They are the fur of the Himalayan snow leopard.
I cut them myself from their still warm bodies. A great male cat. And a cub. How soft they are. The fresher the kill, the softer the fur...
You can see the rosettes. Look. The spots, the markings. Such extraordinary beauty. I had to have it. I simply had to have it.
We were in the Himalayas. I’d spent more than a month in Kathmandu and was tired of it. The city smelled. Mists, fog, god knows what it was hid the mountains. The view ? there was no view. The city could have been situated in the middle of the ocean, there was not even a hint that the mountains were there. But the city was, the whole place was wonderful. Had been wonderful. Magical. A magical city. But after a while, after a month, it started to wear me down. I had to get away. The noise. People trying to sell this. People trying to sell that. It was the sixties. Hippies. There were a good deal of them around in the city. All these Westerners reaching out to the East. Trying to find some reason for their lives. The mindless materialism that was beginning to suffocate the West. Anyway, I had to get away from the city.
Along with a Nepali guide, I took a bus to Pokhara. To the east of Kathmandu. And as we traveled further into the country, the mists continued, the mountains, those huge majestic mountains I had heard so much about, they continued to evade me, until I almost gave up hope of ever seeing them.
As I said, there was a guide. No one else. Of course, people on the bus, people on the street, but apart from that, just me.
Pokhara turned out to be much the same as Kathmandu, though less crowded. There was a certain peace there that I enjoyed. I spent maybe two weeks there, rowing on the lake, eating, sleeping long hours, reading, thinking, watching. The mountains were still shrouded in clouds and mist, the sky a uniform grey. If I stood on the roof garden terrace of the guesthouse I was staying in, early in the evening, I could just make out the two tips of Machapucha, miles in the distance. But that was it. For the two weeks I was there.
At the end of the two weeks, we – the guide and I- took a bus. It took us to the beginning of a trail. and from here, we began our walk into the foothills. I intended to go for three weeks. This is what I had come for. To walk deep into the mountains. To venture into the heart of the Himalaya. Alone. the guide carried my bag and I with a walking cane to support me, walked unencumbered. I felt free. The most free I think I had ever felt or ever felt since. And as we went deeper and deeper in, and further and further up, the clouds and mists began to dissolve and the skies became a sharp blue, and the mountains rose up huge and magnificent around us. It was breathtaking.
And for a long time there was no one in sight. Just us, the slopes, the craggy rocks, the powdery, cold air on my face…
It was strange, the deeper you go into those mountains, well the deeper we went into those mountains, the flatter, the rockier, it got. The first night we came to this small town, village, in the middle of a huge plain. We had emerged from the foothills and found ourselves walking across this expanse, this vast expanse in the middle of the mountains. It must have been a good five miles in the distance, I didn’t expect that. It reminded me of something… something out of the wild west, you know those western movies, not that I’ve ever been to the wild west but, not that I’m sure it even exists, but… this big plain. And in the distance, way in the distance, my imagination told me, lay Tibet. We stayed that night in the village, some small cobbled, stone house, or what, I don’t know, and the next day we continued on out way, after a good breakfast across this plain stretching as far as the eye could see. And then, the guide, he called himself Swift, I suppose it was easier to say than some Nepali name, or so he thought, then he suggested we go off the path and head off to the right and up the mountain slope that we could see from the plains. I was all too eager. He said that if we did, and if the time was right, we were likely to see a snow leopard or two, as families of them often appeared in those parts. ..
I was a western man traveling almost alone in the east. I wasn’t prepared to take any risks. So I hired a guide who carried a gun.
Animals. People. One never knew what one would come across in those mountains.
That’s left you feeling uneasy, hasn’t it?
And so we left the plains behind us, and headed for the mountain slopes. The terrain was very different from the flatness we had just left. I found myself going higher and higher up, along a twisting mountains path, a sheer drop, a hundred feet or so to my right. And as I got higher, the air got colder, and after some time we were forced to make camp. The altitude you know, can cause such trouble, I was informed it was best to stay put for the night.
