By taking the human Mawei was breaking a rule of yeti culture that had been set down by her ancestors long ago. Yetis go to great lengths to avoid humans, and most yetis in Mawei’s position would’ve left the child to die, not out of cruelty, but out of fear. Yetis see the human race as magic run amok.
From a young age yetis are taught that human beings are not technically real, but are a thought-form or ‘tulpa’ created by longhaired plains-yetis in ancient times. This tribe of yetis is said to have accidentally started the human race, conjuring it into existence through the repetition of stories told to the young. So many plains-yetis had grown up believing stories about humans that the force of their belief gave humans a physical form. Eventually humans became real enough to make war on the plains-yetis, and wiped them off the face of the earth. From then on the four remaining tribes avoided contact with humans at all cost.
Mawei had been told many times that humans were the most dangerous creatures in the world, but she felt no threat from the little one she held in her arms. It was young and helpless, and besides, she knew that humans left yetis alone because they didn’t believe in them, and she thought that if humans were anything like yetis their beliefs wouldn’t be changed by the words of a child.
In any case she told herself that her contact with the human would be brief. She would leave it on the outskirts of a village and it would be found and cared for by other humans. After a few miles the child’s crying stopped and it took hold of Mawei’s fur with both hands and clenched its fists. Every time Mawei looked down, it was looking back up at her with its big, penetrating eyes. Mawei could tell that the child thought it was dreaming and she made her movements more fluid so that she wouldn’t break the spell.
The snowstorm was getting worse and Mawei was afraid she’d never find a human village, but eventually she caught a whiff of exhaust and followed it to a highway. It was dark by the time she got there and the child had fallen asleep. The cars going by had their hateful yellow eyes lit, illuminating horizontal cones of snowfall as they sped by. It was a sight that entranced Mawei, and she watched for a while before deciding she could solve her predicament right then and there.
The highway was four lanes wide, two in each direction, and there were cars and trucks coming in groups of two or three every minute or so. Mawei held the child, who was snoring gently, and crept down to the tree line. She watched a couple of cars go by and then moved quickly out to the edge of the road. She set the child down in the right lane, thinking a human would be more likely to stop if the child was directly in its path. The little human shifted around, uncomfortable on the wet concrete. There were large snowflakes accumulating in the child’s hair and eyelashes, and Mawei hesitated for a second before she darted back to the edge of the forest.
She put her back against a tree and darkened her fur. There was a car coming on the other side of the road and she wanted to make sure the little bird was safely picked up before she left. It was a black car with two humans inside and it passed without even slowing down. The car woke the child, who looked around, confused, and scrambled to get up as another car was coming on the same side of the highway. It roared past in the left lane, and as its red taillights faded into the snowy dark the child stumbled backward and cried out.
Mawei was surprised. She knew that human eyesight was bad, but surely they could see a child less than ten feet away from them. The little human, sitting in the right lane of the wet highway, began to cry. Mawei thought that maybe humans cared less for their young than yetis did, and maybe no one would bother to save a helpless child. For all Mawei knew humans ate their orphans.
As she was thinking this, a truck was coming and Mawei could see that it was on a collision course with the child. She bolted toward the highway, skidding a bit on some gravel before getting an arm around the child and pulling it out of the way of the eighteen wheeler that was flying by at that precise moment.
If a human had seen it, they would think Mawei’s fast reaction time and movements were supernatural, but they would be wrong. Yetis are able to move at incredibly fast speeds because of the way they perceive time. What a human being calls ‘the present’ is actually one fourteenth of a second that slides along the timeline, but for a yeti the present much shorter. This means that the number of things a yeti can accomplish in any period of time is far greater than that of a human. Mawei had gone from the trees to the road and saved the child in the time it would’ve taken a human to realize it was too late.
Mawei held the child tighter than before and pressed deep into the forest. She felt they were moving away from death, toward life, as the black forest crackling with ice and fresh snow enveloped them.