In Kedarnath, October 1993, from left to right: Sridhar, Madhu, Kavita, Advait, Rohan, Suhel, and Sara.

“We at W. I. I.” I curse, “are nothing but a bunch of overgrown children playing at Cowboys and Indians. I mean, is this any place to be? The temperatures are so low, I am sure any decent thermometer would freeze over, my cerebrospinal fluid has icebergs that would sink a Titanic floating about in it, and my teeth have started a healthy erosion process from all the chattering.”

“Shh…” says Advait, while I pause to take a breath, “Shh… You won’t get words like that past any subeditor.”

We are on our way up Rudranath towards the end of an enlightening, enriching, exhausting trip to the Kedarnath Wildlife Sanctuary as part of the M. Sc. high altitude techniques tour. The air is rare here, so my tirade is rendered much less effective by my constant need to stop for breath.

My lungs are full again. “When we first got here, it was fine.” I continue, “Mandal and its surroundings were breathtakingly beautiful, with landscapes that would need the brushstrokes of a Monet to describe them, sunsets that would require the lyrical abilities of a Naidu to capture, bird songs that would send Vaughn Williams into a musical compositional frenzy. The butterflies on the wing, the Strobilanthes in bloom, the mysterious fern at our feet and the pine cones on the trees, all these were stunning in their beauty, don’t you think?”

“Hmm”, says Advait in his typical loquacious manner.

And as we run down the steep slope of Rudranath, Advait asks Kavita: “Are there red and yellow spots on your jeans?”

“No.”

“Then I must be giddy”, says Advait.

High altitude sickness has struck, and while we watch the monal pheasant through the spotting scope, wonderfully majestic, a poem in colour, manoeuvering the rocks on the far slope, Advait is busy with his reverse peristaltic manoeuvres in the far corner of the hut.

“The food tastes better the second time around”, he quips between movements.

“Just shut up and throw up”, says Madhu, who is conducting the next movement.

“Quiet!” says Madhu in a loud whisper, his eyes blazing a rebuke. All around the sounds of night, in soft complacency, hum their serenades, and I shut up, swallowing the joyful hilarity that provoked my unfortunate outburst.

We are looking for flying squirrel, and we obediently follow with our eyes the dull beam of light from Madhu’s torch. Shapes leap out, not from the trees, but from our minds, but we feel safe; with Madhu in charge, the night could do its worst.

Madhu, the Protector.

Yet back in the hut, in the grainy glow of candlelight, we see him again, pulling Kavita‘s leg, ribbing her with mindless puns and childlike abandon.

Madhu, the Boychild.

Kavita’s knee is bad but she plods on with single-minded determination. “A stubborn mule she has to be” I think, “to keep her calm with us rowdies.” Nothing fazes her, no length of road and no amount of ribbing will get her down.

“You are just one of the guys” I tell her. She winces as I whack her squarely on the shoulders. “It’s difficult to treat you as the unequal that you are.”

But we try. By God, we certainly try.

“Come on, come on” says Sathyakumar who is goading us on our way down to Mandal, “we have to reach before sundown.”

“This is my kingdom” says Sathyakumar as he waves his hand with regal flourish across the postcard scenes that stretch before us. Trishul in the distance, with the red of the sunset on its peaks, the pine forests below us, the craggy rockslopes, the pika, the raspberries clinging to the rockface, the musk deer farm, the leopard on the street, the call of the Khaleej, the stone huts of Chopta, the windswept alpine meadows and the gritty little temples, all this he encompassed with the sweep of his hand and: “This… this is my kingdom. I call and it responds.”

“Damn the cold”, says Sara softly, for Sara very rarely says anything very loudly. He swears that he will never work in any area where the temperatures are not nicely tropical and sweaty. And though he loathes the cold with a silent vehemence, he does better than most of us in facing it, almost sneering it in the face as he does.

