was almost a wedding gift ( he settled for getting the newly married couple a toaster. I’d have taken the story, personally ).

So this story is for those four special people who took me snowboarding for the first time, but mostly it’s for Ryan. And hopefully he’ll forgive me for how completely strange and weird it is, and for using him as Yeti bait.

Ryan -- Thanks again. You were a very patient teacher. I hope this finds you well.

Some ( Actually Don’t ) Like It Hot ( At All )

His ass was frozen.

Dave thought that maybe he should be more upset about this fact than he was. But he was too busy laughing as his friend tumbled a little further down the mountain to be that discontent. He should have known better than to offer himself up as a snowboarding instructor. Well, at least he was getting some entertainment for his trouble.

“You’re doing great!” he called. His friend, little more than a pile of snow at this point, lifted a hand and gave him a thumbs up.. Dave pulled himself to his feet and glanced a little further down the mountain. They weren’t even close to the end of the run. Not even halfway. It was going to be a long day. Cheerfully, he regarded the next curve. Then he looked back toward his friend.

“I’m going to go a little further!” he called.

Another thumbs up. His friend was still digging out of the snow after that last little crash. Dave waited a moment longer, then -- compelled by his frozen ass -- he turned his snowboard and made his way around the next bend in the run. He made sure not to go too far. He didn’t want to leave the poor newbie boarder too far behind, after all. But he was starting to get circulation back to his bum, and his fingers were remembering what warm felt like. He smiled. He had always loved the mountains, and snowboarding, and the general atmosphere of being so high above the rest of the world. He hadn’t seen too many other snowboarders, but it was a weekday, and he had planned it that way. He thought wistfully that if he hadn’t decided to play nice guy and teach his friend, he would be on his forth or fifth run down the hill by now.

He found himself quiet alone. He decided he’d gone far enough, and he slowed to a stop and plopped back down to wait on his friend. He regretted that his ass was going to go numb again, but there was nothing to be done about that. He simply waited.

His friend was taking a long time. He didn’t have a watch to check, but his ass was definitely numb. He shivered, and glanced around him, and from no where in particular, he began to think about Yetis. He wasn’t sure why. He’d never gone for any of that paranormal bullcrap. Millions of Big Foot sightings or not, Dave liked to think that he had two feet planted firmly in reality. Reality had little time for things like Yetis and Big Feet. Reality preferred Spreadsheets and Growth Reports and Board Meetings. Dave didn’t like those things, either, but he believed in them. They made up a part of the world he understood.

Still, sitting on the side of a mountain with your butt suck in the snow and with nothing to look at but a bunch of trees and nothing to do but wait and think, he found it hard not to let his mind wander to snow monsters. And just when he was convincing himself that everyone who had ever believed in something as nonsensical as a Yeti were all insane, he heard a noise.

He would find himself, in later days, unable to recall what exactly about the noise it was that had his hackles rising. He just knew it wasn’t a good noise. In fact, it was a bone-crackle noise. A splintering noise, the kind of noise that was made by something big, and something strong, and something animal. Dave shook himself. He told himself that at absolute worst, there was a bear nearby. He told himself that he’d just psyched himself out. He told himself a number of comforting things.

But he couldn’t stop himself from hearing it lumber closer. He looked up the slope. Still no sign of his friend yet -- the bend obscured most of the high ground, and he felt very small and very alone.

Come on. This is all in your head. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Thousands of people come to this mountain to snowboard. Hundreds of thousands. They’re all okay. He nodded. That made sense. More sense than the lumbering footsteps headed in his direction.

Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see…? The lyrics to the song drifted to him from the vast distance of his childhood. He shivered. The cheerful song seemed to mock him as he sat there, shivering and convinced that he had just seen one too many horror flicks this month.

At that moment, he felt a deep chill come over him, frosting his bones. He stiffened and everything inside of him screamed at him to get up, to move, to get away and not look back. Instead, slowly, he turned his head. And something, something large and white and tangled, brought a massive paw down on his skull.

He woke, and he was sick. He supposed he must have been knocked unconscious. He glanced around, and he realized that he couldn’t see much. It was dark and there was ice, and that was about all his senses could tell him. That, and something smelled very unpleasant. It didn’t help his queasy stomach. He closed his eyes, but that was just as bad as having them open. Still, whatever it was that hit him -- he was telling himself it was a polar bear, some freak polar bear that had somehow made it to the mountains of California, and screw anyone who would argue -- seemed to have disappeared. He took a few deep breaths through his mouth, and stopped trying to identify the smell.

