Exploits by Mike Resnick Page A

off the ground by my shoulders and shaking me. “Who are you?”
    “The Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones.”
    “You're from Guido Scarducci, right?” he said, finally putting me down.
    “I ain't never heard of him,” I said, brushing myself off.
    “Then why did you shoot at me?” he demanded.
    “I thunk you was the Yeti.”
    “What's a Yeti?” he asked.
    “Well, as near as I can tell, a Yeti is you,” I said. “Except it sure sounds to me like you're speaking one hundred percent pure American.”
    “Of course I am,” he said. “I was raised in Butte, Montana.”
    “What's a fellow American doing on a mountain in Tibet?” I asked.
    “It's a long and tragic story, Doctor Jones,” he said, sitting down on a big rock. “My name is Sam Hightower. By the time I was fifteen years old I was seven feet tall and still growing, so I figured that playing basketball was my calling in life, and as soon as I got out of high school I latched onto a semi-pro team called the Butte Buccaneers. About a week before we were scheduled to play the Great Falls Geldings for the championship, for which we were a real big favorite, a gambler called Guido Scarducci came up and offered me five thousand dollars to make sure we didn't win by more than ten points.”
    “No sense embarrassing the other team,” I said sympathetically.
    “Those were my feelings precisely,” said Hightower. “The problem is that the next night, another gambler named Vinnie Bastino offered me twenty thousand to make sure we won by fifteen points or more.”
    “I can see where that might present a serious moral and economic dilemma,” I said.
    “Well, I was young and innocent and didn't view it as such,” said Hightower. “I just figured I'd pay Mr. Scarducci his five thousand back out of my earnings and we'd be all square and there'd be no hard feelings and we might even have a laugh about it over a drink or two.”
    “I take it he didn't quite see it that way?” I said.
    “I realized he and I had a little communications problem when he blew up my car and set fire to my apartment that night,” said Hightower. “And when he missed me and shot six of my teammates during the victory parade the next day, I figured it was probably time to take my leave of the fair city of my birth, so I hopped the first train heading east, and wound up in New York.” He paused. “Problem is, he found me there, too. And in London. And in Rome. I finally decided that it's not all that easy to disappear in a crowd when you're eight foot two inches tall, so after he found me again in Athens, I made up my mind to go where there weren't any crowds at all, and I've been living on this damned mountain for six years now, waiting for Guido Scarducci to hunt me down.”
    “You hang around here much longer and you're gonna get yourself hunted by a lot more people than Guido Scarducci,” I told him.
    “Why?” he asked. “Surely borrowing a little coffee and tea isn't a capital offense even in Tibet.”
    “This ain't got nothing to do with coffee or tea,” I said. “You ever hear of the Abominable Snowman?”
    “I heard legends when I was growing up, just like I heard about Bigfoot and Paul Bunyon.”
    “Well, most folks in these parts think you're him.”
    “Why on earth should they think that?” he asked, kind of bewildered.
    “Well, the notion of an eight-foot basketball player hiding out from gamblers on top of a mountain in Tibet probably ain't had time to take root yet,” I explained.
    “Yeah,” he said thoughtfully. “Now that I come to consider it, I can see your point. I assume that's why you were shooting at me?”
    I nodded. “After all, you did go for my bait.”
    “You know how hard it is to find food up here?” he replied. He rubbed his jaw. “And I damned near broke a tooth on that frozen meat you put out yesterday.”
    “I didn't put it out,” I said. “Which reminds me—we'd better get back to my cave so I can tell Capturing Clyde