29 July 2017, Dhalung rangeland, upper Mustang, Nepal
‘The gazelles must be resting now. I am going up again to get some more shots of them’, I told Prajwol and grabbed my camera, binoculars, GPS and compass.
‘I am too tired to climb again. And, it’s already 17:30’, he showed no interest of joining, leaving me to ascend alone.
We had spent half the day looking for Tibetan gazelles in the Plateau above our camp. I wanted to obtain close-up photographs of the beautiful small antelope because good photographs of the species from Nepal are almost non-existent. We encountered eight of them in three different occasions-once a lonely adult female, then two adult females and finally a small herd of five containing two adult females and three juveniles. However, very sharp eye sight and tremendous speed, their typical anti-predator instincts, prevented us from approaching them up close. When I was noting GPS location of the herd, Prajwol shouted that a juvenile ran next to me. I fired multiple shots with my camera on burst mode. That resulted a few good shots but the photographer in me still craved for better ones.
I met with a woolly hare on the way. Good shots of the species had already made into my camera; there was no point in wasting time. When the GPS indicated that I was very close to where the herd was during the day, a juvenile gazelle jumped in front and vanished from my sight in a blink of an eye. That very moment, a little up in the landscape, my eyes caught sight of an animal walking elegantly on a small ridge. I assumed it as a juvenile gazelle. A careful look suggested it to be otherwise. I clicked as many shots as I could before it disappeared behind the ridge. Oh my! An adult Eurasian lynx?
I hurried my steps towards the ridge to capture more photographs of the handsome cat. It reappeared on another ridge after a few minutes allowing me to take a few more shots. By the time I reached the ridge on which it was seen the first time, it had completely disappeared. The photographs in my camera were the only proofs that I was not dreaming.
Realizing that just a few minutes earlier, I was one on one with one of the least known wild felids of Nepal, I jumped as high as I could, punched my fists several times in air and shouted like a mad man. At 5023 masl, I was under the cloud of a very strange feeling.
The other day we had visitors from Choser village in our camp. They had shared the following incident:
‘Two villagers from Samdzong had killed a lynx near a monastery about 8-10 years ago. Two years later, both of them died, without any particular reason. We think the lynx was a God!’
Back at camp, I asked Ramu dai, our expedition cook, to fry some yak dry meat and also requested Lakpa baje, our mule keeper and local field guide, to pour in a cup of Chyang each for everyone.
‘What is the occasion?’ asked Prajwol.
‘I saw something special.’
‘A snow leopard?’ (Prajwol is familiar with my obsession towards the snow leopard).
‘Bigger than that. I saw the God!’
Prajwol checked the photo and contemplated, ‘Why did you not insist me to join?’
A few weeks later, back in Kathmandu, it got revealed that no one had ever photographed a lynx in its natural habitat in Nepal with a hand-held camera. The photograph I took that day became the first of its kind for Nepal.
