HIDE & SEEK

Concealed among India’s high peaks is a rare and secretive creature: the Himalayan brown bear. Puskar Basu embarks on a quest to track down this little-known and much maligned mammal.

- PUSKAR BASU

IT’S 13TH APRIL 2021, OUR seventh day of clambering up rocky ridges in the bone-numbing cold. A curtain of snow is engulfing us, restricting our visibility substantially. I desperately continue to scan the slope ahead of me, but I’m shivering and increasingly distracted by my now painfully numb fingers.

This unforgiving landscape lies on the outskirts of Drass, a small town nestling at 3,300m in the Kargil district of Ladakh. Such an elevation, at which temperatures plummet to -20°C in winter, bestows on Drass the dubious honor of being both the coldest place in India and the second-coldest inhabited place on Earth. But as winter eases into spring, the region is breathtakingly beautiful. Mountain streams collect into the impossibly turquoise waters of the Drass River, which flows through a valley draped in the magenta hues of blooming apricot trees, all against a backdrop of high peaks still locked in ice.

I’ve come to this remote settlement to fulfil a lifelong quest to photograph the largest land carnivore on the subcontinent, but the blizzard is making that possibility more remote by the second. Suddenly, Ahmad Ali, my companion and guide, gestures urgently towards a cluster of boulders partially obscured by snow. I have no idea what he has seen. Then, one of the boulders moves, stands and looks straight in our direction.