From the green meadow below Shade, it looks as if the village were tossed like a handful of dice down a bare ridgeline. It was harvest time, and the few people not out in the barley fields assumed we were an ordinary group of trekkers and paid us no attention. How would they have known we were coming? Rinchen and Jigmet left the rest of us to pitch the tents and tether the mules and disappeared over the ridge, where they found two young monks and a soldier from the Ladakh Scouts (The Indian army’s version of our Green Berets), all home on vacation. That evening they brought to our camp a contingent of villagers glad for the rare chance to talk about their predator problems.

They wanted to talk wolf, and they had plenty to say. “Close your eyes,” said Rodney, “and you could think you’re in Wyoming.” Except for the cups of barley beer and butter tea that flowed all during their collective tirade, which of course Rinchen and Jigmet had to translate for us. Wolves have increased a lot in the last few years-or so the shepherds claim-and they wreak havoc on the open range. Marmots have migrated into a meadow above the village, which has only attracted them more.

“Just the word wolf is enough to infuriate these villagers,” said Rinchen. “Given a choice, they’d get rid of them altogether.” He shrugged. “No different from Ladakh. We Buddhists are supposed to treat all beings as sacred, and in fact Buddhism has done a lot for conservation, but they forget they are Buddhists when a poor wolf comes around.”

It was late, and dark, and people wanted their dinner. Up in the village we could see the glimmer of light from each kitchen window where a five-watt bulb hung from the ceiling, powered by a solar panel on the roof. The smell of cooking drifted down and my own stomach began to growl. They agreed to come back in the morning to continue the discussion in a more formal way.

The next day, Rinchen and Jigmet took Shade’s villagers through a mapping exercise focused on the natural resources of the area, and discovered that forage in the surrounding mountains has declined, especially in the last few years. The glaciers are shrinking, they said, and there hasn’t been enough rain. Families are keeping smaller herds of livestock, but there are more families now, and overall livestock numbers have probably increased.

The villagers believe that snow leopards have increased too, along with their prey, the ibex (Capra ibex siberica), a hefty brown beast with scimitar horns, and the bharal, or blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur), which is actually gray, something like our Rocky Mountain bighorn with black magic-marker edging on its flanks and legs. But oddly the people don’t hate snow leopards the way they hate wolves, despite the much greater devastation the cats can cause when they get into a pen.

The report that had spurred us to visit Shade was written by a young British researcher, Ashley Spearing. Villagers told him that seventy-five sheep and goats had been killed in their communal open-air pen over the past seven years. All three of the offending snow leopards were caught in the act and killed. The pen in question lays an hour’s walk up the trail from the village; it looks today exactly as it did in the 1980s, when biologist David Mallon surveyed the area. You had to wonder why they hadn’t fixed it.

“Maybe something happened way back that made the villagers decide to leave it like it is,” Rinchen suggested, reminding us of what had happened with our first predator-proofing project in Ladakh. The villagers had deliberately under-reported their livestock holdings, thinking there might be tax consequences (their bills are based on a head count of their animals). So they had to revise their blueprint for the pen in mid-construction, and they came up short of chain-link to cover the roof. It took a while to get the extra stuff purchased and delivered to such a remote spot, and in the meantime they started using the roofless pen. A snow leopard jumped in and killed twenty-nine goats and sheep. When we heard about it, Rinchen made the trek to the village, prepared to offer some compensation. But much to his surprise, the villagers accepted sole responsibility for what had happened. In the days before the attack, there’d been a death in the family that owned most of the animals killed. They and the other villagers agreed that a guardian deity who lives on a nearby peak had sent the snow leopard in response to some unfinished spiritual business in that family.

It wasn’t the first time we’d heard such a story. Anthropologist John Mock once told Rod that the herders of the Pamir region in Northern Pakistan believe their pastures are the realm of spirits-pure beings who help the herders locate good hunting and grazing areas. They often come to the aid of herders in the shape of an animal of the spirit realm, the most powerful and revered of these being the snow leopard. Without the help of this cat, the locals believe, no hunter can ever succeed. They see the snow leopard as an equal being worthy of respect and having a right to live, and their use of the snow leopard’s territory, to meet their subsistence needs, is comparable to help from fellow humans in time of need.

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