Maybe if we stared at it hard enough it would become a snow-leopard. About the right size - two or three foot high - definitely the right location, Tibet, and certainly some kind of big cat. When you parted the ragged fur, you saw how it died. There was a scorched bullet-hole in the chest, the ragged edges pulled together for decency or disguise. A tell-tale wisp poked through . . .
In one sense we wanted it to be a snow-leopard; at least we'd have seen one. At the same time, we hoped not, because there'd be one less, the last one maybe, in the wild.
You had to laugh though . . . We'd all read Matthiessen's masterpiece, the quest for the mystic spirit of the Himalaya embodied in the snow-leopard. He hadn't actually found one, he'd settled for blue sheep; in a way, that was the point of the book.
You couldn't fail to be inspired by Matthiessen. In the mornings, leaving a camp in the Tibetan uplands, we'd move like hunters or naturalists, scouting the snow for spoor. Sometimes we'd find springing prints taut with the rhythm of distance, and the Sherpas would nod sagely, and say, yes, the snow-leopard had passed this way in the night. Humouring us. If we got too excited, they'd laugh and say he was a long way gone by now.
Still, in spite of the mystery, the mysticism, you had to laugh at this one - to the irritation of its Tibetan keepers.
Their leopard was a sad affair. The matted fur was too dirty to show a trace of the delicate pinkish markings that define the creature. He was stiff and humped and spraddled, his limbs stuck out at odd angles. They had stood him up for show, discreetly propped against a bag of sand, because one leg was too short for balance.
The young hunters were a tough-looking bunch, long black hair twisted in greasy coils, tied up on the head with strips of red cloth. The features had the oily, slightly thickened cast of the uplands. Their quick eyes were practised in pride and anger. They wore earrings and amulets of chunky turquoise with red beads and bunches of threaded coins. One wore an Irish 50p.
The rest of their antiquities were about as old.
They insisted that theirs was a snow-leopard, the real thing; they demanded money for photographs. Adept at the internecine codes, our Sherpas had disappeared. (Everyone has a right to share the tourists.) We examined the snow-leopard's head. It wasn't long dead. There were traces of dried blood on the facial fur, where it had coughed up the last of its existence. The eyes were missing and strands of hay poked through the eye-holes; the creature had been tightly stuffed with dried grass. You could see it wisping through the bullet-hole.
But it was the tufted hairs on the tips of the ears - or were those the eyebrows? they seemed to have merged - that gave the game away. This was never a snow-leopard. It was nothing more than a lynx. A mere lynx! Oddly, when we dismissed the creature as a sham, its keepers lost interest in it too. It was knocked over, shoved out of the way, while they tried to sell their turquoise.
Something about that lynx reminded me of the alpine eagle that haunted us for years. High above the resort of Chamonix-les-Alpes, there is a mountain railway-station at Montenvers, the end of the line, looking out upon the famous Mer de Glace, a river of ice curving down from the flanks of Mont Blanc. Outdoor cafes huddle on a terrace, a lift descends to an ice-cave.
There used to be an "Alpine Zoo" behind the station, for the entertainment of the foolish, a collection of miserable cages and wire enclosures you could smell a mile away. As long ago as the 1970s I remember a campaign to have it shut. In one of the cages, on a wooden perch, stood a dark and motionless lump, like a sack of feathers that had been emptied out and still retained the shape. If you approached the wire, a slate-coloured beak and a scaly eye fell open in succession. Neither anger nor fear, just the weariness of existence.
We had a plan to cut the wire and free the eagle of the Alps . . . The scheme was quietly dropped when we realised it had forgotten how to fly.
Imagine it freed, in the icy dark, sheltering in the ruins of its wings. The myth of the leopard comes upon it, as he prowls the glaciers of the world. The leopard spares the raptor, not from pity, but disdain. The eagle dies of shame.
There was another bird that flew into my memory . . . a noisy jay, the size and effrontery of a magpie, with a cocky little head-crest, a screech-and-rattle of a call. I was scrambling in dusty American terrain, over rocks, through manzanita brush.
The jay would dart ahead, hurl abuse at something in its path, dash back, fluttering in a frenzy, pointing its wings like a cartoon-parrot; again and again it repeated the process, presenting its case, darting back to the fray. I caught up on open ground. The jay was abusing a rattlesnake, beating the air about its head, dashing back to get my opinion, it seemed, then off again to belabour the snake which had nothing on its mind except escape.
That state (California) is chock-full of what was once wildlife . . .
