The Art of Patience - Seeking the snow leopard ...

 Preface

I had met him one Easter day, at a screening of his film about the Abyssinian wolf. He had spoken to me about the elusiveness of animals and of the supreme virtue: patience. He had told me about his life as a wildlife photographer, and explained the technique of lying in wait. It was a delicate and rarefied art that involved hiding in the wild and waiting for an animal that could not be guaranteed to appear. There was a strong chance of coming away empty-handed. This acceptance of uncertainty seemed to me to be very noble—and by the same token anti-modern.

Could I, who loved to run like the wind over lowlands and highlands, manage to spend hours, silent and utterly still?

Lying among the nettles, I obeyed Munier’s precepts: not a movement, not a sound. I could breathe; this was the only vulgar reflex permitted. In cities, I had grown accustomed to prattling about anything and everything. The most difficult thing was saying nothing. Cigars were prohibited. “We’ll smoke later, down by the river,” Munier had said, “it will be night and fog!” The prospect of lighting a Havana on the banks of the Moselle made it easier to endure the position of prostrate watcher.

Life was exploding. The birds in the trees streaked the night sky, they did not shatter the magic of the place, did not disturb the order of things, they belonged to this world. This was beauty. A hundred meters away, the river flowed. Swarms of dragonflies hovered over the surface, predatory. On the western bank, a hobby falcon was diving. Its flight was hieratic, precise, deadly—a Stuka.

This was not the time to allow myself to be distracted: two adult badgers were emerging from the sett.

Until it grew dark, all was a mixture of grace, of drollery, of authority. Would the badgers give a signal? Four heads appeared, and the shadows darted from the tunnels. The twilight games had begun. We were posted ten meters away, and the animals were oblivious to our presence. The badger cubs tussled, scrabbled up the embankment, rolled into the ditch, nipped at each other’s necks and got a clout from an adult, determined to restore a semblance of order to the night circus. The black pelts daubed with three stripes of ivory would disappear into the undergrowth only to reappear further on. The animals were preparing to forage in the fields and on the riverbanks. They were warming up for the night ahead.

From time to time, one of the badgers would wander close to our hide, snuffling the ground with its long snout, then turning to face us. The dark bands set with coal-black eyes sketched out melancholy smears. They were still on the move; we could make out the powerful plantigrade paws turned inward. In the French clay, their claws left small bear-like tracks that a certain lumbering race of humans, in its wisdom, identified as the tracks of “vermin.”

It was the first time I had ever been so still, hoping for an encounter. I scarcely recognized myself. Until now, from the Yakutia to Seine-et-Oise, I had run, adhering to three principles:

The unexpected does not pay house calls, it must be sought out everywhere. 

Movement enhances inspiration. 

Boredom runs less swiftly than a man in a hurry. 

In short, I convinced myself that there was a link between distance and the importance of an event. I thought of stillness as a dress rehearsal for death. In deference to my mother, resting in the family tomb on the banks of the Seine, I roved about frenetically—the mountains on Saturday, the seaside on Sunday—without paying attention to what was going on around me. How do journeys spanning thousands of kilometers lead one day to lying in the tall grass with your chin propped on the edge of a ditch?

Next to me, Vincent Munier was taking photographs of the badgers. The mass of muscle beneath his camouflage clothes blended into the vegetation, but his profile was still visible in the half-light. His face, all sharp edges and long ridges, seemed to be sculpted for issuing orders; he had a nose that Asians mocked, a carved chin and soft eyes. A gentle giant.

He had talked to me about his childhood, his father taking him to a hide beneath a spruce tree to witness the flight of the king—the capercaillie; the father teaching the son the promise of silence; the son discovering the rewards of nights spent lying on the frozen ground; the father explaining that the appearance of an animal is the greatest gift life can give to those who love it; the son setting up his own hides, discovering the secrets of the world unaided, learning to frame a nighthawk taking wing; the father discovering the son’s artistic photographs. Munier, lying next to me, had been born in the mists of the Vosges. He had become the greatest wildlife photographer of his time. His peerless photographs of wolves, bears and cranes were sold in New York galleries.

“Tesson, I’m taking you to the forest to see badgers,” he had said to me, and I had accepted, because no one refuses an invitation from an artist in his studio. He did not know that Tesson meant “badger” in Old French. The word is still common in the vernacular of western France and Picardy. It originated as a deformation of the Greek taxis, from which we get the words “taxonomy,” the science of classifying animals, and “taxidermy,” the art of stuffing animals (since man likes to skin the things he has just named). On the topographical maps of France, there are tessonières, the name given to the bucolic sites of mass culls. For, in the countryside, the badger was despised and ruthlessly destroyed. It was accused of digging up the soil, of damaging hedges. It was smoked out, it was killed. Did the badger deserve the relentless fury of men? It was a secretive animal, creature of night and solitude. It favored an inconspicuous life, ruled over the shadows, did not suffer visitors. It knew tranquility was something to be defended. It left its sett at night and returned at dawn. How could man tolerate the existence of a totem to discretion, making a virtue of distance and an honor of silence? Zoologists described the badger as “monogamous and sedentary.” If etymology connected me to the animal, I did not conform to its nature.

•   •   •Night fell, the animals disappeared into the undergrowth, there was a general rustling. Munier must have noticed my joy. I considered these few hours as one of the best nights of my life. I had just encountered a clan of living creatures that was utterly sovereign. They did not struggle to escape their condition. We headed back to the road via the riverbank. In my pocket, the cigars were crushed.

