Scent Marked

"Come on, spill it, Priya. What are you doing to Elias?"

"Nothing!" Part of me wanted to tell her, but I just couldn't. Especially since what I'd done involved the theft of her undies and a violation of her privacy. I knew Taz was no prude, but I just couldn't imagine her having a positive reaction to how I'd used her knickers in my little experiment.

"You lying hussy! There's guilt written all over your face," she accused, playfully pushing my shoulder.

"I swear! I'm not up to anything," I maintained, but I couldn't help the smile from breaking out over my lips. She wasn't convinced.

"Ok, if that's how you want to play it. But I'll find out what you're up to," she affirmed, looking at me sideways. She knew I was up to something.

After breakfast everyone loaded up on water and snacks and then went on their way. Unlike past mornings, I wasn't so eager to have them leave. A part of me didn't want to watch the clandestine video I captured and have my worst insecurities confirmed. But I also couldn't put it off once they'd left. No way could I concentrate on sorting through the other footage collected from our remote cameras until I found out what went on in our tent the night before.

My palms were all sweaty and my heart beat with nervous trepidation as I watched the first clips. Like the previous night, the first video file captured me arranging our undies on either side of Elias before settling off to sleep. The following video was where the action began. As per usual, Elias began his night sleeping on his back. His head shifted back and forth for a while, as if he couldn't decide which position was more comfortable. The following video showed him turn fully toward my panties, but my heart sank as he turned fully toward Taz's in the next. This went back and forth for a while, leaving me on edge. Finally, at a time stamp of 2:13 am, Elias turned fully over to bury his face in my panties. I literally clapped and cheered out loud, pumping my fist in victory. The following video at 2:28 captured Elias's signature ground humping while face planted in my knickers and my heart swelled with pride and relief. At 3:05 Elias returned to his back, demonstrating an impressive pitched tent. His left hand held my panties flush to his face while his right hand pumped furiously under his sleeping bag.

He chose me. Given the choice between Taz's womanly essence and my own, his body chose mine. A fresh flood seeped into my current undies as the realization washed over me. My own hand drifted under my fleece and began to massage my nipples, which were suddenly aching for attention as I watched the events unfold.

To my utter horror, Elias woke up! Breathing became nearly impossible as my heart caught in my throat. His eyes popped open and began searching aimlessly in the dark, seemingly trying to figure out what was going on. He lifted my soiled panties off of his face and manipulated them with both hands, trying to figure out what they were. There was more confusion on his face as the realization set in. What he did next floored me. He took another whiff, pressing my dirty panties to his face. The infrared sensitivity of the camera caught his eyes rolling back into his head while the bulge making the tent in his sleeping bag jumped up a few times.

Watching this turn of events set the cream to pulsing out of my pussy. Before long one of his hands returned to its earlier task under his sleeping bag, only then with more vigor. The pitched tent began rising rhythmically as he kept my panties pressed tightly to his face. The hand massaging my breasts made its way down under my pants between my legs and found a river running there, and my fingers slid easily around in the current. The rhythmic up and down motion beneath Elias's sleeping bag quickened, as did the pace of my own fingers. I captured his orgasm at 3:17, a wonderful display of thrashing hips and anguished facial expressions. When I saw his body begin to convulse and shake uncontrollably it pushed me over the edge as well. My body was wracked with its own set of convulsions as my orgasm overtook me.

As a last visual treat Elias pulled his hand out from under his sleeping bag and held it up, his messy explosion webbed between his fingers. He used my panties to wipe his hand clean then quickly drifted off to sleep. It explained why they were so wet and heavy when I found them that morning. I wrote down every last detail in my journal, and all the earlier anxiety I had was gone.

