Scent Marked

"But I've never done that before," I heard her protest further. "Besides, it would never fit." My curiosity was totally piqued by that point. Elias mumbled something that I couldn't quite make out, and then there were more giggles, followed by what sounded like wrestling, and finally a loud yelp.

"You are such a pervert," I heard her exclaim. "No one's ever licked me there." Her head sounded closer to the wall then, like she had been repositioned on the bed.

"Oh God," I heard her moan, and my mind swirled with the possibilities of what he was doing to her. The needy ache between my legs could no longer be ignored. I reached up under my night shirt and began to roll my nipples while my right hand snaked under my knickers. I was embarrassingly wet. My lips were puffy and flowering open, ready for my familiar touch. I slowly began to rub my clit as I listened to them start back up again. Before long, she was begging him to go slow and be gentle. Her moans grew more feral, guttural, as he built up speed. After a while, the rhythmic banging of the headboard returned, followed by screaming and moaning that I couldn't tell whether it was from pleasure or pain. I pinched and pulled at my nipples as my fingers on my clit sped up to a blur. All three of us came at the same time, though hopefully no one else heard me.

What truly made it sting was that Elias had been flirting with me earlier that same day. It could have been me getting my brains fucked out for hours, if only I had relented. When he begged me to come away and have a drink with him, I turned him down and stayed with my girlfriends instead, not wanting to be another one of his conquests. After five years of attending the same conference, I knew his reputation well.

Elias is ruggedly handsome and unmarried - which is not usually true for the guys on the prowl at our annual meetings - so that wasn't the issue. He was charming but he could also be arrogant, especially when it came to research in our field. Besides, for a young woman in any science field, getting the men to take you seriously is always an uphill battle. Sleep around too easily and you can just forget about being respected. This is all the more true for women of colour. I saw the mysterious woman sneaking out of Elias's room early the next morning. I won't name her, and I would never slut shame her, but I also never want to be "that girl."

I also have to admit that my reluctance toward Elias stemmed from the fact that he ridiculed a theory I had about human evolutionary biology many years ago when I was still in grad school presenting at a conference for the first time. I desperately wanted to redeem myself and eventually prove him wrong. I couldn't do that on my back with my legs up in the air and my knickers dangling from around my ankles, no matter how bloody handsome he was.

Perhaps because of those negative early experiences with Elias, I had turned my academic eye to big cat evolutionary biology. I have a thing for tigers. I don't know if it is just because I was born in India, but can one ever truly know what inspires wonder and curiosity in a child? For whatever reason, I love tigers, who can grow to be bigger than lions, damn it! In my work I'd become an expert at tracking and studying them, while somehow not ending up as their supper.

Like snow leopards, tigers are solitary animals for most of their lives and despite their size are also incredibly hard to find if they want to avoid you, which they most often do. In the thick of the bush, a tiger can be ten feet away from you and you'd have no clue that this creature that is eight feet long and weighs 500 pounds is even there. That's the bad way to find a tiger, and you risk putting yourself in a situation where you may have to harm the cat to fight for your own life. My method is to put cameras in the trees beyond a tiger's reach and retreat from the bush almost entirely. The trick is in finding the right places to settle the cameras. I was one of the best at it, and thus my invitation to join this search for snow leopards.

We also hired two sherpas and two porters to accompany us on this trek. Normally a group would have one sherpa and one porter, but we hired more to help distribute the weight of all the gear we needed to schlep up the mountain, including laptops, extra batteries, cameras, comprehensive medical kits, medical oxygen, and satellite phones. I initially felt guilty - hiring people to basically serve as our pack mules - but as our lead sherpa, Sonam explained, portering is a way of life in Nepal and, although it is tough work, is also relatively well paid, particularly in the Khumbu region. That made me feel a little bit better, but only a little.

Rounding out our group were four members of the BBC production team - two cameramen, Eric Weismann and Vihaan Patel; a sound specialist, Jannell Valenzuela; and an on-site producer, Vanessa Berlowitz. Twelve of us in all.

