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Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi
Granta Books (UK); Riverhead Books (US)

Like many large carnivores, the snow leopard is eclipsed by an outsize reputation, which makes it almost impossible to separate the animal from the story. The solitary, largely silent cat is often spoken of as being not there – a shadow, a ghost – with its ethereal presence, in the Buddhist heartlands of the Himalaya, bordering on the spiritual.

When Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi first proposed studying the cat, his professor dismissed the idea, because, he said, his student would never see one. Yet two decades on (and a handful of sightings later), Suryawanshi has produced a wonderful book, The Ghost of the Mountains, about this most unknowable of animals.

During the Pleistocene ice age, the snow leopard’s distribution probably stretched from Portugal to Siberia. But their range contracted with the ice, and they are now confined to 12 countries in Central Asia and the Himalaya, across some of the world’s highest mountain ranges. Unlike wolves, say, or lynxes, they are the only large carnivores to be exclusively adapted to mountains. Their dusky coats, spotted with dark rosettes, vanish against boulders and scree. Relative to their body size, their tails are longer than that of any other cat, helping them balance, while wide nostrils warm the air they breathe. Genetic adaptations let them cope with the thin air.

The leopard becomes his way of penetrating the complexity and fragility of all we stand to lose

Suryawanshi is equally well equipped to study them, combining profound patience, a lifetime of mountaineering and a deep passion for this enigmatic animal. This is just as well: it is hard to imagine a more punishing environment for fieldwork. The snow leopard inhabits 3 million square kilometres of mountains. The peaks soar to over 8000 metres and the weather can turn on a dime. His teams must deal with hypothermia, blizzards, bears and rivers in spate. One friend dies of a heart attack, a complication of altitude sickness. Another, who worked to protect the mountains from mining, is found dead, his death unexplained.

Until Suryawanshi began his work, less than 1 per cent of the snow leopard’s habitat had been properly surveyed. Yet it is impossible to conserve something if you cannot show that it is there.

As far as we know, a snow leopard has never harmed a human, the only big cat to hold this “noble record”. Yet this still hasn’t endeared the cats to the herders that share their hills. As I wrote in my own work on wolves in Europe, conservation achieves little without a meaningful, concurrent approach to coexistence. Killing snow leopards is illegal, but that doesn’t stop poaching.

Yet predators aren’t the only threat to these livelihoods. When mining companies prospect for mineral deposits in the Gobi desert, Suryawanshi’s team discovers that under Mongolian law, holders of traditional land rights can form nature reserves by demonstrating the biodiversity of the land. Working with herders, procuring funds for them to build corrals to keep their goats safe, the team sets about changing the narrative of the snow leopard, and ultimately enables the formation of the Tost-Tosonbumba Nature Reserve. It is those who live there, Suryawanshi understands, who are the land’s most vital custodians.

Writing about the snow leopard inevitably means writing about naturalist and writer Peter Matthiessen. In 1973, he was invited by the naturalist George Schaller to accompany him to the Inner Dolpa on the Tibetan plateau of Nepal, on a search for the snow leopard. Matthiessen never sees one, but his book about the journey did much to cement the animal’s mythology as both remarkable carnivore and potent symbol of the untamed and the ineffable.

For Suryawanshi, too, the snow leopard is his way into these places. But if for Matthiessen the elusive animal becomes a cipher for the mystery at the heart of oneself, for Suryawanshi, the quest is far more tangible. The snow leopard becomes his way of penetrating the complexity and fragility of ecosystems and human cultures, and all we stand to lose.

One of the great merits of the book is its story of conservation from a non-Western perspective. Two decades ago, when Suryawanshi began his work, the snow leopard was little studied and the majority of researchers were Westerners. In one illuminating chapter, he explores the downlisting of the snow leopard from “endangered” to “vulnerable” in 2017 by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Whether such a downlisting is merited depends on estimating the population, a Herculean task, and so decisions become politicised. While Western scientists broadly support the downlisting, claiming a conservation success, local scientists fear it will embolden those who want to develop the mountains. Suryawanshi brings a rare, much needed reminder that “political and racial bias” remains in how the wider academic community sees local researchers.

“If there is still a mystery left in the Himalaya,” says one mountain ranger, early in the book, “then it is the snow leopard.” Something similar could have been claimed for Everest, but the mountain is now “for tourists”, says one mountaineering instructor. A boom in wildlife tourism risks similar commodification of snow leopards. With dedicated guides and telemetric equipment, they are now easier to find and Suryawanshi has a certain disdain for photographers lined up to grab a photo of the ghost. Yet tourists bring money to communities and add weight to the idea that these animals and their habitats carry intrinsic value worth protecting.

In the end, Suryawanshi writes, “whether local livestock herders chose to live with snow leopards would depend on their own stories”. Towards the end of the book, an ancient male snow leopard lies down outside a mountain village. Decades earlier, a herder would have killed him on the spot. But now the villagers see him differently. They leave out meat, and when he dies, they bring him into the village and give him a funeral. People can change, if their concerns are understood. It is a remarkable moment in a remarkable book about this most inscrutable of animals.

More to read and watch about elusive carnivores

by John Vaillant
An outstanding book about our relationship with carnivores, this tells the story of a man-eating Siberian tiger and those tasked with hunting it down. As pacy as a thriller, it examines how we see carnivores – and how they see us.

In a modern reworking of Peter Matthiessen’s quest, wildlife photographer Vincent Munier invites writer Sylvain Tesson to join a search for the snow leopard in Tibet. A deep meditation on the value of the wild.

by Adam Weymouth
Forgive me for plugging my book, but my 1600-kilometre hike in the footsteps of a GPS-tracked wolf could work as a companion to Suryawanshi’s, exploring similar issues of wilderness and coexistence – but in Europe.

Adam Weymouth is a writer based in Kent, UK

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