Peter Matthiessen: 3 November

There is so much that enchants me in this spare, silent place that I move softly so as not to break a spell. Because the taking of life has been forbidden by the Lama of Shey, bharal and wolves alike draw near the monastery. On the hills and in the stone beds of the river are fossils from blue ancient days when all this soaring rock lay beneath the sea. And all about are the prayer stones, prayer flags, prayer wheels, and prayer mills in the torrent, calling on all the elements in nature to join in celebration of the One. What I hear from my tent is a delicate wind-bell and the river from the east, in this easterly wind that may bring a change in the weather. At daybreak, two great ravens come, their long toes scratching on the prayer walls.

The sun refracts from the white glaze of the mountains, chills the air. Old Sonam, who lives alone in the hamlet up the hill, was on the mountain before day, gathering the summer's dung to dry and store as cooking fuel; what I took for lumpish matter straightens on the sky as the sun rises, setting her gaunt silhouette afire.

Eleven sheep are visible on the Somdo slope above the monastery, six rams together and a group of ewes and young; though the bands begin to draw near to one another and sniff urine traces, there is no real sign of rut. From our lookout above Sonam's house, three more groups—six, fourteen, and twenty-six—can be seen on the westward slopes, across Black River.

Unable to hold the scope on the restless animals, GS calls out to me to shift the binoculars from the band of fourteen to the group of six sheep, directly across the river from our lookout. "Why are those sheep running?" he demands, and a moment later hollers, "Wolves!" All six sheep are springing for the cliffs, but a pair of wolves coming straight downhill are cutting off the rearmost animal as it bounds across a stretch of snow toward the ledges. In the hard light, the blue-gray creature seems far too swift to catch, yet the streaming wolves gain ground on the hard snow. Then they are whisking through the matted juniper and down over steepening rocks, and it appears that the bharal will be cut off and bowled over, down the mountain, but at the last moment it scoots free and gains a narrow ledge where no wolf can follow.

In the frozen air, the whole mountain is taut; the silence rings. The sheep's flanks quake, and the wolves are panting; otherwise, all is still, as if the arrangement of pale shapes held the world together. Then I breathe, and the mountain breathes, setting the world in motion once again.

Briefly, the wolves gaze about, then make their way up the mountainside in the unhurried gait that may carry them fifty miles in a single day. Two pack mates join them, and in high yak pasture the four pause to romp and roll in dung. Two of these were not among the five seen yesterday, and we recall that the old woman had seen seven. Then they trot onward, disappearing behind a ridge of snow. The band of fourteen sheep high on this ridge gives a brief run of alarm, then forms a line on a high point to stare down at the wolves and watch them go. Before long, all are browsing once again, including the six that were chased onto the precipice.

Turning to speak, we just shake our heads and grin. "It was worth walking five weeks just to see that," GS sighs at last. "That was the most exciting wolf hunt I ever saw." And a little later, exhilarated still, he wonders aloud if I remember "that rainy afternoon in the Serengeti when we watched wild dogs make a zebra kill in that strange storm light on the plain, and all those thousands of animals running?" I nod. I am still excited by the wolves seen so close yesterday, and to see them again, to watch them hunt blue sheep in such fashion, flying down across the cliffs within sight of our tents at Shey Gompa— what happiness!

After years of studying the carnivores, GS has become fascinated by the Caprini—the sheep and the goats—which have the attraction of inhabiting the remote high mountains that he loves. And among the Caprini, this "blue sheep" is a most peculiar species, which is one reason we have come so far to see it. It is presumed that the sheep and goats branched off from a common ancestor among the Rupicaprini, the so-called goat-antelopes, which are thought to have evolved somewhere south of the Himalaya; this generalized ancestor may have resembled the small goat-antelope called the goral, which we saw fast month in the dry canyon of the Bheri. Besides the six species of true goat (Capra) and the six of true sheep (Ovis), the Caprini include three species of tahr (Hemitragus), the aoudad or Barbary sheep (Ammotragus), and the bharal or Himalayan blue sheep (Pseudois), all of which exhibit characters of both sheep and goat. The tahrs, which in their morphology and behavior appear to be intermediate between goat-antelopes and true goats, are classified as goats, and the sheeplike aoudad is mostly goat as well. Pseudois, too, looks very like a sheep; it recalls the Rocky Mountain sheep, not only in its general aspect but in type of habitat—rolling upland in the vicinity of cliffs. Certain specimens, GS says, possess the interdigital glands on all four feet which were thought to be a diagnostic character of Ov is, and the species lacks the strong smell, beard, and knee callouses that are found in Capra. Nevertheless, GS considers it more goat than sheep, and hopes to establish this beyond all doubt by observation of its behavior in the rut.