Vanessa is 'a bad ass,' as my American friends say, and I think I was most excited at the prospect of working for her. She's had more than twenty years' experience at the BBC's Natural History Unit and has filmed almost everywhere on earth. She's collected over 20 Bafta and Emmy awards for her nature films and is Attenborough's top choice when it comes to his series. Dirty blonde hair in her late 30s, she has high cheek bones that accentuate her warm, generous smile and give her face a roundness that suggests a little more weight than she actually carries. She was fit and also tough, having braved the extreme conditions at both the north and south poles. I was looking forward to learning from her and proud that she was leading our team.

Most of us flew into Kathmandu. From there we took a smaller prop plane up to this tiny airstrip in a little mountain village called Lukla, 9,383 feet above sea level in the Namche province of Nepal. From Lukla we were shuttled by helicopter up to a slightly lager village called the Namche Bazaar in the Khunde region, where we stayed in a 20-room lodge called the Yeti Mountain Home, 11,286 feet above sea level. For the foolish and more gullible tourists visiting, there was a Hindu temple nearby that claimed to house an actual scalp of a Yeti. The hosts at the lodge tried hard to get us to shell out a few thousand Nepalese Rupees each to go and see the scalp, but we politely declined.

The lodge had a grand, spacious main lounge with a huge stone fireplace just past the lobby and before the dining hall. There was a warm cozy fire and plenty of tender to keep it going, so we all gathered there to have a few drinks and catch up that first night. Our hosts served us little brass bowls of a drink called Chyang, which is made from fermented rice and tastes rather similar to a cider. It likely has a similar alcohol content as well and its taste was pleasant. As the Chyang flowed, Eric, Vihaan and Elias became more and more flirtatious with myself, Taz and Jannell. They competed over who could tell the funniest expedition story.

Elias was eyeing me more and more boldly, but he was also eyeing Taz. I always felt that Taz is prettier than me, and far more outgoing. Guys were constantly ogling her, and she was usually the life of the party. She had smooth brown skin a shade darker than mine, long black hair and full sensual lips that spread out into a radiating smile. Plus, she had this curvy bubble butt that most girls would kill for. To my surprise, she was always insecure about her thighs and butt, fearing that they were too thick and too big, but I saw the way guys looked at her with raw desire. She had absolutely nothing to be insecure about. Guys would literally drool when looking at her butt, mesmerized, finding it hard to tear their eyes away. It was particularly demoralizing being on a double date with her.

There was probably some small part of me that was jealous of Taz, but I struggled hard to suppress that jealousy and never let it come between us. She knew that guys thought that she was really hot but she was never arrogant about it or bitchy toward other women, and I really appreciated that about her. The fact that Elias was eyeing us both just made me all the more determined to give my attention to Vihaan.

I learned that Vihaan was in his early 30s, born in Johannesburg to parents originally from Mumbai. His mum and dad were anti-apartheid activists and members of the ANC, but moved his family from Johannesburg to London in 2001, shortly after the end of Mandela's presidency. He was very handsome with a thin full beard lining his angular jaw, and he was fun to talk with.

It was likely because Vihaan had never lived in India that we got along so well. I often struggled to find common ground with Indian men from India, as their outdated ideas about gender roles and proper womanhood didn't vibe well with me. But Vihaan was charming and cool. Before long we were laughing like old friends.

Vihaan went to film school in London but it was only by a fluke that he became a nature specialist. Desperately needing money to support himself just out of school, he took a job with a conservationist organization to make a nature documentary. That job led to other similar jobs and then to more of the same, until eventually he just fell in love with it. He'd worked on two previous Attenborough projects for the "Planet Earth" series that took him high up into the mountains, so he became one of the first names on our producer, Vanessa's list.

As Vihaan and I traded stories, Elias asked our hosts if they had anything stronger to drink. They brought out some Aeylaa, a distilled beverage brewed from millet. They told us that it was the strongest drink they had.

"Man, are you crazy?!" Vihaan exclaimed.

"Can't handle a grown man's drink?" Elias teased.

"You mean a grown woman's drink?" Taz sassed him.

"H-E-L-L-O! You guys do remember that we are supposed to wake up god-awful early and go on a full day's climb tomorrow, right?" Jannell warned, trying to talk sense into us. We had already downed a few rounds of the Chyang.

"Just one shot won't hurt us," Elias goaded us on.

