The Snow leopard

by Peter Matthiessen

  Although the gompa is locked tight, the two large stupas on the bluff over the river bridge give a clue to the iconography within. Perhaps thirty feet high, they have the typical square red base and red-garlanded white dome, with a tapering cone topped by a lunar crown and solar disc. On the four sides of the base are crude clay frescoes of symbolic creatures—elephants on the east face, horses south, peacocks west, and on the north face the garuda, or mythical hawk, here represented as a man with wings bearing what appears to be the sun and moon. The garuda, like the swastikas inside the stupa, is a pre-Buddhist symbol, and so is the yin-yang symbol on the door, which is thought to antedate the early Taoism of three thousand years ago in China.

  In the small chamber inside one stupa are two rows of ancient prayer wheels, five to a row, set up in such a way that ten rounds of OM MANI PADME HUM may be turned simultaneously by the visitor; each wheel represents the Wheel of Dharma, first set in motion by the Buddha, and also the rotation of the Universe. On walls and ceilings are bright-painted mandalas and Buddhas, including Samantabhadra and Padma Sambhava, he who scourged the demoness at Phoksimido Lake, depicted here in his fierce Kalachakra 'Tiger-God" aspect, as a protector of the Dharma. A benign presence with four hands, bearing a string of pearls, a lotus, and the blue orb or mani that significes compassion, is Avalokita, or Chen-resigs. Presiding over all is Dorje-Chang, Holder of the Dorje, or "thunderbolt," the adamantine diamond, symbol of cosmic energy distilled. Dorje-Chang (Vajradhara) is the primordial Buddha of Tibet, who transmitted the Dharma to the great Indian sage Tilopa, and thus began a celebrated succession of reincarnations—from Tilopa to Naropa to Lama Marpa the Translator to Milarepa, and so forth, to the present day. He also appears outside on a dome fresco with the Pleiades and black sickle moon over his shoulder; his sky-blue color signifies his eternal nature, and he carries a bell that represents the perfect sound of voiceless wisdom. Beside the dome perches a wind-bell, and its very small clear song, in shifts of air, seems to deepen the vast silence of this place.

  The second stupa is of like size and character, and between these stupas and the monastery houses, heaped up into a platform five feet high, is a whole field of carved slabs, thousands upon thousands, by far the greatest assemblage of prayer stones that I have ever seen, before or since, OM MANI PADME HUM is the commonest inscription, but there are also wheels of life, carved Buddhas, and quotations from liturgical texts, heap upon heap. The stones vary in weight from ten pounds to several hundred; some are recent, while on others, the inscriptions are worn to shadow by the elements, and all of these conceal the masses more that lie beneath. In addition, a great wall of these stones nearly encircles the monastery and its adjoining houses as well as a group of smaller stupas on the northern side, and there are extensive prayer-stone walls on the river island and along the paths as well. The prayer stones at the bottom of these walls must be many centuries old. Though nobody seems to know who lived here when the first of them were made, the great accumulation of old stones in the Shey region supports the idea that the Crystal Mountain is a very ancient shrine of Tibetan Buddhism, and perhaps B'on before it. Samling Monastery, not far north of this mountain, is an old redoubt of B'on and the repository of B'on's most ancient texts, and I like to imagine that this archaic kingdom might be none other than the Kingdom of Sh'ang-Sh'ung that the B'on-pos claim as the home of their religion. That Sh'ang-Sh'ung is deemed "mythical'' may be discounted: the Land of Dolpo is not found in the geographies, and it seems mythical even to such people as myself, who like to imagine they have been here.

  This morning I bathe inside my sunny tent, and sort out gear. Dawa is still groaning with snow blindness, but Jang-bu and Phu-Tsering have crossed Black River to hunt scraps of low shrub juniper for firewood, and GS is up on this Somdo mountainside viewing his sheep; he returns half-frozen toward midmoming. After a quick meal of chapatis, we set off on a survey of other sheep populations in the region, heading eastward up the Saldang trail, which follows the north bank of the White River. Like the Saure and other east-west rivers in this season, this one is snowbound on the side that faces north, and across the water, we can see snow tracks of marmot, wandering outward in weird patterns from a burrow; perhaps the animals, sent underground too early by those blizzards of the late monsoon, had gone out foraging. But they are hibernated now, there is no fresh marmot sign, the land seems empty.

