The snow leopard of Rong: A tale from Ladakh

The ancient river

The Indus river, fed by glaciers on the northern slopes of Mount Kailash, flows across the Byang-thang, the northern part of the Tibetan Plateau, before entering the Indian Changthang in south-eastern Ladakh. The river is a geologic antecedent to the Himalayas—its course predates the mountains’ rise and has held that course ever since.

Over fifty million years, the river has cut deep gorges, and downstream, on its fertile alluvial plains, it sustained the Harappan civilisation for two thousand years until climate change and the river’s shifting course dismantled it some three thousand years ago.

Across these immensities of time, humanity appears as a brief flicker—civilisations rising and vanishing like tumbleweed blown across the high plateau. Yet even with knowledge of these grand contingencies, humility eludes us; we persist in our myopic follies and brashly push against the limits of nature’s ability to replenish.

A quieter time

On a merely human spatial scale and within the brief span of Homo sapiens’ generations, major geographic transitions along the Indus’s course now carry political tensions—of nations competing for control over land, and of development pressing against fragile ecosystems.

In 2006, along the stretch where the Indus flows between the Ladakh and Zanskar ranges, I came upon a snow leopard—an encounter from a quieter time, before the currents of geopolitics and environmental contestation reached into its secluded, stony haunts.

Recounting those dramatic moments of that encounter in the wild may foreground a deeper, more sublime human need within the narrative of development so often swamped by economic considerations alone. We might do well to remember the aesthetic and spiritual values humans seek in nature as we celebrated International Snow Leopard Day this past week.

Across Kalak Tartar

In the spring month of April, I had gone to Kalak Tartar at an altitude of 4,500 m., near Hanle, looking for Gowa (Tibetan gazelle). But I had not found them; instead, I had met Changpas on their lugrang, a nomadic campsite. In accordance with their strictly regulated seasonal grazing regimen at that time of the year, the Changpas were on Kalak Tartar with their livestock.

It was a cold day. The first hundred kilometres were across alpine meadows, through rolling hills, and down the gentle gradient beside the Indus, flowing calmly through a wide valley. By six in the evening, another hundred kilometres were behind—over undulating roads that meandered with the river as it rushed through the narrow Rong valley (Rong means ‘gorge’ in Ladakhi). The light was still good.

Past the village of Likshe, the road ran high on the right bank of the Indus, then plunged into a left-bending loop and straightened along a thirty-metre stretch beside the river. A breeze stirred the willows, which swayed and swooshed at the water’s edge. At the end of that length, I saw an animal with black markings on grey pelage, less than a metre tall, walking along the edge of the smooth, black-topped road.

The bike was not racing; it rolled gently down the slope, engine thumping softly, sound drowned in the roar of the river’s flow. Ambling confidently ahead, in its own undisturbed range, was the snow leopard.

The ascent

The snow leopard did not hear the bike approaching until just 20 metres from it. It began to run, and I raced the bike. It turned around a bend, and I stopped, dismounted, removed my gloves and helmet, and ran down the road to catch sight of the snow leopard running up a landslide slope—15 metres at a 45-degree incline leading to a rock face.

With the binoculars hanging from my shoulder and the camera in hand, I too ran up the slope.

The snow leopard reached the base of a vertical wall. About two and a half metres above the ground was an opening to a two-foot-wide fissure. It leapt into the narrow gap to anchor itself with its front paws. It slipped. On the second attempt, it got a paw-hold and clambered in. Then, with its legs pressing against opposing walls, it chimneyed its way out of the crevice. It stood there—hind legs planted on a small outcrop, torso angled upward, forelegs resting on the incline above.

Then it quickly pulled its body back, muscles contracting, sinews stretching, and leapt to a higher ledge. The rock face was vertical; it leapt from one narrow ledge to another and climbed about nine metres up the face. At the top of the ascent was a small platform the size of the animal’s body—wide and deep enough, with a rock projecting over it. It sat there in that hollow, completely relaxed, knowing I could not follow, and looked down at me.

Standing close to the vertical wall, I could see only its twitching ears. So, I rushed down to the road to get a better view of the animal.

Dusk and departure

It was 6.30 pm, and the last rays of the sun still lit the snow leopard’s face. Perched high above me in its stony, silent domain, the snow leopard, alternating between looking at me and scanning the road and river below, must have been biding its time, knowing that I would go away before it got dark.

From that height, it could have seen the sun slowly descend behind the line of hills across the river. Suddenly, a small car zipped down the road, driving a wedge between the animal and me. Jolted back to the awareness of people—in that other world of theirs, sealed in a metal capsule, perhaps planning their work for Monday morning in Leh after a weekend visit to their village—I watched the car pass. People inside saw me sitting on a rock by the Indus, unaware that I was looking up at a snow leopard.

Soon, with the fading light, the animal vanished—its form dissolved into the dark hollow. I started my bike and rode on toward Leh.

Resilience and limits

Wildlife is resilient—it endures, finds niches, and thrives in them. When the fresh grass of spring is taken by domestic livestock at Kalak Tartar, and the snowmelt dries up, these animals—hardened by evolution far longer than any domestic animal—return to where the best grass is gone and no water remains for livestock to survive.

Yet resilience has its limits. The accelerating extinction rate is evidence enough of how frequently human expansion pushes wild species beyond the brink. Without human interference, roughly one species per million would vanish each year; today, that rate is estimated to be a 100 to a 1,000 times higher.

On the human side too, there are limits. Our sensitivity to a landscape’s ecology fades with distance—the farther removed we are from the ground, the more ignorant and insensitive we become.

Not all local wisdom is scientific, yet it is tested by sustainability, marked by thrift and self-regulation. More often than not, these systems have failed because of aspirations grafted from outside, as in the case of the Pashmina wool economy, promoted by the government’s animal husbandry departments. Winter subsidies for fodder have led to overstocking, which has cascaded into disruptions of the Changpas’ sustainable pasture practices.

Ill-conceived mega solar projects, aimed largely at power export, threaten far greater havoc on Ladakh’s fragile landscape than the careful, incremental steps of local development. Innovative, locally grounded scientific and technological solutions are critical to preserving Ladakh’s unique nature and culture.

The fragile expanse

What the snow leopard requires is a development paradigm for Ladakh that is sensitive to its unique and fragile ecosystem.

As we commemorated the snow leopard this past week, may we always remember not only its elusive splendour but the fragile expanse it inhabits.

Let us not mistake the silence of resilient life forms for their absence, nor the frugality of the landscape for its barrenness—lest we imperil our own survival. For the river will continue to cut deeper gorges and carry mineral nutrients to alluvial plains, indifferent to whether we exist or not.

Narendra Patil writes on ecology, wildlife and nature conservation

Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth