Moving pictures

plains.

It was the home of rogue glaciers and prowling avalanches and high, silent fields of snow.

And yetis. Yetis are a high-altitude species of troll, and quite unaware that eating people is out of fashion. Their view is: if it moves, eat it. If it doesn't, then wait for it to move. And then eat it.

They'd been listening all day to the sounds. Echoes had bounced from peak to peak along the frozen ranges until, now, it was a steady dull rumble.

'My cousin', said one of them, idly probing a hollow tooth with a claw, 'said they was enormous grey animals. Elephants.'

'Bigger'n us?' said the other yeti.

'Nearly as bigger'n us,' said the first yeti. 'Loads of them, he said. More than he could count.'

The second yeti sniffed the wind and appeared to consider this.

'Yeah, well,' he said, gloomily. 'Your cousin can't count above one.'

'He said there was lots of big ones. Big fat grey elephants, all climbing, all roped together. Big and slow. All carrying lots of oograah.'

Ah.

The first yeti indicated the vast sloping snowfield.

'Good and deep today,' he said. 'Nothing's gonna move fast in this, right? We lie down in the snow, they won't see us till they're right on top of us, we panic 'em, it's Big Eats time.' He waved his enormous paws in the air. 'Very heavy, my cousin said. They'll not move fast, you mark my words.'

The other yeti shrugged.

'Let's do it,' he said, against the sound of distant, terrified trumpeting.

They lay down in the snow, their white hides turning them into two unsuspicious mounds. It was a technique that had worked time and again, and had been handed down from yeti to yeti for thousands of years, although it wasn't going to be handed much further.

They waited.

There was a distant bellowing as the herd approached.

Eventually the first troll said, very slowly, because it had been working this out for a long time. 'What do you get, right, what do you get if, you cross . . . a mountain with a elephant?'

It never got an answer.

The yetis had been right.

When five hundred crude two-elephant bobsleighs crested the ridge ten feet away at sixty miles an hour, their strapped on occupants trumpeting in panic, they never saw the yetis until they were right on top of them.

Victor got only two hours' sleep but got up feeling remarkably refreshed and optimistic.

It was all over. Things were going to be a whole lot better now. Ginger had been quite nice to him last night - well, a few hours ago -and whatever it was in the hill had been well and truly buried.

You got that sort of thing sometimes, he thought, as he poured some water into the cracked basin and had a quick wash. Some wicked old king or wizard gets buried and their spirit creeps about, trying to put things right or something. Well-known effect. But now there must be a million tons of rock blocking the tunnel, and I can't see anyone doing any creeping through that.

The unpleasantly alive screen surfaced briefly in his memory, but even that didn't seem so bad now. It had been dark in there, there had been lots of moving shadows, he had been wound up like a spring in any case, no wonder his eyes had played tricks on him. There had been the skeletons, too, but even they now lacked the power to terrify. Victor had heard of tribal leaders up on the cold plains who'd be buried with whole armies of mounted horsemen, so that their souls would live on in the next world. Maybe there was something like