Normally when we're awake, our brains are defensive and cautious when it comes to desire and falling for someone. That caution grows with age and experience. But when we're asleep, the defensive and cautious center of our brain is also at rest, which is what allows our dreams to wander so freely. Ideas, thoughts and desires introduced in our minds while we're sleeping bypass those defenses and implant much deeper, down into the subconscious. It's almost the equivalent of giving someone instructions while they are under hypnosis. I wasn't instructing Elias to crave the smell and taste of my body, but I was testing his desire and exposing his wants in a way that he was helpless to defend against, and then teasing those desires to turn his cravings into an obsession. By saturating his senses with the smell my sex while he was asleep, my pheromones were directly invading his subconscious, and I wondered if that was even ethical or fair. But I wanted to assess his unfiltered reaction, and I couldn't think of a better way to do it.

Was it time to bring my experiment to a close? I had only tested Elias reaction to my scent against one other woman's, but was that evidence of a true preference? Scientifically speaking, no it wasn't. An 'n' of 1 or 2 does not a sound experiment make. However, my resources were limited. There were only two other women in our group. Did I dare also violate their privacy to continue my little study? That would be completely wrong and unethical - there was just no way I could justify that.

Yet, I found myself limping through the snow and the icy ground beneath headed over to the tent where Vihaan, Eric, Vanessa, and Jannell were bedding. I located Jannell's bag and quickly began the same sick and twisted process that I had employed going through Taz's undies. If I hadn't been injured, I would have been out there sampling leopard pee to try and unlock the secrets of their chemical communication. As a researcher why shouldn't I try to discern the scent markings of humans as well? I knew that if I thought long enough I'd find the fault in that reasoning but I had no such interest in doing so at that point.

Jannell had wider hips than me or Taz, so her panties were a size larger. But unlike Taz and I who had only brought our sensible and most comfortable undies to wear, Jannell came prepared for some extracurricular fun. She had all boy leg shorts and thongs - in reds, blacks and purples - many trimmed in an elaborate lattice of expensive lace.

As we learned over the past few nights, Jannell was from Madrid. She kept her dark hair twisted in a bun so I could never tell how long it was, but judging by the size of the bun it likely went down to her mid back. That same understated approach applied to her entire look and mannerisms. The only time I saw her fully relax was during our first night back at the lodge when we were drinking. Judging by her undies, she was quite the passionate woman in private.

That realization somehow primed me to be less timid in sampling her scent. I located the gusset with the tell-tell discoloration on the cotton, pressed it to my nose and inhaled. Never in my life had I smelled another woman so intimately. My left nostril, oriented toward the thong, picked up a darker, more feral scent. Following the trail, my head turned in that direction - almost involuntarily. It was the part of the panty that spent the better part of a day wedged in the dark crevice between her cheeks, absorbing the jungle musk unique to that region of the body. My face scrunched up in disgust when I encountered the full brunt of the offensive bouquet yet I could not refrain from sampling it again and again. The odor wasn't fecal - it was the concentrated scent of her anal glands, which secrete their own dark aromas which are then concentrated in the warm damp crevice that protects our rosebuds. My reaction, equal parts revulsion and allure, set off a million different questions in my brain.

The analogy is like scratching your butt then feeling compelled to sniff your fingers afterward. Our forebrains say "eww, that's gross!" yet our arms diligently bring our fingers back to our noses for repeat whiffs. What is the cause of that overwhelming compulsion?

Neurologically, this phenomena is a prime example of the amygdala and hypothalamus in direct conflict with our cerebral cortex. The cortex, conditioned by social proprieties, signals disgust while the amygdala and hypothalamus, under no such constraints, signal allure and desire. Every time we sniff our fingers is evidence of how primal desires will beat social conditioning every time.

I returned to sniffing the gusset as I contemplated how Elias might respond to the enhanced scent of Jannell's panties compared to mine. There were subtle differences between Jannell, Taz and I, yet our scents all had a similar base element that classed them as the same family. We all had unique accents, however, that delineated us individually and that - I was betting - evoked different neurological responses in different people, depending on their biochemical compatibility with us. But that's the question I needed to answer: what is true biochemical compatibility? What is its evolutionary purpose?

