Three evocative episodes of snow leopard sightings

“As we reach for the stars, we neglect the flowers at our feet. But the great age of the mammals in the Himalayas need not be over unless we permit it to be… but when the last snow leopard has stalked among the crags and the last markhor has stood on a promontory, his ruff waving in the breeze, a spark of life will have gone, turning the mountains into stones of silence.” — George B Schaller

I had once come across a tantalisingly brief account of the sighting of a snow leopard in the wilds of India which occurred in 1906 near village Nilang, in the Jadh Ganga valley (Uttarakhand). Major HC Tytler in the company of his wife had set out from the duty station at Barrackpore to acquire an ibex trophy-head from the upland of Tibet. At the base of a sheer cliff with a crystal-clear stream, their guides halted abruptly and signalled to the sahibs to come over. Lo and behold, the Tytler couple was astonished at their good luck of viewing a fine specimen of a snow leopard at 11,300 ft above sea level, literally under their noses as it were.
After thoroughly examining its pelt and body, they concluded that the leopard had drowned barely an hour earlier. They supervised the removal of its skin. In the process, they discovered the probable cause of its death: a big stone detaching from the upper reaches of the cliff had hit the skull and spine of the leopard with lethal force as it lay crouched to drink water. Back at Barrackpore, the skin was dispatched for trophy-mounting to Rowland Ward, world famous taxidermists of London. Maybe, it was on display when Major General Sir Harry Tytler arrived at the family mansion, post superannuation from the army in 1928.
Providentially, at that very time, Kay Nixon, a lass of 34, was much sought after in the art circles of London. She was a bright graduate in art illustrations who had won acclaim by embellishing a few Enid Blyton stories, as also an edition of ‘Alice in Wonderland’. With that baggage of accomplishments, she arrived in Bombay in 1928 on some assignments, one among others for illustrating the definitive compilation ‘Wild Animals of the Indian Empire’. It led to the oil painting which in my experience is the most exquisite and enigmatic art piece of a pair of snow leopards! Was that painting from a factual sighting of the elusive cat by Kay or imaginary, is shrouded in mystery. Kay stayed on till 1954 and married an army braveheart, Col Victor Blundell, MC.
But it will be another four decades post Kay’s painting that the world at large would get to see the first recorded black and white photograph of the snow leopard from the lofty heights in Chitral. George B Schaller, a young affable American field biologist with an accreditation to the New York Zoological Society and the National Geographic Society, had been stomping for mapping the field biology of mammal species, across the west to east stupendous arc formed by the Pamirs, Hindu Kush and Himalayas.
But in years of searching, Schaller got his first look at a snow leopard in Chitral in 1970 — “a hundred and fifty feet away, peering at me from the spur, her body so well moulded into the contours… smoky-grey coat sprinkled with black rosettes… pale eyes conveyed an image of immense solitude… sensing that I meant no harm, she sat up… she had a kill, a domestic goat, and at the entrance to a rock cleft nearby were her two cubs”.
And his friend, Peter Mathiessen, author of ‘The Snow Leopard’, recounts that “after an entire month of baiting, with live goats, he (Schaller) made the first films ever taken of this creature in the wild”.