Snow Leopard: Stories from the Roof of the World

14. Epiphany

— 113 — 015 Here I stand, in the middle of a small photo booth somewhere in the streets of Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan; in my hands is the culmination of two months worth of backbreaking effort—a washed-out photograph of a snow leopard. I think to myself, a decade ago the snow leopard tore my family to shreds. So why am I here? Why have I dragged my new wife with me to the middle of nowhere? To a diet of rotten goat meat and moldy potatoes, a toilet of curved ibex horns over a shallow hole, tea strained through teeth in a vain effort to remove glacial silt, torturous days of hiking, worthless camp gear, and the nearest hospital two days away on horseback followed by an eight-hour jeep ride. What could possibly have led me to this remote, harsh world? The answer lies in the path my life has taken since childhood, leading me to an unlikely kinship with a rare cat. This cat, the snow leopard, guided me through sorrow to an awakening love. When I was four, we loaded our family into a Volkswagen bus and moved to Alaska, living on Admiralty Island among the Epiphany K y l e M c C a r t h y Kyrgyzstan—A young boy’s destiny is revealed one cold winter night on a mountain in a distant land. K y l e M c C a r t h y — 114 — densest brown bear population in the world. My father gathered data for his master’s degree while my older brother, Keegan, and I learned firsthand the ways of raw nature. But this is a book about snow leopards, so I’ll fast-forward my story to the place of my freshman year in high school, the Gobi Desert of Mongolia. After years of flirting with charismatic animals from the wild lands of Alaska, I didn’t expect to meet my first true love in the barren landscape of the Gobi Desert. I also never expected to cradle such an exquisite creature as the snow leopard in my arms, but I did. I remember well the day my dad got “the call.” In the world of wildlife biology, when you get a call like this it might as well be from the president. When the man on the other end of the phone is Dr. George Schaller, offering you a chance to work with him, you sit up and take notice. With few cat specialists in Mongolia, George needed someone to head a research study on snow leopards, and my dad was the man to do it. Suddenly, my family was leaving Alaska and heading to Mongolia. There we were, a few short months later, settling into a concrete flat in the middle of Bayantooroi, a small settlement in southwestern Mongolia, headquarters for the Great Gobi Biosphere Reserve and a stopover along the ancient Silk Road. One objective of the study was to learn whether the reserve had a healthy population of snow leopards and was large enough to protect them. Our flat came with limited indoor plumbing, so the first major task in the study was to dig a hole about fifteen feet deep and four feet wide. We sunk an old coal chimney into the hole and lined the bottom with fresh hay. Next we built a wooden frame above the hole large enough to fit a full-grown man, then added a corrugated tin roof. Finally, we put a door on the entrance and carved a half moon into it. The first step in our fieldwork—the outhouse—was complete, and this was one of the best I had ever seen. Unfortunately, we were not truly in the field yet but rather waiting in Bayantooroi for permits, waiting for staff, waiting to pick a study site, waiting to get over dysentery. Thank God for that outhouse. We waited so long that six months later I was on a plane back to Alaska with my disillusioned mother—life in Mongolia, not E p i p h a n y — 115 — to mention field research, isn’t suited for everyone and is certainly less glamorous than it might sound. We never set a single snare, let alone picked a likely study site. With my mother, brother, and me in Alaska and my dad half a world away in Mongolia, the high...