THE GHOST OF THE MOUNTAINS

On the trail of “one of the most elusive wildcats in the world.”

Suryawanshi, an ecologist and conservationist, decided as a child in India to devote his life to studying snow leopards. He knew this would help lead him out of his isolated village. He also chose the field because intriguingly little was known about the animals, given that their “silvery-brown-and-white coats” and “rosette markings” blended in so well with the frozen Himalayan landscape that human eyes couldn’t make the animals out—even when looking straight at them. This book is about the 20 years that followed in the life of that boy, as he dedicated his schoolwork, PhD thesis, and career to tracking and studying the shy creatures. He discovered that fossils indicate snow leopards have occupied every mountain range from Portugal to Siberia since the last ice age. “Their silvery-brown-and-white coats, marked with dark rosettes, work like magic cloaks, offering such good camouflage that they can disappear in plain sight,” the author writes. “They have long, furry tails—the longest of any cat in the world—which they wrap around their bodies like mufflers on cold nights. As they maneuver around exposed cliffs, their tails also work like the balancing poles of tightrope walkers. Their thick, wide paws, lined with fur, act like snowshoes, helping them walk on snow like elves. They are silent predators, unable to roar.” Suryawanshi is one of the few people who truly understands these ghostly cats, which are increasingly endangered by mining, commerce, and glacier-melting climate change. His research has helped draw the attention of world governments to the import of the animals, which act as the Himalayas’ “ecosystem engineers,” digging wells into mountainsides that keep whole mountain communities alive. The book meanders a bit as the author tracks his ever-migrating subject. But it reaches its key goal: to help us see, at last, the elusive creatures that have been haunting Earth’s highest peaks for as long as we’ve been hunting its plains below.

An affecting book about an animal that was “shaped to perfection by evolution” but that now needs human help to survive.