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Storytelling, wearing accessories and stamping around could be the oldest art forms among humans. Some skilled storytellers preserve and transmit communal history and knowledge as they entertain - for example before bedtime.

The yeti was a protected species in Nepal as recently as 1958. Some think this elusive, dangerous creature is found in the snowy Himalayas. For generations the Sherpas of Tibet have refrained from climbing Mount Kumbhila in eastern Nepal for fear that yetis would come and punish them. You see, yetis are most often described - by those who claim to have seem them - as between two and four meters tall. And Tibetan lamas say a yeti carries a magic stone in his left armpits and throws it at great yaks in order to stun and kill them.

The yeti was observed twice in eastern Tibet by Rheinholdt Messner, a leading mountaineer. The huge ape-like creature was also spied in Nepal by the British mountaineer Don Whillans in 1970 when it was making off across the southern slope of Mount Annapurna while clutching a bag of English chocolate bars taken from the mountaineer's tent.

Genuine yeti specimen and authenticated photos seem absent. In May 2012 investigators, led by University of Oxford genetics professor Bryan Sykes, sent out a request to museums and individual collectors, including the renowned mountaineer Reinhold Messner, and got three hair samples in good enough shape to allow gene sequencing. These samples were said to be from yetis. But one of them came from a goat, and the other two – one from Ladakh in India and the other from Bhutan – were linked to the polar bear. The hairs might have come from a distant descendant of the polar bear or a local cross with a brown bear, the scientists suggested. "Might have come from . . ." looks like a little speculation. [1]

The facts are: Three hair samples are investigated and ruled out. But the samples are few. The findings are therefore far from being conclusive evidence whether there are "snow-bears" walking about in Tibet or not.

Yeti tales 9 - 17 in this collection are adapted from a popular textbook, Tibetan-English Folktales (2006), edited by Allie Stuart, Kevin Stuart, Tse dbang rdo rje, and others.