The Snow Leopard: Peter Matthiessen

Product Information

Rationale for adopting community-based biodiversity protection and management models in snow leopard range countries I will say this—when I started the book, I wondered if I would continue. The start is too theoretical, too impersonal. I did not like the start. Don’t give up too soon!

P.S. There were two Snow Leopards born in the summer of 2015 at Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Several times now I have seen them, but I had waited to see them initially until I was done with this book. I traveled the country to see the Snow Leopard at home! Is that like the Wizard Oz: There’s no place like home? Schaller, G., J. Tserendeleg, G. Amarsanaa. 1994. Observations on snow leopards in Mongolia. Proc. Int. Snow Leopard Symposium, 7: 33-42. Ok, I admit after the first chapter I considered not carrying on reading. At this point around a third of the content was religious philosophy - which is not for me. However the third of the book that was the hiking expedition and the third that was about the flora and fauna was great, and I am glad I persisted. Due to their large paws and elongated hind legs, the ability of snow leopards to jump is highly developed, as well as their ability to climb. They prefer to rest upon elevated structures, especially when they are kept in captivity. The rarity of sightings of snow leopards in the wild suggests that they reduce their activity around areas where humans are present. ( Hemmer, 1972; Wolf and Ale, 2009) Matthiessen frequently digresses to remember his wife Deborah Love who had died of cancer prior to the adventure. [4] The book is, therefore, also a meditation upon death, suffering, loss, memory and healing. The memories of Deborah operate with a number of other recursive stylistic traits that play against the linear, outward progress of the journey logged through maps and dates. [5]

Become a Member

The snow leopards can be seen behind the wolverine enclosure on the way up to the viewing area at the top of the hill in the walk-around section. Threats and conservation

The writing is stunning. No wonder this won a 1979 National Book Award (in the short-lived “Contemporary Thought” category, which has since been replaced by a general nonfiction award). It’s a nature and travel writing classic. However, it took me nearly EIGHTEEN MONTHS to read, in all kinds of fits and starts, because I could rarely read more than part of one daily entry at a time. I struggle with travel narratives in general – perhaps I think it’s unfair to read them faster than the author lived through them? – but there’s also an aphoristic density to the book that requires unhurried, meditative engagement. Snow leopards are found in 12 countries in central Asia, from the Himalayas to the mountains of Siberia. Geraghty, V., J. Mooney, K. Pike. 1981. A study of parasitic infections in mammals and birds at the Dublin Zoological Gardens. Veterinary Research Communications, 5(1): 343-348. He read the book in sequence with the retraced journey. Did it feel strange to read about his father missing him as a boy in those exact landscapes?Hussain, S. 2003. The status of the snow leopard in Pakistan and its conflict with local farmers. Oryx, 37(1): 26-33. I started this book a few times in my twenties. It won the National Book Award in 1978, when I was first teaching, and I was not yet ready to read it. Or maybe, if I had gone “on the road” as Kerouac got a generation to do, one way or the other, I might have taken it with me then and actually read it. I tried on a few other occasions to get into it, and I couldn’t do it, for one reason or the other, but for some reason I always knew at some point it would be important for me to experience. Something like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, it was a book for a time, highly influential, but this book is in my opinion a much better and richer book. But even then, having slow-read it over the month of my trip, it has still taken me months to get to writing about it. I warn you, this could go on for a while. I’m mostly writing it for myself, but you are welcome to come along for my (reading) journey. Mentally, spiritually, it was perhaps more demanding. Talking to Alex, I mention how over the years that one or two people have told me how special the book has been to them, in helping them to understand or cope with death. In particular, my friend the writer Sonali Deraniyagala, who lost her whole family in the 2003 Sri Lankan tsunami, once told me how the book was just about the only thing she had ever known truly to comfort her. “It’s odd to say but I found that the book really helped with the actual physical pain,” she said. I wondered if Alex felt it to be primarily a book that encompassed grief. Subchapter 16.2: Argali Sheep (Ovis ammon) and Siberian Ibex (Capra sibirica) Trophy Hunting in Mongolia