“There’s an animal in Tibet that I’ve been tracking for six years,” said Munier. “It lives up in the high plateaus. You can spend a long time in a hide just to catch a glimpse of one. I’m going back this winter; come with me.”

“What is it?”

“The snow leopard,” he said.

“I thought it had disappeared,” I said.

“That’s what it wants you to think.”

*

In the distance beyond the pass, wolves howled at the setting sun.

“They’re singing,” Munier insisted. “There are at least eight of them.”

How could he possibly know? I could hear only a lone lament. Munier gave a howl. Ten minutes later, a wolf answered. So began what I think of as the most beautiful conversations between living creatures certain never to meet. “Why did we drift apart?” Munier was howling. “What do you want from me?” replied the wolf.

Munier would sing. A wolf would respond. Munier would fall silent, the wolf would start again. Then, suddenly, one of the wolves appeared on the highest pass. Munier sang a last lament and the wolf dashed down the slope heading in our direction. Having been weaned on medieval literature—the fables of the Beast of Gévaudan, the Arthurian cycle—I was not exactly thrilled to see a wolf hurtling toward us. I reassured myself by glancing at Munier, who looked about as worried as an Air France flight attendant in a pocket of turbulence.

“He’ll stop dead before he gets to us,” he whispered a moment before the wolf froze some fifty meters away.

It turned aside and padded in a wide circle, its muzzle turned toward us, unsettling the yaks. The herd moved further up the slopes, alarmed by the presence of the wolf. The tragedy of life in the herd: never a moment’s peace. The wolf disappeared; we scanned the valley, the yaks had now reached the crest, night was drawing in; we did not see the wolf again, it had melted away.

*

Munier told me about the first photograph he ever took, at the age of twelve: a roe deer in the Vosges. “Oh! nobility! Oh! true and simple beauty!” was the prayer offered by the young Ernest Renan as he surveyed the ruins of Athens. For Munier, that first encounter was his night spent on the Acropolis.

“That day, I shaped my destiny: to see animals. To wait for them.”

Since that night, he had spent more time crouching behind bushes than sitting at school desks. His father did not force him. He never passed his baccalauréat, and earned a living working on building sites until his work as a photographer was recognized.

Scientists were scornful. Munier approached nature as an artist. His work was of little interest to statisticians, the servants of the number. I had met my fair share of number crunchers. They ringed hummingbirds and disemboweled seagulls to take samples of bile. The numbers added up. Where was the poetry? Nowhere. Did their work contribute to the sum of knowledge? Not necessarily. Science masked its limitations behind petabytes of digital data. The process of tallying the world claimed to advance science. It was pretentious.

Munier, for his part, paid tribute only to beauty. He celebrated the grace of the wolf, the elegance of the crane, the perfection of the bear. His photographs belong to art, not to mathematics.

“Your detractors would rather model the digestive system of a tiger than own a Delacroix,” I told him. In the late nineteenth century, Eugène Labiche foresaw the absurdity of the age of science: “Statistics, Madame, is a modern positive science. It shines a light on the most impenetrable facts. Recently, for example, thanks to laborious research, we have managed to calculate the exact number of widows who crossed the Pont-Neuf in the year 1860.”

“A yak is a lord,” replied Munier. “What do I care whether he’s ruminated twelve times this morning!”

Munier constantly seemed to be nurturing a melancholy. He never raised his voice for fear of startling the snowfinches.

*

Mediocrity

Another morning spent on the dusty slopes. The sixth. This sand had once been a mountain that was molded by rivers. These stones held secrets that stretched back. The air throttled all movement. The sky was steel blue as an anvil. Frost lay like lace over the sand. A Tibetan gazelle stood, eating snow, with delicate movements.

Suddenly, a wild donkey—a kiang—appeared. The animal stopped, warily. Munier pressed an eye to the telescopic sight. It looked almost as though he were hunting. Neither Munier nor I have the heart of a killer. Why destroy an animal more powerful and better adapted than oneself? The hunter kills twice. He kills a living creature, and, in himself, he kills the spite he feels at being less powerful than the wolf, less agile than the antelope. Bang! the shot rings out. “At last,” says the hunter’s wife.

Pity the poor hunter; it is unfair to be pot-bellied when you are surrounded by creatures as taut as a drawn bow.

The wild donkey did not leave. Had we not seen it arrive, we could have mistaken it for a statue carved from sand.

We were looking down on the bed of the frozen river, some five kilometers from our camp, and I was talking about a letter I had received some years earlier from Monsieur de B—feathered hat and velvet tailcoat—the president of the French Federation of Huntsmen, in response to an article I had written lambasting hunters. In it, he accused me of being a moccasin-wearing urbanite with no sense of tragedy, someone who strolled through gardens, maudlin about field mice and terrified by the clack of a breechblock. A pansy, I guess. As I read the letter, having just arrived back from a trek in the mountains of Afghanistan, my first thought was that it was a pity that the word “hunter” lumped together men who eviscerated woolly mammoths with spears and a gentleman with a double chin who fired grapeshot at obese pheasants between the cognac and the camembert. Using the same word to define contradictory concepts does nothing to alleviate the suffering of the world.

From The Art of Patience - Seeking the snow leopard 

by Sylvian Tesson