Abstract
Ever since I first met a female snow leopard and photographed her in northern Pakistan in 1970, the frosty eyes and smoky-gray coat of the cat has shadowed my work, sometimes as an insistent presence and at others as a vague mountain spirit. I have spent years in the realm of the snow leopard yet have seldom seen it. “Imperiled Phantom of Asian Peaks” is the title of my 1971 National Geographic article, and indeed Panthera uncia has remained a phantom. On one occasion in 1973 a snow leopard and I startled each other in a willow thicket in Nepal, but during my wide-ranging surveys for the cat in the Kunlun, Karakoram, Tian Shan, and other ranges in China between 1984 and 1986, for example, I did not encounter a single one. No doubt some observed me trudging along valleys and ridges, my eyes cast down to find at least a trace of them. When Peter Matthiessen and I trekked through northern Nepal in 1973, he did not see a snow leopard, yet like a good Zen Buddhist he said in his evocative book about the trip, The Snow Leopard, “Have you seen the snow leopard? No! Isn’t that wonderful?” I am not quite able to achieve a similar attitude.
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