Snow Leopard: Stories from the Roof of the World

6. Death of a Bharal

— 51 — 007 Fly north from Delhi and within an hour you’ll be above the peaks of the Indian Himalaya. You’ll look down in dread and wonder how an animal can stand upright, let alone survive, and you’ll convince yourself that where you’re headed couldn’t possibly be this rugged. Beneath you the mountains go on and on, and something seems not quite right—you’re flying over these peaks, thousands of feet over them, and yet you feel them towering above you. It’s your first sense of the power of the Himalaya. The mountains become less white and more brown, and with just the slightest descent you fly between two hills and land at the town of Leh. You’d like a better word than “moonscape” but that’s the only one you manage, and at this altitude you care less for description than you do for respiration. A jeep takes you across the Indus River and up into the mountains until the track runs out, where Namgyal the horseman is waiting for you. Beyond are only foot trails. You’ll walk through a cultivated valley and back and forth across the frozen river and, Death of a Bharal M i t c h e l l K e l l y india—In Ladakh’s high mountains, nature’s drama of life and death is described in full detail as seen through the lens of a determined filmmaker. M i t c h e l l K e l l y — 52 — mesmerized by the sound of horse bells, you’ll somewhere enter Hemis National Park. The hillsides will steepen to slopes of loose scree and then to cliff, and you’ll scan the skyline for animals you can’t yet see. Walk like this for half a day and you’ll reach a spot where you can no longer call it a valley but rather a canyon: sheer vertical cliff on both sides, a hundred feet apart. Just before you enter the canyon, high up where the scree gives way to cliff, is a spring, flowing warm from the rock for a foot or two before it freezes into a solid ice waterfall. It’s one of the few midwinter sources of drinkable water for miles around, the kind of place where you’d expect things to happen. If you’re here for months or a year, you’ll pass this spot many times, and each time you’ll feel the landscape crackle with tension. If you are lucky, it’s here that you will meet the snow leopard. I was here at the invitation of the production company Natural History New Zealand to shoot the Himalayan episode of their lat­ est wildlife series. “Wild Asia: At the Edge” was to show a year in the life of the bharal, the legendary “blue sheep” of the high­ altitude mountains. The location was Hemis National Park in Ladakh, India, considered prime snow leopard territory. Although there was no provision in the schedule for dedicated filming of the cats, I immediately agreed to shoot the film. With 160 days of field time, spanning from April 1999 to March 2000, I promised myself I would shoot the very best bharal film I could and trust my conviction that if you spend enough time in a landscape—mindful, alert, respectful time—then wonderful things can happen. For the next ten months the mountains revealed more amazing things than any one person deserves to see: Tibetan wolves tending their pups at the den, the mayhem of the bharal rut, two cliff­nest golden eagle chicks gorging their way from gonzo to majestic. But the air still pulsed with the absence of the one I had really come to meet, the one that had been lounging around in my psyche ever since I first saw it in a childhood picture book. Whenever possible I’d tracked snow leopards, staked out scrapes and rock scents, even had one near­miss sighting opportunity. From time to time I’d shadowed injured or ill bharal. Although I had managed to get the D e a t h o f a B h a r a l — 53 — cats to film themselves with a remote self-triggered camera, I still hadn’t actually seen a snow leopard. But late that winter, finally, a limping female bharal I’d been tracking was...