Tibet Wild by George B. Schaller

Author:George B. Schaller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Island Press
Published: 2012-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

My projects in the 1960s on gorillas, tigers, and lions had been conducted in national parks, which in spite of various problems had a measure of security, but they had, I felt, contributed little to conservation or to protecting “precious intangible values,” to use Olaus Murie’s phrase from the Alaska expedition. During the next decade, I would do something beyond myself by selecting projects on new species in new areas which had so far been ignored or neglected, to give voice to animals which have had no one to speak on their behalf. I initiated, for example, a study of the jaguar and its prey in the great swamps of the Pantanal in western Brazil, a project similar in concept and execution to the one on the Indian tiger. After three and a half decades, I still collaborate with my Brazilian colleague Peter Crawshaw on issues of jaguar conservation. But no place attracted me more than the Himalaya, the rampart of gleaming snow peaks which I had first glimpsed in northern India, and beyond which, I knew, was the mysterious Tibetan Plateau. I was intrigued by various Himalayan species of wild sheep and goats, such as the markhor goat with its spiraling horns, the argali sheep with its great curling horns, and especially the blue sheep, whose looks and behavior make it unclear whether it is a sheep or goat.

December 1970 found me in the Hindu Kush Mountains of northern Pakistan to observe markhor. One day, as I climbed up a steep scree slope broken by boulders, everything was motionless and silent around me as if devoid of life. My book Stones of Silence (1980) describes what happened next:

Then I saw the snow leopard, a hundred and fifty feet away, peering at me from the spur, her body so well molded into the contours of the boulders that she seemed a part of them. Her smoky-grey coat sprinkled with black rosettes perfectly complemented the rocks and snowy wastes, and her pale eyes conveyed the image of immense solitude. As we watched each other the clouds descended once more, entombing us and bringing more snow. . . . The snow fell more thickly, and, dreamlike, the cat slipped away as if she had never been.

It was a fleeting moment of transcendence. To see this phantom of the snows again and again and again became a quest, and it continues still, as I describe in Chapter 14.

From 1972 to 1974, we lived in the city of Lahore, Pakistan, where Eric and Mark, now almost teenagers, went to school. While Kay remained with them, I roamed the mountains to study goats and sheep. I traversed tribal areas near the Afghanistan border (today under Taliban control), observed the rare Punjab urial sheep in the private reserve of the Nawab of Kalibagh, and searched for ibex and Marco Polo sheep in the mighty Karakoram Range. Amanullah Khan, a former army major, and Pervez Khan, an avid trekker, were my frequent companions. One area in the Karakoram would, I felt, make a good national park.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.