You do not find a snow leopard. You arrange your week so that a snow leopard might consent to be found. That means winter, when the ibex come down to the valley floors and the cats follow; it means our spotters — village men who have read these slopes since boyhood — glassing the cliffs from first light; and it means learning to love the waiting, because the waiting is most of it.
Our February group was small by design: a wildlife photographer from Helsinki with lenses the size of stovepipes, and a retired biology teacher from Vermont who had wanted this since reading about the 'grey ghost' forty years ago. Base was a warm guesthouse in upper Gojal; office hours were dawn and dusk on the ridgelines above the Khunjerab road, with hot lunches and a thermos economy that would impress a central bank.
The valley gave us its riches in instalments. Day one: ibex, eighty strong, carved against the skyline. Day three: fresh pugmarks crossing the road at dawn, each print the size of a saucer, heading up a gully our spotter knew by name. Day four: a golden eagle, a fox in winter coat, and the particular silence that falls when everyone privately begins to believe.
Day five, 4:40 in the afternoon, the light already turning blue: Karim's radio crackled two words and the scopes swung as one. She was on the third ridge, moving like poured smoke along a line no human would ever pick, and for forty seconds the only sound on our hillside was a shutter and somebody's heartbeat — possibly mine. Then she folded into the rocks and was simply not there anymore. The teacher from Vermont didn't get a photograph. He says it's the best thing he's ever seen. Both facts are true, and somehow related.
“She moved like poured smoke along a line no human would ever pick.”
