Snow leopard

They say every mountain has a ghost story. Someone that climbed that peak and never returned. With no trace of them going or coming back at all. Almost as if they never existed before. That was the same case with Mount Kamet. One of the tallest mountains in all of India. Even though it was first climbed in 1931 and there have been many people that have climbed the mountain ever since, There was one man that climbed the mountain about 7 years ago, he came back alive and then disappeared. A local myth says that this man saw something at the peak and could not bear the weight of returning to human society. What I always thought was, what could he have seen? Of this curiosity, I decided to scale the mountain.

Yet there was one problem, they say he was only able to witness this because he climbed the mountain alone. He was the only one to have done so, which is why no one has ever tried after him. Maybe then I started thinking that talking to the locals was not the best Idea I had that day. Yet, my curiosity was stuck. After a few weeks of finding and asking, I was able to meet the climber's family. What they told me was a completely different story. They told me that he would visit them once a week and give them loads of money and a few other valuable things. They told me that the rest of the village did not believe them, that they were now outcasts.

I went back to Delhi and got in touch with a company that would be able to train me for scaling this mountain. When I told them that I wanted to go up Kamet, their eyes opened wider, their eyebrows raised, and their nostrils flared. The guy at the office pushed his chair away from the table and looked at me as if I had just asked him for all of his life’s savings. Then two words came out of his mouth “Snow leopard” and I froze. Not because he said snow but because he said the leopard. He began telling me that a snow leopard has been on the loose in this region over the past 6 or 7 years. Which was the reason people stopped climbing the mountain alone and tourism in the region dropped. He told me very clearly not to climb the mountain. I refused.

So then there I was on my way back to Uttarakhand, barely prepared to climb thirty flights of stairs, trying to scale a mountain. But I started on the trail with a billion regrets and a voice inside my head constantly telling me to go back. I did not go back. I continued climbing up the mountain. At night the wind was colder than ice. And the minimal equipment I had was not enough to keep me warm. I decided that instead of shivering and waiting for morning, I should keep climbing. So, I did. In the darkness of the night, I thought of nothing better but to keep walking. I guess you would have realised by now that I don’t make the best decisions. Right then, in the night I heard a noise behind me. I looked back and nothing was there. Yet as soon as I turned back around, I saw these claws waiting to take out a piece of me.

There was something off though, they resembled the snow leopard but there was something so human about their movement. As I saw the face of the creature I realised, there was no leopard. But a man pretending to be a leopard. Not just any man, but the one that had been missing all these years. So, I said to him, before you kill me and take my money to your family, why did you do it? As his claws wound up to hit me harder, he said “Nobody came to help when I was climbing and the leopard came at me.”