“So you see,” the abbot said, “he is the only one of his kind. Alone.”

You didn’t have to understand the yeti’s language, if he had one, to know that Gaspar was right.

“No he’s not,” said Joshua. “I’m going to him.”

Gaspar took Joshua’s arm to stop him. “Everything is as it should be.”

“No,” said Joshua. “It is not.”

Gaspar pulled his hand back as if he had plunged it into a flame—a strange reaction, as I had actually seen the monk put his hand in flame with less reaction as part of the kung fu regimen.

“Let him be,” I said to Gaspar, not sure at the time why I was doing it.

Joshua headed back into the valley by himself, having not said another word to us.

“He’ll be back when it’s time,” I said.

“What do you know?” snapped Gaspar in a distinctly unenlightened way. “You’ll be working off your karma for a thousand years as a dung beetle just to evolve to the point of being dense.”

I didn’t say anything. I simply bowed, then turned and followed my brother monks back to the monastery.

It was a week before Joshua returned to us, and it was another day before he and I actually had time to speak. We were in the dining hall, and Joshua had eaten his own rice as well as mine. In the meantime, I had applied a lot of thought to the plight of the abominable snowman and, more important, to his origins.

“Do you think there were a lot of them, Josh?”

“Yes. Never as many as there are men, but there were many more.”

“What happened to them?”

“I’m not sure. When the yeti sings I see pictures in my head. I saw that men came to these mountains and killed the yeti. They had no instinct to fight. Most just stood in place and watched as they were slaughtered. Perplexed by man’s evil. Others ran higher and higher into the mountains. I think that this one had a mate and a family. They starved or died of some slow sickness. I can’t tell.”

“Is he a man?”

“I don’t think he is a man,” said Joshua.

“Is he an animal?”

“No, I don’t think he’s an animal either. He knows who he is. He knows he is the only one.”

“I think I know what he is.”

Joshua regarded me over the rim of his bowl. “Well?”

“Well, do you remember the monkey feet Balthasar bought from the old woman in Antioch, how they looked like little human feet?”

“Yes.”

“And you have to admit that the yeti looks very much like a man. More like a man than he does any other creature, right? Well, what if he is a creature who is becoming a man? What if he isn’t really the last of his kind, but the first of ours? What made me think of it was how Gaspar talks about how we work off our karma in different incarnations, as different creatures. As we learn more in each lifetime we may become a higher creature as we go. Well, maybe creatures do that too. Maybe as the yeti needs to live where it is warmer he loses his fur. Or as the monkeys need to, I don’t know, run cattle and sheep, they become bigger. Not all at once, but through many incarnations. Maybe creatures evolve the way Gaspar believes the soul evolves. What do you think?”

Joshua stroked his chin for a moment and stared at me as if he was deep in thought, while at the same time I thought he might burst out laughing any second. I’d spent a whole week thinking about this. This theory had vexed me through all of my training, all of my meditations since we’d made the pilgrimage to the yeti’s valley. I wanted some sort of acknowledgment from Joshua for my effort, if nothing else.

“Biff,” he said, “that may be the dumbest idea you’ve ever had.”

“So you don’t think it’s possible?”

“Why would the Lord create a creature only to have it die out? Why would the Lord allow that?” Joshua said.

“What about the flood? All but Noah and his family were killed.”

“But that was because people had become wicked. The yeti isn’t wicked. If anything, his kind have died out because they have no capacity for wickedness.”

“So, you’re the Son of God, you explain it to me.”

“It is God’s will,” said Joshua, “that the yeti disappear.”

“Because they had no trace of wickedness?” I said sarcastically. “If the yeti isn’t a man, then he’s not a sinner either. He’s innocent.”

Joshua nodded, staring into his now-empty bowl. “Yes. He’s innocent.” He stood and bowed to me, which was something he almost never did unless we were training. “I’m tired now, Biff. I have to sleep and pray.”

“Sorry, Josh, I didn’t mean to make you sad. I thought it was an interesting theory.”

He smiled weakly at me, then bowed his head and shuffled off to his cell.

Over the next few years Joshua spent at least a week out of every month in the mountains with the yeti, going up not only with every group after alms, but often going up into the mountains by himself for days or, in the summer, weeks at a time. He never talked about what he did while in the mountains, except, he told me, that the yeti had taken him to the cave where he lived and had shown him the bones of his people. My friend had found something with the yeti, and although I didn’t have the courage to ask him, I suspect the bond he shared with the snowman was the knowledge that they were both unique creatures, nothing like either of them walked the face of the earth, and regardless of the connection each might feel with God and the universe, at that time, in that place, but for each other, they were utterly alone.

Gaspar didn’t forbid Joshua’s pilgrimages, and indeed, he went out of his way to act as if he didn’t notice when Twenty-Two Monk was gone, yet I could tell there was some unease in the abbot whenever Joshua was away.

We both continued to drill on the posts, and after two years of leaping and balancing, dancing and the use of weapons were added to our routine. Joshua refused to take up any of the weapons; in fact, he refused to practice any art that would bring harm to another being. He wouldn’t even mimic the action of fighting with swords and spears with a bamboo substitute. At first Gaspar bristled at Joshua’s refusal, and threatened to banish him from the monastery, but when I took the abbot aside and told him the story of the archer Joshua had blinded on the way to Balthasar’s fortress, the abbot relented. He and two of the older monks who had been soldiers devised for Joshua a regimen of weaponless fighting that involved no offense or striking at all, but instead channeled the energy of an attacker away from oneself. Since the new art was practiced only by Joshua (and sometimes myself), the monks called it Jew-dô, meaning the way of the Jew.

In addition to learning kung fu and Jew-dô, Gaspar set us to learning to speak and write Sanskrit. Most of the holy books of Buddhism had been written in that language and had yet to be translated into Chinese, which Joshua and I had become fluent in.

“This is the language of my boyhood,” Gaspar said before beginning our lessons. “You need to know this to learn the words of Gautama Buddha, but you will also need this language when you follow your dharma to your next destination.”

Joshua and I looked at each other. It had been a long time since we had talked about leaving the monastery and the mention of it put us on edge. Routine feeds the illusion of safety, and if nothing else, there was routine at the monastery.

“When will we leave, master?” I asked.

“When it is time,” said Gaspar.

“And how will we know it is time to leave?”

“When the time for staying has come to an end.”

“And we will know this because you will finally give us a straight and concrete answer to a question instead of being obtuse and spooky?” I asked.

“Does the unhatched tadpole know the universe of the full-grown frog?”

“Evidently not,” Joshua said.

“Correct,” said the master. “Meditate upon it.”