  Snow clouds come up over the mountains, and the shining river turns to black, over black rocks. A lone black dzo nuzzles the stony earth. GS has picked up scat of a large carnivore and turns it in his hand, wondering aloud why fox sign, so abundant at Black Pond, is uncommon here at lower altitudes. "Too big for fox, I think. . . ."

  As GS speaks, I scan the mountain slopes for bharal: on these rolling hills to the east of Somdo, we have not seen even one. Abruptly, he says, "Hold it! Freeze! Two snow leopard!" I see a pale shape slip behind a low rise patched with snow, as GS, agitated, mutters, "Tail's too short! Must have been foxes—!"

  "No!" I say. "Much too big—!"

  "Wolves!" he cries out "Wolves!"

  And there they are.

  Moving away without haste up an open slope beyond the rise, the wolves bring the barren hills to life. Two on the slope to northward frisk and play, but soon they pause to look us over; their tameness is astonishing. Then they cut across the hill to join three others that are climbing a stone gully. The pack stops each little while to gaze at us, and through the telescope we rejoice in every shining hair: two silver wolves, and two of faded gold, and one that is the no-color of frost: this frost-colored wolf, a big male, seems to be leader. All have black tail tips and a delicate black fretting on the back. "That's why there's no sign of fox or leopard!" GS says, "and that's why the blue sheep stay near the river cliffs, away from this open country!" I ask if the wolves would hunt and kill the fox and leopard, and he says they would. For some reason, the wolves' appearance here has taken us by surprise; it is in Tibet that such mythic creatures belong. This is an Asian race of Canis lupus, the timber wolf, which both of us have seen in Alaska, and it is always an exciting animal: the empty hills where the pack has gone have come to life. In a snow patch are five sets of wolf tracks, and old wolf scats along the path contain brittle gray stuff and soft yellow hair—blue sheep and marmot.

  Down the path comes an old woman who has walked alone from Saldang, over the Shey Pass to the east; we are as surprised by her appearance as she is by ours. The old woman has seen the five jangu, and two more, but seems less wary of the wolves than of big strangers.

  We wonder about that solitary dzo, not more than a half mile from the place where we had turned the wolves back toward the east. Later Namu says that wolves kill two or three dzos every year, and five or six sheep at a time in the corrals. She sets out upriver to fetch her dzo, and is back with the lone beast just before sundown.

  NOVEMBER 3

  There is so much that enchants me in this spare, silent place that I move softly so as not to break a spell. Because the taking of life has been forbidden by the Lama of Shey, bharal and wolves alike draw near the monastery. On the hills and in the stone beds of the river are fossils from blue ancient days when all this soaring rock lay beneath the sea. And all about are the prayer stones, prayer flags, prayer wheels, and prayer mills in the torrent, calling on all the elements in nature to join in celebration of the One. What I hear from my tent is a delicate wind-bell and the river from the east, in this easterly wind that may bring a change in the weather. At daybreak, two great ravens come, their long toes scratching on the prayer walls.

  The sun refracts from the white glaze of the mountains, chills the air. Old Sonam, who lives alone in the hamlet up the hill, was on the mountain before day, gathering the summer's dung to dry and store as cooking fuel; what I took for lumpish matter straightens on the sky as the sun rises, setting her gaunt silhouette afire.

  Eleven sheep are visible on the Somdo slope above the monastery, six rams together and a group of ewes and
young; though the bands begin to draw near to one another and sniff urine traces, there is no real sign of rut. From our lookout above Sonam's house, three more groups—six, fourteen, and twenty-six—can be seen on the westward slopes, across Black River.

  Unable to hold the scope on the restless animals, GS calls out to me to shtft the binoculars from the band of fourteen to the group of six sheep, directly across the river from our lookout. "Why are those sheep running?" he demands, and a moment later hollers, "Wolves!" All six sheep are springing for the cliffs, but a pair of wolves coming straight downhill are cutting off the rearmost animal as it bounds across a stretch of snow toward the ledges. In the hard light, the blue-gray creature seems far too swift to catch, yet the streaming wolves gain ground on the hard snow. Then they are whisking through the matted juniper and down over steepening rocks, and it appears that the bharal will be cut off and bowled over, down the mountain, but at the last moment it scoots free and gains a narrow ledge where no wolf can follow.