We relented and took it, but as the flirtatious banter continued, one shot eventually became three. That stuff was strong! I was way past buzzed when a playful argument broke out about whose strategy was going to work best to find our elusive cats.

"I'm sure Priya's got a few bottles of leopard pee in her backpack to help bring the kitties to us!" teased Elias, both making fun of me and the smaller size of the cats we were tracking. Everybody roared.

"Yeah, and I'm gonna pour it all over your backpack when you're not looking," I retorted. "We'll see if you still call them 'kitties' when one of them caries you up the side of a cliff in her jaws!"

"Leopards do have the strongest neck and jaw muscles of all the big cats," Greg chimed in. "They can climb a tree carrying an animal that weighs almost twice as much as them."

"Leave it to Poop to cite the statistics," Elias chided, elbowing Greg in his side good naturedly.

"Very funny, smartass, but you won't be laughing when my strategy brings in the best footage," I replied.

"Do I sense a bit of a wager afoot?" Taz asked, cocking up one eyebrow. A dark lust flashed over Elias's eyes as his gaze raked over me, a wicked grin curling his lips. A shiver ran through me and my nipples perked up, and I thanked God my clothing was layered.

"Loser buys the drinks for everyone when we get back to Kathmandu," he suggested, apparently too polite to say what he was actually thinking.

"Sounds good to me. Priya...?" Taz raised her eyebrows and gestured toward me.

"You're on!" I affirmed, "and I have to pee. So if you all will excuse me..." I set my drink down and went to the loo. 'As if I wasn't feeling enough pressure already,' I thought to myself as I sat perched atop the porcelain bowl, my hands covering my face. The slight eco of my urine splashing in the bowl reverberated throughout the room as I tried to calm my nerves. I didn't want to admit it but my heart was also racing from the lascivious look Elias gave me. I needed to put those thoughts out of my head and stay focused on the job we were hired to do.

I washed my hands and face and opened the door to head back to the group, only to run into Elias in the hallway blocking my path. The mischievous look on his face told me he was waiting for me.

"You know Priyanka, buying drinks is one thing, but we really should put something with consequence on our little wager," he suggested, using my full name. I hated when he did that.

"Something with consequence, huh?" I asked sarcastically.

"Unless you're afraid..."

"Puh-lease!" I snorted. "You will be extolling my brilliance when this is all over."

"Then being so confident, you should have no problem raising the stakes," he said, eyeing me hungrily. He was as ruggedly handsome as ever, sporadic flecks of grey decorating his jet black hair. It was seemingly unruly yet meticulous in its care. I had to fold my arms across my chest to prevent him seeing any evidence that he was getting to me.

"And just what did you have in mind?" I asked, raising one eyebrow.

"How about if you lose I get to photograph you, and capture your natural beauty, just like I do my cats?"

"Ha! In your dreams, big boy!"

"If you are so confident in your tracking skills, there's no risk. Just name what it is you would extract out of me," he replied, spreading his arms and looking down, gesturing that he was open to anything.

"You're serious?! You want to see me naked that bad, huh?"

"For a while now," he admitted boldly as a simple matter of fact.

"And that's really how you want it, from a bet?"

"I've made no secret about the fact that I want you," he said softly, licking his lips, "but you've yet to give in."

"Listen," I said to him, shifting into a sultry voice and slowly poking my finger at his chest. "If you are going to see me naked, it should be because I'm hot for you, dripping wet for you, and needing you inside me." He was caught fully off guard, his mouth hanging open in shock. I was laughing internally but I held it together. I was totally teasing him, and I glanced down to make sure I was having the desired effect. "That's how it should happen, not because you had to resort to some cheap trick like a bet," I concluded.

"Well, I was about to call it a night," he said as he recovered from his initial shock at me being so brazen, his voice a baritone timbre. "I'd truly and sincerely love it if you'd consider joining me for a nightcap so we can work on setting those proper conditions," he proposed.

"Are you seriously asking me to come back to your room with you?... Tonight?" I asked incredulously, all teasing aside. "With the day we have ahead of us tomorrow?"

"I've always had a thing for you, Priya, you know that."

"And I've always turned you down."