He must have dozed again, because when he woke, it was lighter in the cave. The smell was still there, and he could make out a dark stain in the snow not far from where he was. He tried to stand this time. But when he managed to get to his feet, he was so dizzy that he wasn’t sure which way was up, or down, or out, and he sank back to his haunches. The queasiness was worse.

The third time he woke up, he had a terrible moment where his brain flashed back to a scene in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Something about a huge white monster, and a cave. He groaned and found himself disgusted by how small and weak the noise was. He wondered if he would die in this cold cave.

The forth time he woke up, he realized that he was not alone in the cave. He heard the thing, and its steps were like thunder, rolling through the cave. He caught a glimpse of it. It was still huge and white and terrible, and it looked like a cross between a huge ape and a bear, and it had a black noise and wicked fangs. Its claws were long and they scraped on the ice, and it walked on two feet. Its hair was tangled and dirty, and it was yellow and brown at its belly, and white and grey on its back and head and shoulders. Dave tried not to make a sound, or to breathe. It saw him, saw his eyes, and lumbered over. It made a grumbling, growling noise. Dave bit back a scream. He knew, in some base, instinctual part of his brain, that he was about to become dinner. He blacked out again.

When he woke up the fifth time, he was sure he was dead. It was warm and bright, and there were too many colors, and he shut his eyes in protest. He heard voices, heard people calling his name. Opening his eyes a second time took effort, and he realized he couldn’t be dead -- he was still a little queasy, and he didn’t think you could be queasy in heaven. He was also fairly certain that heaven did not look like a ski lodge in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

“Dave!” said his girlfriend, and he shifted his eyes and there she was, standing at his bed, looking immensely relieved and immensely concerned. He tried to smile, but he didn’t think it worked. She leaned down and kissed him on the lips, but softly, as though she were afraid she’d hurt him with the tiny contact.

“Hey,” he said, and the word was slurred almost past recognition. “What happened?”

“You went missing,” said his friend, and his eyes slid over to her next. She wasn’t covered in snow anymore, and she stood back a little. “I fell down to the bottom of the hill, but you weren’t there, and no one else had seen you come down. So search parties went up. But no one could find you.”

“How long…How long was I gone?” he asked, feeling dizzy again.

“Two days,” said his girlfriend. She looked close to tears, and he touched her hand, covered it with his own. He moved to sit up and he felt a blinding, shooting pain in his leg. He had to take a few breaths to get past it, and when he didn’t feel like he might throw up by merely sitting still, he realized he could still feel it throbbing in his thigh, almost bone-deep.

“God…what happened to me?” he managed, teeth clenched.

“Well, that’s the thing.” His girlfriend bit her lip, and then looked over him at his friend. The two women paused, and then his girlfriend continued. “No one could find you, and then this morning you were on the doorstep of the lodge. You were half-frozen, and wrapped in a blanket, and you had been…well…”

“I had been…?”

“Bitten,” she finished, with reluctance.

“Bitten?!” He fumbled with his blanket -- hoping all the while that it was not the one he’d been found in -- and tried to look at his leg, but it was swathed in bandages under his boxers. “Bitten by what?”

“No one knows,” said his friend. He turned to her again, and she shrugged. “But there was a note.”

“A note?” Dave sat back and wondered if he were dreaming. It felt real, but…it sounded like somebody’s twisted little nightmare. “A note. From who?”

His friend shrugged. “We don’t know. It was written really badly, like a kid still learning letters, but it said…” She flushed and he waited, and when she continued she seemed almost embarrassed to say it.

“It said, ‘He’s much too stringy and spicy. Next time I’ll take his slow, fat friend.’”

Dave didn’t believe it. He didn’t think anyone would believe it. But he read it himself, as it was next to his bed on a nightstand. And then he lied back down, and closed his eyes, and decided next time he’d go to a ski lodge out of state, and he wouldn’t be offering to teach any more newbies how to snowboard, and that maybe those nut jobs who chased paranormal creatures weren’t so nutty after all.

He drifted off to sleep, and when he woke, he made himself forget all about it. It worked, too, except for the scars, which looked like teeth marks, on his thigh. Those he kept with him, and never spoke of, not even to the children he had with his girlfriend-turned-wife, years later.