Mar 7

Mar 7 The Green Panthers - Tom Vater

The Green Panthers by Tom Vater

Book excerpt

She needed to kill.

And soon.

The pink snow leopard was hungry. She’d been moving along the high valleys and the wide, ragged ridges of the Altai Mountains, unaware that she was passing between Russia, China, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan on her search for sustenance. Nor did she know that she was traversing the Saylyugem National Park, established to protect her and her kind. Even as she had no fixed route in mind, her mission was clear.

This morning, as the pale, grey sun crept over ridges that revealed themselves one after another with majestic coyness, she sensed something in the rarified air. It drifted in from far away, from a spot deeper in the national park and lower down too. Not an area she’d ever choose to pass through. Too warm. Too much exposure. She didn’t know this, but the principal reason why some four thousand snow leopards remained alive in Asia was their extraordinary caution. Distant sisters of the tiger, the big cats were considered part of the Panthera genus. Theirs was a solitary, remote existence. Snow leopards spent their lives keeping a low profile, rarely meeting one another, and staying as far away from humans as circumstances allowed.

But now she carried a secret. Soon she would no longer be solitary. Soon, Russia’s snow leopard population was going to expand significantly. She stuck her head into the warm wind that swept up the valley from where she’d sensed the promising scent. Too warm. Too much exposure at this time of year. But the last meal she’d had, a week earlier, a young, scrawny, injured ibex she’d chased into a ravine, was barely a memory. She sat for an hour or two, watching, listening, and sniffing for movement below. Vaguely satisfied that her senses failed to detect a threat lurking down-valley, she dropped off the ridge, through rocky boulders and fields of scree, in silence, barely visible. Had anyone been watching, she might have appeared momentarily as nothing more than a brilliant flash of the imagination. Instead, she was feeding a series of state-of-the-art camera traps that relayed her every move to the park’s headquarters and from there to two sets of plush offices in the City of London.

The world’s last pink Panthera uncia was about to become a celebrity. Of the very wrong kind.