Matthiessen’s book is part travelogue, part naturalist observations, and part coming to terms with loss. About a year after the death of his wife, Matthiessen travels along with a friend in search of a snow leopard, really in the search of big blue sheep. It’s much hiking and camping, and eating. I came to this book through Without Ever Reaching the Summit: A Journey which purports to follow in Matthiessen’s footsteps. My review for it quotes the author saying how little has changed in the 40+ years since the original journey but I realise now how untrue that statement is. An internet search finds a whole host of trekking companies offering guided walks through this region, following the trail of ‘The Snow Leopard’ in many cases. Where Matthiessen and George Schaller camped in often squalid conditions are now found hotels and tea houses catering for travellers. I even found videos on YouTube of mountain bikers travelling the route. It’s not surprising as there are few parts of the world that haven’t changed since the early 1970s. Whether these changes are for the better in every respect is another matter.

Let’s get social!

This was a donation to my Little Free Library Shed. It was also a winner of the 1979 National Book Award. I was attracted to the book cover, and the idea of it, that made me want to explore reading it. Fox, J. 1989. A review of the status and ecology of the snow leopard Panthera uncia. International Snow Leopard Trust, 1: 1-38. The third time he read his father’s words was nearly two years ago, when he was invited to retrace the journey to the crystal mountain in the company of his father’s original companion, George Schaller. This time, he says, “because [my father] had died and was gone I felt a greater imperative, if you will, to use the book as a way to more deeply understand him and his thinking, not only what that experience had been like for him, but also who he was in life”. Sometimes it's not till I finish a book that I realize how much I am in love with it. That's the case with this lovely travelogue, which smartly does not pretend to be anything that it is not. It's not given any frills or decoration, other than beautiful and inimitable descriptions of nature. It is a humble record of a man's journey through the Himalayas and his concurrent spiritual journey. To ask after the object of the journey is missing the point—and I hope this doesn't sound cheesy, as it does not come across cheesily at all in the book—the journey is the point. Subchapter 14.2: The Role of Village Reserves in Revitalizing the Natural Prey Base of the Snow Leopard

Chapter 20: Corporate Business and the Conservation of the Snow Leopard: Worlds That Need Not Collide There is also an eco-spiritual aspect to the book. The author is grieving the loss of his wife during this trip. We can feel this loss, and we are a part of his meditative process. This sometimes colors his observations. Up-front confession: My own interactions with Buddhism have been tangential and shallow, and I may be missing a lot. The sense I get (and to which this book contributes mightily) is that the emphasis this religion places on one's own acceptance, one's own enlightenment, and one's own self-knowledge doesn't really do diddly-squat to help your less-fortunate neighbor down the road. Mathiessen writes, quite movingly, of a child in India, dragging her twisted, crippled legs through the mud, and smiling up with the most beautiful face he's ever seen. While it's nice to be appreciated and memorialized in this way, perhaps studying medicine or public health instead of The Way would provide more tangible benefits to children like this. Similarly, the author's own children, shortly after the death of their mother, were left with another family for months while Mathiessen did, I suppose, what he considered more important than being there for them. Perhaps the argument is that, until you are at peace with yourself, you cannot really do much for others. But I don't buy that, and if there's the second half of the argument, then it wasn't made in this book. So I'm afraid that his experiences under the sacred Bodhi tree are somewhat wasted on me.The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no 'meaning,' they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day.” To Flower Children, become middle aged in their inevitable daily grind, he gave new hope in this book. Hope as the Tibetans of whom he treats here have in abundance that after endless Kalpas of Rebirth to a Life of Sorrow, complete enlightenment will at last be theirs! He recalls how “in the years since the publication of The Snow Leopard, many friends, and even a few strangers, have harshly criticised my father for leaving me behind for three months so soon after my mother’s death. I appreciate the solidarity, and don’t entirely disagree with the sentiment, as those months he was away were sometimes bewildering for me. But they also marked some of the wildest and most fun times of my life, it being the early 70s and all…”