Rarity Made Common - The Kingdom of Rarities - page 178

his belly, and suddenly the air was filled with the heavenly scent. As he lay dying, the musk deer
realized that the fragrance had all along been emanating from within himself.
The author commented, “We may spend our lives seeking something that is actually right in-
side us, and could be found if we would only stop and deepen our attention.”
After more whiskey, it was time to air out the yeti stories. No rare Himalayan species has
garnered more ink, launched such fruitless expeditions, or attracted more cranks than this
rarity, the “abominable snowman.” Search parties have scoured parts of the Himalayas and
brought back traces of fur claimed to be from a yeti, but these typically turn out to be from a
Himalayan tahr—a relative of the Rocky Mountain goat—a Himalayan brown or black bear,
a langur, or a macaque. The absence of scientific proof does little to dissuade the locals, who
are convinced that the yeti, known here as the migoi , is real. In fact, the Bhutanese add a nov-
el feature to its repertoire—the ability to become invisible when necessary. Such revelations
only add fuel to the beliefs of diehard cryptozoologists (literally, those who study hidden
creatures) who remain convinced it is only a matter of time before hard evidence convinces a
skeptical world.
The next day, after crossing another mountain pass, we were at last entering old-growth
oak and rhododendron forest. At the next rise, I walked clockwise around a stone monument,
a religious shrine, and leaned against a boulder. As soon as I put my pack down, a cascade of
cuckoo songs tumbled down the mountainside. The large hawk cuckoo is an incessant sing-
er. Repeatedly, I heard its definitive self-diagnosis: “ Brainfe-ver,brainfe-ver,brainfe-ver ,”
consoled by a nearby oriental cuckoo's soft “ Ho-ho-ho-ho ”; offered treatment by the Indian
cuckoo's “ One-more-bottle , one-more-bottle ”; and dismissed by the psychoanalytic Eurasian
species with the classic rejoinder “ Cuck-koo, cuck-koo .” I tried to call in the oriental but in-
stead stirred up a juvenile yellow-billed blue magpie.
The oaks were massive, draped in lichens. Rhododendrons colored the scene—the giant
Rhododendronarboreum , with its bright red flowers and the most beautiful variety I had ever
seen; the species R. hodgsonii , now all around me, its trunk and limbs festooned with long
peeling strips of purplish bark. The rhododendrons had peaked, and the trail lay strewn with
fallen flowers. William Beebe's quote “To be a Naturalist is better than to be a King” floated
through my mind.
To pause in this old-growth oak-rhododendron forest, to be in this moment, seemed to offer
a perfect marriage of Buddhist practice and scientific curiosity. There is something wondrous
about walking among living organisms many hundreds of years older than you. Deep groves
of old growth are globally rare and can induce a state of rapture in those open to the experien-
ce, whether in the redwoods or sequoias of California, the hill dipterocarp forests of Sarawak,
the mountain ash stands of Australia, the venerable hemlock-cedar forests of Vancouver Is-
land, or the primeval koa stands of Hawaii. And rapture mixes with tranquility, an inner