The Ghost of the Mountains by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi review – the secrets of the snow leopard

When bored, try the following game – I call it “Purr or Roar?”. Take any feline and guess whether it can purr or roar (it cannot do both because purring and roaring require different anatomical structures). Some candidates are easy: any child knows that lions and tigers roar and that a tabby does not. But between the great cats and our pets are numerous other species, from lynxes to panthers, whose anatomy is not so easy to infer. A leopard, for instance? Roar (or growl). The discreet, mountain-dwelling snow leopard? Purr.

The snow leopard is the protagonist of Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi’s first book, a compelling and intimate look at this elusive mountain specialist. An Indian conservationist and mountaineer, Suryawanshi pursues the creature through the Himalayas and Gobi desert. This is a gritty and detailed portrait of an often misunderstood and endangered species in an increasingly hostile, crowded and hot environment.

Suryawanshi grew up in Aurangabad in the Deccan Peninsula – far away from the snow leopard’s habitat – and decided to pursue ecology after reading biologist George Schaller’s The Year of the Gorilla in the city’s public library. He writes of his admiration for western conservationists, mountaineers and explorers – Schaller, Reinhold Messner, and British imperial adventurer Francis Younghusband – and yet he is an Indian writer, writing about the ecology of his own country. As much as his book is about snow leopards, it also asks us to consider their biographers: who is it who gets to tell the story of the nonhuman lives around us?

Despite its name, the snow leopard has little in common with the leopard (its closest living relative is the tiger). And, unlike the leopard, it is adapted to the harsh and rugged terrain of the highest ranges, from India to Russia. It has an absurdly bushy tail, used both as extra limb and voluminous shawl, and large paws which act like snow shoes. What it lacks in power (it does not have a particularly strong bite), it makes up for in agility and guile (snow leopards can chase their prey down steep cliff faces; and have been known to drive horses into deep snow where they can be picked off). They are extremely difficult to spot; Suryawanshi observes that their “ochre-and-dust-colour coat with its irregular rosettes looks exactly like a rock covered with lichens”. Indeed, he muses, they should really be called “rock leopards”.

I have read much about the snow leopard, or rather books by writers searching for some ideal version of them. Suryawanshi’s book is very different, and can almost be read in opposition to the quest narratives of, say, Peter Matthiessen or Sylvain Tesson. Much like a conservationist’s diary, his book is shorn of romance, and recounts the grind of observing and counting snow leopards in remote parts of the world, far away from his wife and young daughter. He wades through snow, sets up camera traps, and tries to defuse tensions with local herders. His snow leopards are part of an ecosystem, just like any other animal; they are hated and loved, as well as being objects of indifference.

According to Suryawanshi, although snow leopards prefer to hunt wild animals, up to 70% of their diet is livestock, a recipe for conflict with local people. He talks to one herder in the Spiti Valley of the Indian Himalayas who nonchalantly relates that he shot a snow leopard after it attacked his goats, and dumped its corpse in a river. Here is no sacred object of veneration, then, but a potential pest, the equivalent of European fox (other locals speak of their fondness for the cats: a community in the village of Kibber ended up adopting and feeding a sick snow leopard, even naming him Rancho after a character in a Bollywood film).

Much of Suryawanshi’s work is dedicated to mediating conflict between the cats and locals. He assists in the design of a livestock enclosure that can deter the claws and ingenuity of a hungry snow leopard; and makes recommendations on schemes to compensate herders whose animals have been killed. Interestingly, he notes that women are the most hostile to snow leopards as they are the ones who look after livestock (and do not necessarily benefit from compensation schemes). One local woman asks: “why don’t you marry one of your snow leopards?”

The most painful section in the book relates to the bitter dispute regarding the The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s 2017 decision to downgrade the animal’s from “endangered” to “vulnerable”. Suryawanshi and his colleagues at the Snow Leopard Trust bitterly opposed the move, arguing that the decision was based on flawed science and driven by the political considerations of large NGOs in the west. In his eyes, “racial power dynamics and colonial legacies of conservation and research” were at play. As of today, the snow leopard is still classed as vulnerable.

There is a critique here of the stories that we have told ourselves about the snow leopard, an attempt to wrest it back from literary and metropolitan writers. In one section, Suryawanshi retraces Matthiessen’s steps in Nepal, but it seems as though his heart isn’t really in it. Along the way, he notices the effects of mass tourism, and learns that Nepal’s richest man, who owns an instant noodle company, had sought to build a resort in a remote village for tourists hoping to spot snow leopards. He takes a gentle swipe at Matthiessen: did the American writer ever stop to think about the consequences of mythologising the creature?

I think it’s a push to blame Matthiessen for the plight of the snow leopard, in the same way that Melville shouldn’t be held accountable for the decline in sperm whales. But Suryawanshi’s point is that stories matter: the snow leopard has become a commodity in the way that Everest has, a mountain to be summited. The effect of this book is a gradual stripping away of mystification, revealing the snow leopard to be fragile and beautiful just like any other inhabitant of high mountain ranges – the pika, the wild yak, the Pallas’s cat – but no less wondrous for it, and no less deserving of our attention and respect.

Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.