Sara has the poetic eye of an artist, for he sees hidden symmetry where others don’t, beauty in a certain play of light, music in a certain droop of the leaf. It is a magical, faery and exciting world, the world that is Sara’s lens.

“It was not very cold that night—just touching the –5 °C mark.” Dr Chundawat, sitting on the cold, stone quadrangle outside the Rudranath huts, is at his best today. The exceptional sunset, the rise of the stars in the moonless sky, the milky way, bright and dreamy as it lazes through the deep blue of the night, the smell of potatoes being cooked by Jabbar inside the hut and the soft drift of voices from within, all conspire to bring out the storyteller in him, and tales of Ladakh flow easily, in the curious anecdotal style that is his alone.

And in a style very much his own, Sridhar recounts the story of the Amazon researcher, and his experience with the rainforest flies. Satyakumar will spend the whole night wondering about it.

Sridhar is like that. He speaks, his nostrils flare, and he leaves you wondering.

The brook burbled and sang to us, inviting and cold. I resisted, the coward in me for once providing me with wise caution. Sridhar is more impetuous, but needs company to give it action.

“Let’s”, he pleads, “It won’t be all that cold.”

Suhel looks on with a little smile, refusing to be drawn into the pleading game. “Not me” he gestures.

Sridhar and I sit in cowardly camaraderie for an hour, with our feet in the flowing ice of the rivulet without further attempting to explore the limits of our bodies’ endurance.

Suhel stands alone against the railing at Mandal, staring out at the sky. We leave today, and I take my last looks, with the elated sadness that always grows within me at the end of a trip.

But Suhel has none of that sentimentality, none of those nonsense emotions that make man weak and frail. He is stoic, binoculars and notes in meticulous shorthand.

I watch him now as I dump my dirty socks into the rucksack, staring almost wistfully at the sky, drinking in the Mandal morning air. Later, in the bus, as we race back through the narrow mountain roads to Dehradun, he will play a jaunty, sad, “Oh Susanna” on his harmonica.

With the sardonic half-smile that is his trademark arranged on his face, he turns to me to make some soft, cynical comment.

“You’re fooling no one laddie” I say to myself, “You’re fooling no one.”

This joint project will focus on empowering local communities in each country to adopt a series of conservation measures, including environmental education, community‐based wildlife monitoring, anti‐poaching programmes, and cross‐collaboration between regional and national government offices. The project will be implemented together with leading national conservationists based at NCF, Shan Shui and Peking University in China, and the Snow Leopard Conservation Fund in Mongolia. The Snow Leopard Trust (SLT), recognized as the global leader in snow leopard conservation, will also participate in the project. The BBC Wildlife Fund is providing nearly £60,000 ($90,000 US) over the next two years in this program for conservation in regions critical to the survival of the snow leopard.

“This is the first large, multi‐country project of its kind for snow leopards,” says Dr. Charudutt Mishra, Trustee of NCF and Science and Conservation Director of the SLT, “and it’s a huge leap forward for the species.” Snow leopards are still relatively new to the conservation scene. The first photograph of a wild snow leopard wasn’t captured until the 1970s, and targeted efforts to protect the cats didn’t begin until the 1980s. Snow leopard conservation has lagged behind big campaigns like those set up for tigers, but Dr. Mishra hopes this project will change all that and says “with WFN, BBC and our other partners, we can finally produce the kind of in‐depth, multifaceted conservation systems necessary to save these cats.”

Georgina Domberger, Director of WFN, believes the project has global impact, one of the factors that gained WFN’s support: “It’s great to say you’re going to protect an endangered species—but what does that mean? We can’t save all of them at once, but we are coming up with a way to protect some of the most important population centres we can, and then we hope to build outwards from there.” WFN is also excited because they, like NCF, view snow leopards as a flagship species able to streamline and lead larger efforts in critical habitats. Domberger says “we all love snow leopards for their beauty and charisma, and since they are at the top of the wildlife pyramid, we know helping them will help the entire ecosystem.”

A press release about the program is available here [PDF].

Fading rays of sun illuminate a mountain peak: one of the several spells of Spiti.

Its a landscape where the elusive snow leopards and pervasive humans share the same terrain, their fate intertwined in a tangled complexity. My curiosity to know more about snow leopards brought me here, but it was the bewitching landscape that left me breathless; literally!!! At times when fieldwork starts taking a toll on your body and mind, its one of the spells of the magical Spiti that alleviates the spirits.

A maze of agricultural fields. The austere landscape is shared by wildlife and people.

It had been a busy month and our team had been moving about in the mountains, rushing from one point to another to place camera traps at various locations. It had become a routine work and monotony had quietly crept in. During one of these routine rush through’s, I was visiting the Badang nullah; an excellent snow leopard area. A few years back, Charu and Sushil had watched a snow leopard at this very nullah for more than an hour, resting quietly underneath one of the cliffs. The approach however was quite difficult and it took us more than an hour to first climb down all the way to the nullah bed and then to climb up to the cliff site where we were supposed to place the camera. I was still thinking if it would be worth the effort, but my doubts were more than allayed when I reached the place. Full of scrape marks and scats, this looked like an ideal place for fixing a camera. However this place harbored things that diverted my attention from camera traps and snow leopards.

A blue sheep group on the move.

The cliffs here in the upper half of the tall mountain overlooked the nullah flowing below with its crisp and clear water. The footing was not all that good and looking down I wondered, what a missed step or wrongly placed foot would mean. There was a small cave, with neat mud plaster slowly coming off the walls and inside the rocks were all black with what appeared like result of years of wood fire. There was a disfigured, but a beautiful painting of a Gompa (Monastery) that had been created by carving on the mud wall. I was very curious about it. Was it that this place was still being used by hunters, did people killed Ibex blue sheep and cooked them up in this desolate cave? I asked Tsering Dorje, my field assistant about this and soon the story unfolded.

An Ibex male in its typical rugged habitat.

There used to be a brave hunter who used to inhabit this cave, killing blue sheep and Ibex in the day and returning to his cave with the quarry in the night. Not very far from the place, there was a Buddhist monk, meditating in this serene and calm Himalayan environment. The hunter was very impressed with the austere life that the monk used to live. He made it a point to leave the best piece of the meat from his kills quietly at the doorsteps of the small cave that monk used to inhabit, making sure that he did not disturb the monk in his meditation.

Spiti panorama. Buddhist monks still meditate in these remote mountains.

It is said that years passed by like this when one day the hunter became a bit curious and decided to find out a bit more about the monk whom he had been selflessly serving for such a long time in his own small way. Once inside the cave, he was surprised to notice that none of his offerings to the monk had been accepted and that the monk turned out to be a staunch vegetarian. The hunter felt very bad about it. He thought he had sinned by placing chunks of meat and bone at the very door of a monk who in fact was a vegetarian. Thus filled with utmost remorse, he jumped off from the very cave where he had spent years placing meat at the door of the monk.

It is believed that he did not fall in the nullah. Halfway through his decent, he was suddenly lifted up by some divine powers and he attained buddhatava (or nirvana in today’s more fancy terms). The monk had been watching all this. Thinking that if a sinner like the hunter who killed animal’s everyday and ate their flesh was lifted up by the divine powers, he was sure to be lifted too. Thus he jumped, full of confidence, just that no divine powers lifted him up.

As per the latest rumours, a ghost has laid claim on this unclaimed property (caves). There indeed was an element of truth in these rumours as is evident from the photographs from our spy camera.

Snow leopard, the mountain ghost photographed by our hidden camera.

The story had thus ended and all of us having had 2-3 cups of lukewarm tea from the big Chinese thermos were feeling refreshed and energized. It was time to move on to the next location of the day and may be search for another story.