"Aren't you tired of saying no yet?" he smiled confidently. The memory of that night in Boston flashed through my mind, and just how hard I came listening to his performance. God, the offer was tempting but I reminded myself that I wasn't the only woman receiving his attention that night.

"You flirted with Taz just as much as you did with me," I told him, striking a defensive posture. "Maybe you'll have more luck with her, but I'm going to bed... alone."

"Let me come tuck you in, and give you a little something to help you sleep better," he persisted, licking his plush full lips as he stepped closer to me. I could feel the heat coming off his body as he undressed me with his eyes, hinting at just where he wanted to put that tongue.

"Dream on, dude," I told him, holding firm despite the trickle of moisture forming between my legs.

"Oh well," he signed. "I had to try."

"Good night, Elias. See you bright and early," I said as I walked away, naughtily putting a little extra sway in my hips. I could feel his eyes zeroed in on my backside.

"Mmm mmm mmm," he sighed heavily.

-------

The next morning we met with our Sherpas bright and early at 5 am. They gave us a run down on how we would spend the next few days taking short day-long hikes to help get acclimatized and finalizing the logistics for our eventual excursion to find the leopards. Those day hikes were grueling. They were also sunny and beautiful but when you're that high in elevation, sunny skies are deceptive. Cloud cover can actually trap warmer air rising up from the south but bright sunny days are frigidly cold. There was no more staying up late drinking, laughing and teasing. When we got back to the lodge each evening, we had dinner and showered and then were passed out by 9:00 pm.

The night before we departed for the final trek, our lead sherpa, Sonam, gathered us around the huge fireplace in the lodge to center our thinking and calm our anxieties.

"We believe that the mountains challenge our bodies, our minds, and our souls," he explained. "They are places where we are forced to turn our gaze inwards and search within ourselves for the grit and the humility to continue. From our years in the mountains we know that no person steps foot from a mountain unchanged in some small way. We recognize that from the mountains we draw our vitality and we feel strongly that it is our responsibility to do our share in giving back to them."

In contrast to the excitement and laughter we'd shared over the past few days, the mood that evening was solemn, reflective. We all knew that our search was extremely dangerous and potentially life-threatening. So many people had died trying to tame these mountains, and if we didn't approach this trip with respect, we could very well add our names to that grim list. We listened intently and in total silence as Sonam spoke.

"Over 290 people have met their creator trying to climb Everest. The last time that we went a year without anyone dying was 1977," he warned ominously. "Most of them perished in what we call, 'the death zone,' above 26,000 feet. Up that high, there is not enough oxygen to sustain human life. Luckily for us, we are climbing only up to 21,000 feet."

"How many climbers have you lost personally?" our producer, Vanessa asked. Sonam paused, and cleared his throat before continuing.

"Way too many," he admitted grimly.

"We thought that you are the best at taking people up and bringing them back safely?" Greg chimed in.

"I haven't lost a climber in 12 years," Sonam insisted. "It is the best safety record of any sherpa here. However, my wisdom came at a steep price," he said despondently. We all got very quiet.

"It was the month of May in the year 1996 of the Western calendar," he continued. "I was much younger then, and it was my first trip as a sherpa. I portered the previous 6 years. It was exciting to finally become a sherpa. A mixed group of climbers from New Zealand and the United States, and one woman from Japan made up my team. Yasuko was her name. At 47, she was actually the oldest in our group, and the most experienced. She tried to warn me that I was letting a few of the cockier men push our group too hard. Regrettably, I didn't listen to her." There were tears forming in his eyes then as he stared off into the flames. The rest of us sat quietly amidst the crackle and pops of the burning logs and didn't make a peep.

"We were approaching up the south summit at just over 28,000 feet. We could see the peak of Everest less than a thousand feet away but because the group had been pushing themselves so hard, they were using up oxygen faster than planned. We were in danger of not having enough oxygen to make it back down to a free-breathing altitude. What was worse, there was a major storm brewing. A blizzard was forecast for the mountain. My gut told me not to risk it and turn back, but the guys were so disappointed when I raised that potentiality with them. Many climbs don't make it to the top, either due to the weather or because of an injury. But being so close, the group decided to go for it. Yasuko deferred to the group decision, but I could tell that she disagreed.