I continued contemplating that question as I scanned all the files on the memory cards the teams had collected the previous day. It was more of the same, every animal known to inhabit these peaks save for the one we were so desperately looking for. What sucked is that I still had to log all the footage, no matter what animal was captured. It was tedious work, notating the time, date and geo-position of each recorded encounter, as well as noting any identifying characteristics of the animals so that we could tell if we were seeing any of them multiple times. That way, we could begin to get a sense of species' population density. After four hours, I was grateful to finally be on the last file on the last memory card when a medium sized snow leopard walked right across the screen, rubbing its cheek against the surrounding rock as it passed, and then scent marking where its cheek made contact.

I jumped up with joy and shouted, forgetting that I only had one good foot on which to stand. When the pain hit me, I toppled over immediately, taking special care not to smash the laptop. Luckily there was the pile of sleeping bags to break my fall, otherwise I might have added a fractured arm to my list of injuries.

From the size I was judging that our leopard was an adult female - her face looked too mature to be a young male. Snow leopards share the canonical black spot patterns that mark them as leopards but instead of being set against a rich gold background the rest of their coat is a dusky brownish yellow. Their pelts are also thicker and bushier to protect them from the cold, as are their tails.

After scent marking, our leopard stood looking over the white expanse of snow-capped rocks as if she was enjoying the view. Then she casually walked off - oblivious to the enormous emotional effect she had on me. The entire encounter lasted no more than 17 seconds. It was the first recording of a snow leopard ever captured. I quickly logged down all the details, rewinding the clip and watching it over and over. To my delight, it was from one of the cameras that Sonam's team had placed, which meant that they were using my methods. I cried tears of elation as my heart filled with pride.

Despite my desire to play it cool, I couldn't hide my elation when the teams returned to camp that evening. We gathered around the laptop and watched and cheered when our leopard came into view, sharing hugs all around. We used the satellite phone to call up Sir Attenborough and inform him of our initial success. His signature voice sounded tinny coming out of the phone's tiny speaker, but raised all our spirits nonetheless as he congratulated us on a job well done. Vanessa surprised us by pulling out a bottle of champagne, pouring some into each of our water bottles for a toast.

"You hauled that heavy bottle all the way up the mountain?" Jannell asked in disbelief.

"Not hardly," Vanessa snorted. "For this, we have Kabir to thank. I asked him if we could make room for it and he took care of it."

"Well then cheers to us and cheers to Kabir!" I said gleefully raising my bottle toward our porter.

All the glee carried over from that evening was, for me, short lived the next day as I scanned the secret footage I captured in our tent the previous night. Elias initially gravitated toward my scent but then turned away from my panties and slowly moved towards Jannell's. Once his nose made contact with the scant material of her thong - enhanced with the feral musk of her anal glands - his reaction was immediate. He flipped onto his back with her thong partly in his mouth and the rest held tightly to his nose while he furiously masturbated. Compared to previous nights his orgasm was quick, coming on in less than 5 minutes while my own knickers lay neglected and untouched by his side.

I was unprepared for just how great of a letdown I'd feel. Was Elias that fickle? Was his desire for me that fleeting and so easily replaced? I sulked for the better part of the day while I watched the other footage off of our memory cards collected the previous day. To make matters worse our heat signature camera caught footage of a leopard attacking and capturing a bharal during the night, then carrying it off in her jaws out of view. It was from a camera that Ganesh's team had placed, meaning that they were using Elias's strategy.

My first instinct was to climb under the pile of sleeping bags and lay there sulking and licking my wounds. I admit, I get really down on myself sometimes. Self-doubt is often my biggest foe. But I really didn't want to go back to that depressive space I was in after my fall. I had worked so hard and took such huge risks to get to this point that I did not want to let a gloomy outlook keep me from reaching my goals.

What had I actually found out? I found out that Elias was into butts. So what? I suspected that already. I needed to know whose ass he preferred and truly craved but so far I had only tested the scent of Jannell's. I needed to test her scent against my own. Unlike Jannell, however, I hadn't packed any naturally wedging undies. I was going to have to improvise.

I took my normal, full-butt panties and pulled them up between my cheeks as far as they would go, wedging them in there securely. Then I limped my way back over to Jannell's shared tent and exchanged the thong I "borrowed" the day before for a "fresh" one.