  In the frozen air, the whole mountain is taut; the silence rings. The sheep's flanks quake, and the wolves are panting; otherwise, all is still, as if the arrangement of pale shapes held the world together. Then I breathe, and the mountain breathes, setting the world in motion once again.

  Briefly, the wolves gaze about, then make their way up the mountainside in the unhurried gait that may carry them fifty miles in a single day. Two pack mates join them, and in high yak pasture the four pause to romp and roll in dung. Two of these were not among the five seen yesterday, and we recall that the old woman had seen seven. Then they trot onward, disappearing behind a ridge of snow. The band of fourteen sheep high on this ridge gives a brief run of alarm, then forms a line on a high point to stare down at the wolves and watch them go. Before long, all are browsing once again, including the six that were chased onto the precipice.

  Turning to speak, we just shake our heads and grin. "It was worth walking five weeks just to see that," GS sighs at last "That was the most exciting wolf hunt I ever saw." And a little later, exhilarated still, he wonders aloud if I remember "that rainy afternoon in the Serengeti when we watched wild dogs make a zebra kill in that strange storm light on the plain, and all those thousands of animals running?" I nod. I am still excited by the wolves seen so close yesterday, and to see them again, to watch them hunt blue sheep in such fashion, flying down across the cliffs within sight of our tents at Shey Gompa—what happiness!

  After years of studying the carnivores, GS has become fascinated by the Caprini—the sheep and the goats—which have the attraction of inhabiting the remote high mountains that he loves. And among the Caprini, this "blue sheep" is a most peculiar species, which is one reason we have come so far to see it It is presumed that the sheeps and goats branched off from a common ancestor among the Rupicaprini, the so-called goat-antelopes, which are thought7 to have evolved somewhere south of the Himalaya; this generalized ancestor may have resembled the small goat-antelope called the goral, which we saw last month in the dry canyon of the Bheri. Besides the six species of true goat (Capra) and the six of true sheep (Ovis), the Caprini include three species of tahr ( Hemitragus) , the aoudad or Barbary sheep (Ammotragus), and the bharal or Himalayan blue sheep (Pseudois), all of which exhibit characters of both sheep and goat. The tahrs, which in their morphology and behavior appear to be intermediate between goat-antelopes and true goats, are classified as goats, and the sheeplike aoudad is mostly goat as well. Pseudois, too, looks very like a sheep; it recalls the Rocky Mountain sheep, not only in its general aspect but in type of habitat—trolling upland in the vicinity of cliffs. Certain specimens, GS says, possess the interdigital glands on all four feet which were thought to be a diagnostic character of Ovis, and the species lacks the strong smell, beard, and knee callouses that are found in Capra. Nevertheless, GS considers it more goat than sheep, and hopes to establish this beyond all doubt by observation of its behavior in the rut.

  Hunters' reports account for most of what is known of the wild goats and sheep of Asia, which may be why the classification of Pseudois is still disputed. Since the blue sheep is now rare in world collections, the one way to resolve the question is to observe the animal in its own inhospitable habitat—above timberline, as high as 18,000 feet, in the vicinity of cliffs—in one of the most remote ranges of any animal on earth: from Ladakh and Kashmir east across Tibet into northwest China, south to the Himalayan crest, and north to the Kuenlun and Altyn mountains. In Nepal, a few bharal are found on the western and southern flanks of Dhaulagiri (this is the population that we saw near the Jang Pass), as well as in the upper Arun Valley, in the east, but most are found here in the northwest, near the Tibetan border.