I sat transfixed at a picnic-table when a mother-bear and two cubs came marauding. She shambled in at a loping run, cubs bouncing behind her. She was dark, shaggy brown, a belligerent cut to her, smaller than you'd expect - about the size of a big calf. Fortunately, a family was eating nearby and I was ignored. I was privileged to see a brown bear scattering Sugar Puffs on the ground, cubs snuffling them up with appreciation. Family values, but no table-manners.
When hikers first began to lose food to the brown bear, they developed strategies. They'd climb a tree and hang their food from a branch. But the bear is a better climber. The humans chose thinner trees, saplings, threw a rope over a high branch, hauled up the food. The bear gnawed through the rope. If it was in a particular hurry, it knocked the tree over. For a while, food was hung way out on the thinnest branch of a stout tree. The bears sent up a cub, or else they inched out along the branch until it dipped within reach of an accessory. Failing that, they snapped it off and fell to the ground with the loot.
Food-lockers with every conceivable kind of catch were devised for camp-sites: bears solved them all. At present, a cunning spring-loaded bolt and clip is confusing everyone - bears and humans alike. It's only a matter of time.
When it comes to food in cars, the bear is brisk. It hooks the top of a door out of the frame and folds it down till it resembles the ring-pull on a can. On lesser cars, the roof is simply ripped off with a claw, the way you'd open an unsophisticated tin.
You might be tempted to take your food inside the tent for protection. The bear doesn't like that, especially if you're in there too. The bear sees that as greed on your part, and it won't stand for it. If you're lucky, you'll have a knife to hand and you'll slash your way through the back of the tent faster than the bear can slash the front. The bear doesn't bother with zips at times like that: why should you?
When it comes to wildlife, the most familiar creatures can be the strangest - which is wonderfully upsetting . . .
Because I'd never seen a snow-leopard, or even a leopard, and the only really big cats I'd seen were on Clapham Common when a circus parked its lorries and you could see five tigers slotted lengthwise in a cage so tightly crowded that a tigress needing to change direction had to get her forepaws up on her neighbour's back and shuffle along his spine till she could drop into position - because of all that, I was full of anticipation as we drove our jeep into a Safari-Park in Kenya, where there are lions, tigers, cheetah. We had to face the camera south all the time - otherwise we'd have the high-rise urban horizon of Nairobi all across the lens. But we were dead keen. We'd filmed dogs and cats and sheep; we'd a lot of experience with cows of all kinds, and it was time to move up the scale.
Advisers had pumped us with information about the vantage-points and killing-sites in Nairobi's Safari Park. They knew by our equipment that we wanted blood and gristle and dripping fangs. Near the east gate, at sunrise, they said you were as good as guaranteed a kill by a lion; at sunset by the west gate, a cheetah would surely perform a kill. Kills happened, it seemed, with great frequency - especially if there was a camera about. It was a poor crew that wouldn't see a lion kill something, at the very least an Australian in baggy shorts.
All day long we drove around the park pursuing bored giraffes. A zebra wore a set of claw-marks scored across its rump where a lion had lost its grip and nearly ripped the pyjamas off. But we didn't see a single kill of any kind. Until we found the heron.
We'd missed the sunset, missed all the gates, we were bumbling around in the gloom searching for an exit before night-fall when the killing-hours begin in earnest. Tall, thin, familiar, with its grey plumage and its stoop, the heron stood in the African grass on its spindly legs, watching us approach. In the midst of alien life-forms we knew this very bird, we recognised it. Not just the species. This was the heron from the pond in the Devil's Glen in Wicklow. We'd seen it so often at home we were practically friends. We lurched to a halt and saluted. The heron lowered its beaky head, bent its long neck, shuffled from side to side. An unkind eye can see the pterodactyl hidden in a heron's plumage, but we weren't looking. As we spoke, enquiring about its long flight, it became more disturbed and shifty.
Without warning, the long neck shot sideways, a stabbing motion in the grass. The beak rose, facing us. Impaled upon it was a large, live rat. The heron allowed no time for existential queries; it whipped its neck, detached the rodent, caught and swallowed it in mid-air. Dumbstruck, white-faced, we watched from the safety of our jeep as the homely heron from the Devil's Glen backed away, a lump squirming downwards in its long reptilian throat. Thin, indignant squeals still sounded from within - echoes of an eerie error.
Dermot Somers's two-part documentary Siberia - the journey north was made by Crossing The Line Films. Part 2: Summer will be shown on TG4 on January 2nd