OUT OF EDEN WALK

Not only is it rare . . . but it is wary and elusive to a magical degree, and so well camouflaged in the places it chooses to lie that one can stare straight at it from yards away and fail to see it.

— Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

We are walking the length of the Wakhan Corridor in northern Afghanistan. We see villagers planting trees.

Why are they planting trees?

Because a tree offers shade, fodder, cooking fuel, building materials, and, perhaps, fruit. Because a tree always pleases the eye. Because trees are life. There have been few trees for a very long time in the Wakhan Corridor, a remote strip of Afghanistan that stretches for some 170 miles through the Karakoram to the wild frontier of western China. Why? First, the landscape here is extremely high, rocky, and mostly dry: a cold alpine desert. Second, the main valley of the Wakhan Corridor has been inhabited for thousands of years—it was an artery of the Silk Road—and its sparse tree cover was cut long ago. But today: Entire forests of saplings are sprouting up.

“Hundreds of thousands of willows, poplars, and sea buckthorn trees have been planted in recent years,” says Inayat Ali, my walking partner through the Wakhan region. Ali is a latter-day version of Johnny Appleseed. He works for the Rupani Foundation, a philanthropy that measures its success, and the well-being of the local farmers known as Wakhi, in the abundance of tree leaves—in chlorophyll. “Last year we planted 5,000 fruit trees alone,” Ali says. “By next year we hope to reach 25,000.”

These young orchards, Ali adds, offer many of the impoverished residents of the Wakhan their first taste of fresh apples, cherries, and apricots. And it is true. We walk through stonewalled villages on narrow lanes built only for foot traffic, and the people bring out their harvests to share with us. This includes novel vegetables such as onions and tomatoes. A woman farmer who grew up on a diet of bread and tea says she sampled her first bite of squash only two years ago. Another reason for this small agricultural revolution: climate change. The river valleys in the Wakhan are warming. The glaciers are melting. Apricot trees that used to blossom in May now do so in March.

This is the realm of humans.

Far above the greening, medieval valleys of the Wakhan soars the wild domain of Panthera uncia, the snow leopard.

Snow leopards are high altitude predators. They are relics of the ice ages, adapted to extreme cold, to blizzards and vertical slopes, and are rarely seen below 6,000 feet. Their pelts are smoky white with ashy rosettes. Their eyes, sliced by vertical feline pupils, are the color of hoar frost. Half of their six-foot-long bodies consists of a magnificent tail: a thick, furry balancing rod for a cat that can leap 30 feet through the air.

As few as 2,700 adult snow leopards now remain in the world, biologists say, and they are sprinkled thinly across a dozen mountainous nations in Central Asia. The animals are so secretive, so well camouflaged, and so incredibly difficult to observe, that 25 years ago almost nothing was known of their ecology. But recent intensive field studies have begun to unveil the cats’ behavior, and this has helped mobilize better conservation efforts. The International Union for Conservation of Nature, a global arbiter of threats to wildlife, has downgraded the snow leopards’ status from endangered to vulnerable.

“The local communities have agreed to stop hunting them,” says Ali Madad Rajabi, an Afghan veterinarian with the Wildlife Conservation Society of New York, or WCS, which maintains a field office in the Wakhan. “The main problem now is the security forces. They have the guns. We are trying to raise their awareness.”

I recall my last exposure to Afghan wildlife, years ago. Gunmen aboard a pickup truck I was riding in opened up with their AK-47s at a distant space that once may or may not have been occupied by a wolf. They never stopped the truck.

Rajabi and his WCS colleagues are assisting the Afghan government in protecting the war-bruised country’s newest and largest nature reserve, the sprawling and virtually roadless Wakhan National Park. At 4,200 square miles, the preserve is 25 percent bigger than Yellowstone and is one of Central Asia’s last strongholds not only for rare snow leopards but also for bears, ibexes, Marco Polo sheep, urials, wolves, stone martins, golden eagles, marmots, and many other wild creatures. The park is a vast time capsule, a natural treasure safeguarded by the current generation of Afghans for a future not plagued by violence and war. Because of wartime insecurity and general inaccessibility, it now receives barely 200 visitors a year.

