THE BIG CAT QUEST

One woman's mission to see a rare snow leopard in Tajikistan's Pamir mountains - and meet the people protecting them

- ANTONIA BOLINGBROKE-KENT

IT FELT LIKE WE had driven off the end of the earth, our existence made inconsequential by the vastness of the surrounding mountains. On all sides rose the ramparts of the Southern Alichur Range, the sinking sun caught on their needle-like peaks. At 4,300m altitude and 30’c, the air felt like cut diamonds.

“Fresh snow leopard tracks!” exclaimed my guide, Mahan, kneeling at his spotting scope. A few hundred metres ahead of us a single set of tracks wound up a snowy slope. But it was too cold to stay here any longer. We had to turn back. The ghost cat had eluded me, yet again.

There are few mammals that capture our imagination more than Panthera uncia, the snow leopard. Listed as Vulnerable by the IUCN, fewer than 7,000 individuals remain in 12 countries across the high mountains of Asia. Of these, an estimated five per cent live in Tajikistan’s Pamir mountains. I’d come here on a quest to see a leopard, and to meet some of the people conserving these cats and their habitat.

A landlocked, mountainous country bordering China and Afghanistan, for decades Tajikistan lay at the eastern limit of the Soviet Union. But in 1991, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, the country slid into a five-year civil war that cost 100,000 lives and forced a million more from their homes. In its wake, the country’s rare wildlife was hunted to near extinction. In recent years, however, a network of grassroots initiatives has reversed this decline.