- Kulbhushan & Karthik

A dialogue that sparked off between us about which dried-meat tastes better; Mithun or Yak, instantly became a meaty confab beyond bovids that revolved around communities in Spiti and Siang valley and their practices. One look at the map followed by finger-pointing at each other’s study sites got us further excited since we had spent a decent amount of time exactly on the opposite flanks of the Himalayas.

The Kee monastery with the frozen Spiti river in the background

Roots: Largely Buddhists, the Spitians of the Mongoloid stock are from Spiti valley in Himachal Pradesh at the western end of the Himalayas whereas the Adis are animists (they practice the Donyi-Polo i.e. the Sun-Moon religion) of the Tibeto-Burman stock from Siang valley in Arunachal Pradesh in the Eastern Himalayas. The former are settled agro-pastoralists whereas the latter are hunter-gatherers practicing shifting cultivation over the last few millennia.

The Siang valley with the Siang river seeping within

A typical Spiti / Adi year: While the shifting cultivation practice determines the annual activity pattern of the Adi community, the winter determines that of the Spitians. Spitians have small agricultural fields which are ploughed as the snow starts to melt in early-April, following which the crops are sown. The staple crop is barley, but is rapidly getting replaced by green peas, a cash-crop. After the crop-harvest in Sep-Oct, it is party time for the locals during the long winter from November to March.

The Adis clearfell forests in February, undertake sowing in March and reap harvest in October. In the months of Oct-Nov-Dec, Adis in the Upper Siang district scout into the surrounding forests and higher altitudes for animals to hunt, preferred species being Himalayan musk deer, Takin and Serow. Surprisingly, according to the Adis, one of the reasons they do not hunt during rest of the year or venture far into forest is due to the fear of snakes!

As you sow, so you brew: The staple crops of the Spitians and the Adis are barley and rice, respectively. Besides ensuring food-security throughout the year and seeds for the next year, one of the seemingly fundamental uses of these grains is to keep up their spirits! Chang is the Spitian barley-beer whereas Apong is the Adi rice-beer, the distilled version being called Ara and Nogin, respectively. Bonus points to Adis for also brewing millet-beer! A notable similarity amongst the two communities is that none of the grains cultivated are sold in a market and are reserved for subsistence use.

Bringing home the beef: Whereas Mithun is a ‘domesticated’ Gaur which is also considered as a hybrid between a wild Gaur and a cow, the Yak is a domesticated version of the wild Yak. Yak meat is mainly used for festive occasions and also forms an important part of the diet of the people during winters. Yaks are used for ploughing fields for cultivation, following which the yaks freely graze in herds in distant pastures for the next eight to nine months. Being unable to forage in more than half-a-feet snow, the Yaks are stall-fed during winter. Bringing the Yaks back is often an extremely exhausting exercise involving plowing through deep snow. Once located, the Yaks are rounded up, often done the cowboy way with lassos. This exercise sometimes lasts weeks as finding the Yaks in the snow-clad mountains can be a difficult task.

Lassoing the Yak!

The Mithun is a unit of wealth and plays a significant role in the Adi tradition. Mithun meat is smoke-dried and stays edible for almost two years. The point to note here is that no self-respecting mithun has ever ploughed land, although the main reason for this is that there is little-to-no land available for settled cultivation. During festivals, bringing back home the Mithun is a tiring exercise that men in the village endure since they move singly or in groups of 2-3. All the Mithuns in the village are identified by a combination of ear-clips on the two ears. The men depend on footmarks, hearsay and other signs and often survey the entire home-range of the Mithun which centers around the place it was born. It is quite common to meet men coming back to the village with cane-lassos, empty-handed and empty-stomached!

A young Mithun in a current year slash-and-burn field

We ended the conversation amazed at the similarities amongst the communities that are geographically separated by a beeline distance of more than 800 miles and with mutual promises that when each visits the others’ field site, meat, booze and local treks are on-the-house!