Losing the yeti in forgotten nation of Bhutan

The great Italian climber Reinhold Messner spent years tracking yeti stories across the Himalayas and even caught a glimpse of it a couple times. But in the end, the truth was obvious to him. "All evidence," he wrote at the end of his travels, "points to a nocturnal species of brown bear."

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Or maybe not.

Ask politely, and Sangay Wangchuck will take you into a meeting room at the headquarters of Bhutan's conservation department and show you half a dozen framed plaster casts mounted on the wall. The frames show the outline of irregular grayish footprints around 12 inches long. All, according to small signs, come from yetis.

Wangchuck, the national director of conservation, knows what it is to wrestle with belief and science.

He has a master's degree from Yale and a doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He's a scientist who oversees legions of rangers and researchers. His training tells him not to believe in something unless he has proof.

But the yeti stories run deep here, and denial means more than casting off an old belief.

"My parents, my village, they still believe," says Wangchuck, a genial, erudite man clearly pained by the twin pulls of science and his heritage.

So he speaks slowly when he talks about the yeti, words stumbling out in sentence fragments as he tries to straddle the line between the empirical and the emotional.

"As a biological entity, it's very difficult" to believe, says Wangchuck, looking down at his desk, covered with piles of papers. But does it exist? "It's very difficult to say no."

So this man of science has found a very unscientific middle ground. "I tell people: 'Let's not dig too much into it. Let's talk about it, but leave it at that, and not conclude 'Yes, it's there,' or 'No, it's not there.'"

Talk to most Bhutanese, though, and few have such quandaries.