But as soon as dawn came, and dawn was indeed spectacular over those mountains, as the stars and the crystal night gave way to the great swathes of color that heralded the sun and the morning. Now that was the meaning of spectacular, and such clarity of sound and vision. Every one of my senses was heightened. I felt almost more than human, Wolf. Like a super human. A superman.
We walked further on and upwards, and I remember it as if it were yesterday. We turned a corner, a sharp bend on the path, and suddenly there it was- about a hundred feet ahead of us and further up a slope. We were almost in a kind of rocky valley, and there it stood above us, silently, and still. It made me freeze. I stood frozen for a while.
I was in awe.
It was so striking. Long, woolly fur, grey with brown, yellowish tinges on its flanks, and lighter, white , white fur on its belly, its chest , its chin. Of course I only saw all of this once I got closer, but it was such a beautiful sight.
A feeling came over me. A feeling so deep, so deep…. A longing. It wasn’t enough just to look. Just to see it and then carry on. I – I wanted it….
I wanted it, Wolf. I had to have it. I wanted it for my own.
We watched it for some time. It had maybe seen something, some smaller animal maybe, in the trees ahead, and it was waiting, waiting to pounce, waiting for something anyway. Its body was huge, more than a metre long, and its head… its head was small in comparison, it didn’t quite seem to fit with the body, tiny ears, this heavy, heavy brow, frowning. And short, again, almost out of proportion, short legs, yet powerful, so, so powerful, and large paws. Such latent energy. Such …
I knew I had to have it. And I knew I was going to have it.
They are not generally aggressive to Man. It was nothing like that. After a while, it took off. I don’t know what disturbed it. It sensed something. It took off, up the slope and across the ridge. For a while I was feeling a kind of sickness, nausea, I don’t know, it could have been a mixture of altitude sickness and hunger, I don’t know, but we set up camp again on a small plateau on the side of the valley, which was the only place with trees and shrubs, and so we settled in for the night. After some time I felt better, Swift cooked us a meal, and I fell asleep, cold slightly, but the food had warmed me up and I was exhausted. My mind full of the snow leopard, the fur, the white fur on her belly and chest and chin…
I awoke with a start. Again it was dawn, although this time there were fine, twinkling sheets of snow falling, blowing in the early morning mountain air. I crawled out of my sleeping bag, Swift sound asleep beside me, and crawled out of the open tent door. Something had woken me up. I knelt by the side of the tent, and looked down into the valley, my eyes kind of blind to the snow after the relative darkness of the inside of the tent, but I could see, about fifty yards ahead of me, further down the valley, in almost the same place as the day before, the beautiful snow leopard, still and … she looked as if she were waiting for something. And I did it. I knew what I had to do. It was some kind of internal drive that had brought me to this point in time and had said “now- do it. Do what you came here to do.” I quietly, ever so quietly, took the gun out of the bag. I was so, so quiet, I did it slowly, I knew any noise would make her turn and run. I took the gun, my fingers were covered in the gloves, so of course I had to take them off. I had never handles a gun with gloves on before. I had hardly ever handled a gun.
I lay there, or did I crouch there in the snow, and I raised the gun to my eye and lined it with the aim, the target, the target, the big cat in front of me. It all flowed, seemingly, so effortless. And just, just as I pulled the trigger, the snow leopard’s face directly in my aim, it turned, it saw me, I saw it, I looked into its eye and I fired. I shot the snow leopard.
Neither of us carried the dead carcass. When the guide, when the gunfire woke Swift up, I told him that I was , I had been protecting myself, the animal had been coming towards me. It was self defense, me or her.
He explained that the snow leopard was getting rarer and rarer. Apparently they only exist in those Asian regions. He was saddened.
I persuaded him to help me do what I had wanted to do ever since I saw the cat. Skin the leopard. Remove the fur. I bribed him to keep quiet. He was easily bribed. Poverty makes a mockery of pride. All the time in my head, I had that nursery rhyme, this crazy rhyme going through my head, I remember being read to as a child:
There was a little man,
And he had a little gun
And his bullets were made of
Lead lead lead,
So he went to the brook
And he shot a little duck
Right in the middle of the
Head head head.
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