What Do We Hope to Find When We Look for a Snow Leopard?
Biologically speaking, the sperm whale belongs to the genus Physeter, to the family Physeteridae, and to that magnificent group of aquatic mammals properly called Cetacea. As a literary matter, however, it belongs, indisputably, to Herman Melville. Certain other authors of both fiction and nonfiction have achieved a feat like his, forging an alternative taxonomy whereby they become permanently associated with a particular creature. Thus it could be said that the mongoose belongs to Rudyard Kipling, the mockingbird to Harper Lee, the lobster to David Foster Wallace, the cockroach to Kafka, the spider to E. B. White, and the snake to whoever wrote Genesis. In this sense, the snow leopard, which clearly belongs to no one, belongs to Peter Matthiessen. Matthiessen, who died in 2014, was a man of many other associations as well: novelist, travel writer, environmentalist, co-founder of The Paris Review, Zen Buddhist, undercover agent for the C.I.A. But he sealed his connection to one of natures most elusive animals in 1978, with the publication of The Snow Leopard, which first appeared in part in this magazine and went on to win two National Book Awards, one for the now defunct category of contemporary thought, one for general nonfiction. Despite the books title, the snow leopard is almost entirely absent from its pages, faint and fleeting as a pawprint in the snow. Matthiessen dedicates roughly as many paragraphs to it as to the yeti, and of those two mysterious alpine animals he thinks he catches a glimpse of only the imaginary one. And yet The Snow Leopard manages to convey the impression of being subtly yet fundamentally about its stated subject matter, albeit in some chimeric waypart literal, part figurative, like a creature turning midway through into a thought. Even scholars writing about snow leopards routinely cite Matthiessens book, while general-interest authors, perhaps recognizing that a flag had been planted in particularly high and difficult terrain, have mostly looked elsewhere for their stories. But now comes the Parisian writer Sylvain Tesson with The Art of Patience, its title a necessary accommodation to an apparently unwelcome predecessor: in French, the language in which it was written, Tessons book, like Matthiessens, is simply named for the animal. The Art of Patience, which was ably translated by Frank Wynne, is not an homage to its precursor, to put it mildly. One understands why Tesson wants to put some distance between himself and Matthiessen, whose book looms over much of nature writing, enormous and immovable as Annapurna. Yet this new book echoes the earlier one in countless ways. Like Matthiessen, Tesson is facing the far side of his forties, feeling his age and his physical limitations. Like Matthiessen, he hopes his journey will help him settle into a new way of beingZen, in the original book; the more secular art of patience in this one. Like Matthiessen, he is a kind of Watson figure, sidekick throughout his adventure to a savvier character: in his case, Vincent Munier, a French wildlife photographer; for Matthiessen, George Schaller, one of the worlds preminent field biologists. Finally, Tessons interest in the snow leopard, like Matthiessens, is tangled up, in troubling ways, with grief and women. Even where these books diverge, the effect is less to set this new one apart than to create a study in contrasts. Within the field of nature writing, Matthiessen works primarily in the tradition of the spiritual pilgrim, while Tesson writes in the tradition of the disgruntled misanthrope. Together, they raise that age-old question of how we are supposed to relate to nature. Its easy to understand the appeal of the snow leopard. For one thing, even in photographs it is magnificent to behold: pale green of eye, pale gray of fur, dappled with dark rosettes like the risen ghost of a jaguar. Its muzzle is huge, its paws enormous, its tail XXXXL, equally useful for maintaining balance in steep terrain and wrapping around its body like a blanket to ward off the cold while nappingwhich it can well afford to do, since it is an unusually literal apex predator, unchallenged suzerain of the roof of the world, regnant since three million B.C. Its realm encompasses some of the most storied and least accessible terrain on earth, from the Hindu Kush to the Himalaya, from Siberia to Mongolia to Bhutan. For a certain type of person (and I am one of them), this combination of big cats and high mountains is thrilling, the animal and its context conspiring to suggest a kind of extreme, untouchable wildness. Further contributing to this mystique is the matter of scarcity: of all big cats, the snow leopard is one of the rarest. Perhaps four thousand adults remain, or perhaps two thousand; at all events, they are fiendishly difficult to spot. Photographs of tigers date back to at least 1891, but the earliest known photo of a snow leopard was taken in 1970, by George Schaller, Peter Matthiessens travelling companionat the time, one of only two Westerners to have laid eyes on the creature in the wild. Drawings of snow leopards, however, are ancient and appear all across the heraldic iconography of Central Asia, from the coat of arms of the Tatars to the official seal of the city of Samarqand. In some of these images, the beast is rendered with wings, which seems apt, considering that snow leopards routinely reach heights far above those customary for eagles and falcons. All of thisthe remoteness, the rarity, the altitude, the furtivenesspresents a problem for anyone hoping to encounter a snow leopard. Thats the kind of challenge that Matthiessen was not wired to resist. By the time he set off in search of the creature, he had already travelled extensively, to New Guinea, the Serengeti, the Bering Sea, Patagonia. And so, when Schaller invited him to tag along on a trip to a region of Nepal known as Inner Dolpo, deep within the Himalaya, in order to study the bharal sheep and possibly glimpse a snow leopard, Matthiessen jumped at the chance. The resulting book takes the form of a journal, beginning on September 28, 1973, and ending on December 1sta dicey time of year to trek the local mountains, dictated not by comfort or safety but by the mating season of the sheep. Together with Schaller and a group of Sherpas and porters, Matthiessen travels on foot some two hundred and fifty miles, and his book, accordingly, proceeds at the literary equivalent of a walking pace. Thats the right speed for registering ones surroundings, which is Matthiessens forte; he is a wonderful observer, convincing without being showy, and at its best his prose has the documentary force of early film footage. He takes note of a hawk on a cliff, how it hunches while the sun goes down, nape feathers lifting in the wind; he watches on a cloudy day as a pine forest drifts by in breaths of mist. Some of his most striking revelations are the smallest ones. Pausing to admire a lizard basking on a rock fifteen thousand feet in the air in mid-November, he writes that, for the first time in my life, I apprehended the pure heat of our starhow searingly hot the sun must burn for its light to pass through ninety-three million miles of bitter cold yet still suffice to warm the two creatures sharing that mountainside. But Matthiessen is after deeper insights than that on his journey. One night, he meets a biologist who asks him why he is traversing such inhospitable terrain if he has no work to do in the region. I shrugged, uncomfortable, Matthiessen writes:  Facebook  Twitter  Email  Shopping Cartoon by Roz Chast