  This morning, through the telescope, I study blue sheep carefully for the first time. Like the Rocky mountain sheep, they are short-legged, strong, broad-backed animals, quick and neat-footed, with gold demonic eyes. The thick-horned male is a handsome slaty blue, the white of his rump and belly set off by bold black face marks, chest, and flank stripe, and black anteriors on all four legs; the black flank stripes, like the horns, become heavier with age. The female is much smaller, with dull pelage and less contrast in the black, and her horns are spindly, as in female sheep. Those of the males, on the other hand, are heavy, curving upward, out, and back. Also, the basio-occipital bone at the base of the skull is goatlike, and so are the large dew claws and the prominent markings on the fore sides of the legs. In this confused situation, the rutting behavior will be a deciding factor, yet from the limited reports available, even the rutting is ambiguous. For example, the courting sheep rarely raises its tail above the horizontal, whereas the goat may arch it back onto its rump: perhaps for lack of the odorous tail-gland secretions of true goats that the arched tail may help disseminate, both tahr and bharal compromise by erecting the tail straight up into the air.

  Although the male herds are still intact—this sociability of rams is a trait of Caprini—the males are mounting one another, as much to establish dominance as in sexuality; among many sheep and goats, the juvenile males and the females are quite similar in appearance, and tend to imitate the behavior of the other, so that rams may fail to differentiate between them, treating all of these subordinates alike.8 A few are displaying the bizarre behavior (heretofore unreported) that GS calls "rump-rubbing," in which one male may rub his face against the hind end of another. In the vicinity of females, the male "kicks"—a loose twitch of the leg in her direction that appears to be a mounting preliminary and may also serve to display his handsome markings. Also, he thrusts his muzzle into her urine stream, as if to learn whether or not she is in estrus, and licks in agitation at his penis. But the blue sheep stops short of certain practices developed by the markhor of Pakistan and the wild goat (the ancestor of the domestic goat, ranging from Pakistan to Greece), both of which take their penises into their mouths, urinate copiously, then spit on their own coats; the beard of the male goat is an adaptive character, a sort of urine sponge that perpetuates the fine funky smell for which the goats are known.

  The itch of the rutting season has begun, and even the young animals play at butting and sparring, as if anxious not to miss the only lively time in the blue sheep's year. GS wonders at the scarcity of the young, concluding that a 50 percent mortality must occur in the first year, due as much to weakness or disease caused by poor range condition as to predation by wolves and leopard. Perhaps one juvenile in three attains maturity, and this may suffice to sustain the herds, which must adjust numbers to the limited amount of habitat that remains snow-free all the year. This region of the Tibetan Plateau is a near desert of rock and barren slopes dominated by two thorn shrubs, Caragana and a bush honeysuckle, Lonicera; the blue sheep will eat small amounts of almost any growth, including the dry everlasting and the oily juniper, and the adaptations of the Caprini for hard, abrasive forage permit limited browsing of this thorny scrub as well. But excepting a few tufts among the thorns, almost all the native grasses that are its preferred food have b
een eradicated by the herds of yak and sheep and goats that are brought here from distant villages in summer, and the overgrazing has led already to erosion.

  NOVEMBER 4

  Condemned by cold to spend twelve hours in my sleeping bag each night, I find myself inclined to my Zen practice. Each morning before daybreak, I drag my down parka into my sleeping bag, to warm it, then sit up in meditation posture and perform a sutra chanting service for perhaps forty-five minutes, including the sutra dedicated to Kannon or Avalokita, and the Heart Sutra (the "heart" of the mighty Prajna Paramita Sutra that lies at the base of Mahayana Buddhism). This morning service is lent dignity by a clay ts'a ts'a Buddha taken from the piles of these small icons that litter the stupas at Ring-mo—that it may be "B'on" seems of small importance. I place the figure outside the tent on an altar of flat stone, which it will receive the first of the eastern light, down the White River, and I sit bundled up just inside the flap, for at this hour the temperature is never more than —12° Centigrade. Sometimes I am joined for morning service by a hardy little bird that dwells in the brush piles on the roof of the pink stone house behind the tent. With flicking tail, it hunts among the dung chips near the Buddha; the bill is slim in a pale-gray head, and it has a rufous breast and a white belly. This is the robin accentor (Prunella).

  Today Dawa is better, and the sherpas will climb up to Black Pond to fetch down three more loads. Being dependent on their good will, we try to spare them where possible, and share things, and wait for them to volunteer—they always do—before making our requests, but theirs is a wearing job, and poorly paid, and were they less faithful, they could simply abandon us, as they have seen the porters do so often.