![]() In 1970 he’d taken what is believed to be the first photograph of a snow leopard in its natural habitat. At the time, Schaller was said to be one of only two Westerners who’d seen a wild snow leopard. In 1973 he and the legendary biologist George Schaller had spent two months hiking in Nepal and had seen signs of the cats-paw prints, scratch marks, scat-but never glimpsed one. But today-my first day in Kibber, and still woozy from the climb to 14,000 feet-the cat had deigned to appear.Įver since college, when I’d read Peter Matthiessen’s book The Snow Leopard, I’d fixated on seeing one of these elusive creatures. ![]() In the coming weeks we’d trek more than 30 miles, descending into canyons, trudging up snow-choked passes, climbing onto icy cliffs. ![]() Unauthorized use is prohibited.įor the past two years, photographer Prasenjeet Yadav had tracked this male on foot and with camera traps in this high-altitude corner of northern India’s Spiti Valley. When we’d heard a cat had been spotted, one of them said, “It’s yours,” tapping his left ear. Some of the local guides even called him that. This was, after all, Prasenjeet’s snow leopard. Prasenjeet would look up from his camera and point, and I’d follow his finger back to where the animal lay. A veil of snowflakes as fine as eyelashes drifted into the gorge, and occasionally, when I jiggled the binoculars, the cat’s smoky fur with charcoal rosettes would be lost among the creases and shadows. He drowsed on a ledge on the opposite cliff, its sheer walls plunging nearly a thousand feet to the Spiti River. On a bitterly cold afternoon in February, I crouched on the ice-encrusted rim of a gaping chasm, watching the old snow leopard through binoculars. When snow leopards are too old to hunt the ibex and blue sheep that live among the limestone crags, they seek easier prey, the village’s goats and sheep, young horses, and yak calves. The old ones are the ones you must watch. Like all snow leopards, he was part phantom and would shape-shift, dissolving into these mountains like smoke from the village chimneys, dispersing into the cold, thin air. It was unclear when he’d claimed the gorges and cliffs around this ancient Himalayan village, but over the past few years, the people here had come to recognize this large male, with a notched left ear, and kept track of him to the extent anyone could. The old snow leopard was well-known in Kibber. This story appears in the July 2020 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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