Between 100 and 150 snow leopards are believed to prowl the Wakhan.

Rajabi's team invites me to visit their leopard trapping camp high above the village of Qal-e-Panj, at the foot of the receding Sher Khan Glacier. There, the biologists are attempting to fit captured leopards with GPS tracking collars to better understand the animals’ ranges.

I hike up to the tents with David Bradfield, a rangy South African wildlife expert who directs the organization’s conservation programs in the Wakhan. An old bullet scar pocks Bradfield’s leg. He was shot while conducting anti-poaching patrols at an elephant reserve in Mozambique. He has another hole in his torso from being gored by a rhinoceros in South Africa. The rhino—a pet from a nearby game farm, and dangerously habituated to humans—was ramming Bradfield’s parked car outside his home. Bradfield sprinted out to shoo it away. The rhino charged, puncturing him with its horn, and tossed him skyward like a rag doll.

“I remember being lifted in the air and looking down at the car, and the car looked very tiny, like a matchbox,” he says. The same rhino later charged some tourists. It had to be destroyed, a denouement Bradfield still regrets.

The biologists’ camp huddles in the rocky, 13,000-foot bottom of a U-shaped valley where sheets of late afternoon light—honey yellow, magentas bright as the core of a peach, aquamarines—burn out the eyeballs. Bradfield and his colleagues set up spotting scopes. Within minutes they locate snow leopard prey: a herd of ibex, pony-size antelope with long ribbed horns, grazing on an impossibly steep rock face. The animals hold an entire mountainside together, concentrating its massive presence into pinpoints, distilling its hues within their shining brown hides. High up along the leopard trails, park rangers have hidden snares with radio alarms that beep at the base camp when triggered. For demonstration purposes a ranger named Ayan Beg Pamiri pretends to be a leopard. He walks on all fours into a trap. It whips shut in cloud of dust.

I sleep in one of the tents. A heavy blanket is rolled into a corner. This is meant to be tossed over a darted cat.

For all their grace and power, snow leopards are a relatively small feline, rarely weighing more than a hundred pounds. They are surprisingly vulnerable to humans. Tanya Rosen, with the conservation group Panthera, says that across the Afghanistan border in Tajikistan, snow leopards have been cornered while attacking flocks of domestic animals and are simply hammered to death by shepherds with whatever tools lie at hand.

“The leopards fixate on killing the sheep and on nothing else,” Rosen says. “You can literally walk up behind one and whack it with a shovel.”

Dawn fires the scientists’ camp.

These men have been trying to trap a snow leopard in Afghanistan’s high Wakhan for 20 straight days. Over five years they have managed to capture and release only four of the supremely cautious predators. Once again the beeping of the snares’ radio signals is steady: There are no leopards in the traps.

“If the snow leopard should manifest itself, then I am ready to see the snow leopard,” writes Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard, the most famous book ever written about the quest for the furtive animal, and oneself. “If not, then somehow (and I don’t understand this instinct, even now) I am not ready to perceive it . . .”

I hopscotch down the glacial moraine back to the land of people. I will never see a snow leopard. But a snow leopard has possibly seen me. I imagine it perched up on a ridge where the sky is acutest at its vanishing. It peers down with perfect equanimity on a human world encroaching, in a rising sea of trees, on its cloud-white mountain islands. In this way I suppose the entire Karakoram of Afghanistan is like a snow leopard:

Peak after unclimbed peak, each glazed with snow, each disappearing behind another, pales in serried ranks before me to the far edges of the visible Earth. I can marvel that such a majestic wilderness still exists in our time on the planet. But I also know, deep down, that somehow I am not really seeing the Karakoram at all. The tableau shining before my eyes is far too big for my puny heart and mind to ensnare, to apprehend. And the mountains escape me even as I step through them, day after golden autumn day.