Hunters' reports account for most of what is known of the wild goats and sheep of Asia, which may be why the classifica-lion of Pseudois is still disputed. Since the blue sheep is now rare in world collections, the one way to resolve the question is to observe the animal in its own inhospitable habitat—above timberline, as high as 18,000 feet, in the vicinity of cliffs—in one of the most remote ranges of any animal on earth: from Ladakh and Kashmir east across Tibet into northwest China, south to the Himalayan crest, and north to the Kuenlun and Altyn mountains. In Nepal, a few bharal are found on the west¬ern and southern flanks of Dhaulagiri (this is the population that we saw near the Jang Pass), as well as in the upper Arun Valley, in the east, but most are found here in the northwest, near the Tibetan border.

This morning, through the telescope, I study blue sheep carefully for the first time. Like the Rocky Mountain sheep, they are short-legged, strong, broad-backed animals, quick and neat-footed, with gold demonic eyes. The thick-horned male is a handsome slaty blue, the white of his rump and belly set off by bold black face marks, chest, and flank stripe, and black anteriors on all four legs; the black flank stripes, like the horns, become heavier with age. The female is much smaller, with dull pelage and less contrast in the black, and her horns are spindly, as in female sheep. Those of the males, on the other hand, are heavy, curving upward, out, and back. Also, the basio-occipital bone at the base of the skull is goatlike, and so are the large dew claws and the prominent markings on the fore sides of the legs. In this confused situation, the rutting behavior will be a deciding factor, yet from the limited reports available, even the rutting is ambiguous. For example, the courting sheep rarely raises its tail above the horizontal, whereas the goat may arch it back onto its rump: perhaps for lack of the odorous tail-gland secretions of true goats that the arched tail may help dis-seminate, both tahr and bharal compromise by erecting the tail straight up into the air.

Although the male herds are still intact—this sociability of rams is a trait of Caprini—the males are mounting one another, as much to establish dominance as in sexuality; among many sheep and goats, the juvenile males and the females are quite similar in appearance, and tend to imitate the behavior of the other, so that rams may fail to differentiate between them, treating all of these subordinates alike. A few are displaying the bizarre behavior (heretofore unreported) that GS calls "rump-rubbing," in which one male may rub his face against the hind end of another. In the vicinity of females, the male "kicks"—a loose twitch of the leg in her direction that appears to be a mounting preliminary and may also serve to display his handsome markings. Also, he thrusts his muzzle into her urine stream, as if to learn whether or not she is in estrus, and licks in agitation at his penis. But the blue sheep stops short of certain practices developed by the markhor of Pakistan and the wild goat (the ancestor of the domestic goat, ranging from Pakistan to Greece), both of which take their penises into their own mouths, urinate copiously, then spit on their own coats; the beard of the male goat is an adaptive character, a sort of urine sponge that perpetuates the fine funky smell for which the goats are known.

The itch of the rutting season has begun, and even the young animals play at butting and sparring, as if anxious not to miss the only lively time in the blue sheep's year. GS wonders at the scarcity of the young, concluding that a 50 percent mortality must occur in the first year, due as much to weakness or disease caused by poor range conditions as to predation by wolves and leopard. Perhaps one juvenile in three attains maturity, and this may suffice to sustain the herds, which must adjust numbers to the limited amount of habitat that remains snow-free all the year. This region of the Tibetan Plateau is a near desert of rock and barren slopes dominated by two thorn shrubs, Caragana and a bush honeysuckle, Lonicera; the blue sheep will eat small amounts of almost any growth, including the dry everlasting and the oily juniper, and the adaptations of the Caprini for hard, abrasive forage permit limited browsing of this thorny scrub as well. But excepting a few tufts among the thorns, almost all the native grasses that are its preferred food have been eradicated by the herds of yak and sheep and goats that are brought here from distant villages in summer, and the over-; grazing has led already to erosion.

From The Snow Leopard