Losing the yeti in forgotten nation of Bhutan

But across the Himalayas the beast was seen as real, known for generations in a half-dozen countries from Tibet to Pakistan. It was a region flush with wildlife, where tigers, bears and wild dogs roamed thick mountain forests and remote river valleys. Here, if nowhere else, the yeti was simply one more creature.

For Bhutan, a country barely noticed by much of the world, it became something even more.

In a nation stumbling nervously into modernity, the hulking mountain beast was publicly celebrated, becoming a 20th-century talisman against unbridled change and a link to ancient traditions. Stories of its travels were told by the king and top government officials. The Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, a large national park, was created in part as a place to protect it. Once Bhutan bothered to set up a postal system, in the early 1960s, it issued stamps honoring an animal that science insists does not exist.

"Everyone knew it was there," Dorji says. "It was like the bears or the leopards. Why would we question it?"

But change, a concept barely imaginable here just a few years ago, is accelerating quickly.

Until the early 1960s, Bhutan had sealed itself off for centuries, retreating behind the Himalayas to live as it always had _ with life revolving around crop cycles, Buddhism, tiny feudal city-states and revered royalty. It had no roads, no electricity network, no currency. It had no postal system or telephones. Trade depended on barter. Tourists were barred.

Only after China invaded Tibet in 1959 did the king decree his country would not be fully closed off. At first, change came slowly: there were no paved roads until 1963, no tourists until the 1970s and no international phone service until the 1980s.

In the 1990s, though, things accelerated: Television arrived in 1999, the road network grew, the electricity grid blossomed. While tourism remains highly restricted - visitors must pay $220 per day, in advance, to get a visa - there were still 20,000 tourists last year, nearly ten times as many as in 1991. In a nation where kings held absolute power, March democratic elections brought in a generation of ambitious politicians.

Bhutan is a place where almost everyone was born in a village but where few people see a future in farming _ and where a minuscule modern economy means there are precious few other jobs.

Thimphu, Bhutan's increasingly crowded capital, has everything from majestic royal palaces to microscopic traffic jams of a few dozen cars. On weekend nights, bored, unemployed young people brawl outside dance bars.

Suddenly, Bhutan has reached an uncomfortable crossroads. This is a time when the dynamism of modernity regularly clashes with modernity's pitfalls. Child mortality rates are plummeting, crime is on the rise and a college education is no longer just a dream.

It is a time when the yeti is increasingly unwelcome.