On a bad ankle in deep snow, even that short of a distance feels like a strenuous workout, but doing so made me realize I needed more exercise to keep my muscles from atrophying. I had built up so much stamina and endurance preparing for this trip that I was probably in the best shape of my life when I took my fall. I didn't want to lose all my hard-fought progress. Problem was that my exercise options were limited with my bum ankle and all. Improvising, I lay on my back and did leg lifts, tummy tucks, and air cycling for the next hour. It was enough to build up a light sweat, and enough to insure that my knickers had fully absorbed my darker musk.

For added insurance, I pulled up a few of the earlier videos of Elias masturbating to my scent, and I masturbated with him - keeping my panties on. Late that night after everyone else had fallen asleep I took them off and tested them before placing them opposite Jannell's beside Elias's head. They were so richly ripe and fragrant with both of my scents that I almost lost my nerve. 'No risk, no wickets,' I repeated to myself. I placed the garments and left it to the gods. There was no more I could do, so I set my alarm and drifted off to sleep.

The next morning I woke up feeling exhausted. As far as I could tell I slept through the night, but my dreams were restless and frustrating. I was back trapped under the ice and snow waiting for my team to dig me out and rescue me. For some reason they couldn't get to me, and a deep chill was setting in my bones. Strangely, a steaming box of Starbucks coffee lay just out of my reach, wedged in the snow and creating its own little bubble of warm air around it. The rich aroma of the roasted beans drifted all around me, tempting me and teasing me. I wanted nothing more than to take long, deep gulps from it then pour it all over my body to keep warm, yet it remained out of my reach - seemingly for hours.

Taz and Greg woke up feeling refreshed with all new energy, no doubt buoyed by our recent success with our remote cameras. Elias and I, on the other hand, both woke up feeling groggy and looking disheveled. My experimentation was depriving him of precious sleep and a pang of guilt shot through me as I realized that the insufficient rest could put him in danger during a climb. I needed to draw my study to a close, no matter what was captured by the camera that night.

The teams left that morning with a revised mission of concentrating our remote cameras around the two areas where we captured our earlier leopard footage, in hopes of picking up the trail of our two cats. Using the survey maps I plotted out a half mile radius around the two cameras that captured our prized video, as the bharal never seemed to move more than a half mile in a day. Then using the geo-positioning from the ones we microchipped I estimated the direction in which the sheep were moving, and instructed the teams to try and place cameras along that direction in the circumscribed area.

From the look she gave me, I could tell that Vanessa was proud of all the ways I was able to contribute given my lost mobility. Her simple nod of affirmation lifted my spirits a bit and made me feel more secure about my worth as a scientist.

Still, I hesitated all day before checking the footage on the camera I had hidden in our tent. I stood a 50/50 chance of being gravely disappointed and, quite frankly, a bit humiliated. Part of me felt like I deserved it, for so blatantly and unethically violating Elias's mind while he slept and for violating my friends' privacy by 'borrowing' their undies. Expecting the worst, I knew I had to steel my resolve, put my big girl panties on and eventually check the damn video files. Too cowardly to face my music, I decided to focus on work first instead.

My cowardice paid off as over the course of the morning I discovered that three of our cameras picked up footage of leopards - one from Elias's team and two from cameras Taz had placed, using my strategy. I was excited beyond belief! Plus, it looked like one of our leopards was a male. He was considerably larger with a rounder face but he never presented his hind quarters to the camera so that I could get an anatomical confirmation. He more than made up for it, though, in the way that he sampled the scent of the rocks - those same rocks upon which our female from a couple of days ago had sprayed. He scrunched up his face and made a weird gravely high-pitched grunt as he sniffed her offering, and kept refilling his lungs with more. Males in other species of big cats behave similarly when sampling the scent markings of a female, so I was pretty confident in my gender assessment.

The footage we captured from the camera placed by Elias's team was also pretty spectacular. It managed to capture a protracted unsuccessful hunt of a bharal, with daring acrobatic leaps along a steep rocky slope. I had to hand it to Elias and his wisdom. Catching that footage wasn't just luck - the placement of the camera was just bloody fucking brilliant.