The Snow Leopard

In the fall of 1973 Peter Matthiessen set out on a 250 mile walk into Dolpo, the Tibetan plateau country of northwest Nepal, with the field biologist George Schaller, who appears throughout the book as GS. Schaller was going to Shey Gompa to watch Himalayan blue sheep, the bharal, and compare their mating behavior with that of sheep in the United States. Matthiessen went to see the Crystal Monastery and its lama, to look for a snow leopard, and because he did not know what else to do with his grief. He and his wife Deborah Love had practiced Zen together, and she had died of cancer in New York in January 1972.

The book is the journal he kept walking in and walking out, and it moves at the speed of a man on foot at altitude: passes in blizzard, blisters, porters who bargain and disappear, days of sitting on cold scree while GS glasses the slopes for sheep. The animal in the title governs everything and almost never appears. Westerners had glimpsed a snow leopard in Nepal only twice in the previous twenty five years, and Schaller was one of the two, so what a reader mostly gets is the waiting, and what waiting does to a man who came for consolation.

The other half of the book turns inward, to the marriage, to the deep commitment he and Deborah reached shortly before her diagnosis, and to the Heart Sutra he keeps returning to on the climb. Late in the walk he writes that the hard rocks instruct his bones in what his brain could never grasp, that form is emptiness and emptiness is form. It suits readers who want their nature writing exact and their travel books slow, and who can accept a search that answers a different question than the one it asked.