An unimproved corral in Shadé with a river view

Rinchen and Jigmet helped the Shade shepherds draft a plan to fix their pen. They’d work out the details after they discussed the plan with key members of the community away at the time of our visit, then come to our office in Leh to finalize and sign the agreement. Winter is the best time to haul supplies from Padum; the Zanskar River-wide as the Colorado-freezes in the thirty-below weather and makes a flat, slick road that avoids the ups, downs and hazards of the route we’d taken.

From Shade our path led up a canyon dense with sign that snow leopards had also passed that way: scent-sprayed rocks and scraped depressions in the sandy soil. It all had to be recorded on the data forms that Rodney, Rinchen and Jigmet carry with them every time they go into the field.

Compared to Ladakh, Zanskar seemed less over-grazed. The range lands certainly looked greener – a stretch of the imagination, maybe, in a landscape reminiscent of the moon. Based on the amount of sign the cats leave in the environment, these two regions might support the densest populations of snow leopards anywhere. In time the camera trapping study should provide the data, but for now we don’t know the actual number of cats roaming the region, or anywhere else in their 1.5 million square-miles of potential habitat. There may be between 4,000 and 7,500 snow leopards left in the wild, a guess based mostly on out-of-date sign surveys conducted in a fraction of the range. Developing countries make up most of the range, where lack of money and trained personnel have historically prevented surveying. Ladakh’s Hemis National Park, for instance, has a budget of about $60,000 and just three rangers to cover the entire 3,000 sq.km., virtually roadless park.

The sun beat down, raising the sweat under my straw hat and intensifying the sage-smell of the artemesia straggling through the canyon. We stopped for lunch in a pocket of shade cast by a pile of boulders and I looked up at the brown cliffs on the opposite wall.

“There’s a face in that rock,” I said, pointing.

“I see it,” said Jigmet. “It’s a snow leopard face. A huge one.”

It seems strange, looking back, that seeing omens everywhere else, I didn’t see one in that wind-and-ice-carved cat.

We followed the French party’s rock cairns away from there and up the steep moraine rubble of Nyalo Kuntse La. At 15,744 feet, it was one of the lower passes. The days in Shade had mostly done away with my sense of dread over Rani’s death, though I made good use of my inhaler, and stepped carefully along the narrow, rocky trail.

We camped beside a willow tree in the only spot that was semi-green on the vast moraine. While the mules picked among the rubble for something edible, Jugmet Singh and Dorjay dug a hole to catch the thread of water that dribbled from the base of the rocks. The two had become fast friends.

We pitched the tents and Dorjay got the donkey’s ears under preparation for our dinner; hand-made pasta shells in a thick vegetable or meat soup. We didn’t mind the shortage of water; we were too tired to bathe anyway, happy to just flop out in the tent.

Jigmet brought us tea, then walked back up to the cook tent for his binoculars, wanting to scan the slopes for animals. It was almost 6:00 pm. Later, he described what happened:

As I started to scan the slopes I heard some rocks rolling above me. I looked up and saw bharal running across the slope – I counted eight of them. I called Rinchen out, and he saw them too. After a minute he said to me, “Quick Jigmet! Get the spotting scope. There’s a snow leopard.”

Rinchen continued the story, “After Jigmet alerted me to the bharal, I got a little suspicious on why they were running and started to search the rocky mountain shoulder, from the direction the sheep had come. The sun had gone down, but visibility was still good especially over the skyline. After a minute of scanning I saw the smoke-like snow leopard peering over the ridgeline. Then I could recognize the cat’s back as it moved gently, hugging to the rocks. It was as though a little strip of cloud was moving over the ridge.”

The leopard sat about three hundred yards away, looking down at us, a statuesque Cheshire cat. It was my first sighting of a wild snow leopard since we left Nepal in 1985.

“It’s a male I’m sure,” said Rinchen, “from its size and stocky build.”

Rodney agreed, “He must know we’re looking at him, but he doesn’t seem to care.”

The cat was absolutely invisible to our naked eyes. I thought about the snow leopards I’ve seen in cages, the way they hunker down behind a boulder, nothing showing but their eyes, a curve of forehead and the black tips of two ears. Without the running blue sheep, we’d never have known this guy was there. Rodney’s surely right: a lot more snow leopards have seen people than people have seen snow leopards.

For an hour we jostled for a turn to watch him, through the powerful eye of the scope, where he stayed until it got too dark to see.

That night Jugmet Singh staked his mules at the door of his tent, perhaps unnecessarily. The cat would likely go for dinner at the Shade Sheep and Goat Café, which would have been visible from his vantage point on the ridgeline.

The morning dawned blue and gold as only a desert can. From somewhere a kata appeared, the Buddhist ceremonial scarf of honor and friendship, silky white, tied into Bachar’s halter so as to frame her handsome face. Tall and elegant and the color of cinnamon, she was now queen of the pack mules. And Jugmet Singh was smiling again.

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