Howling skies, empty spaces

by George Schaller

A western biologist journeys into a bleak land where humankind has barely intruded and animals live as if becalmed in time and space

FOR NEARLY A CENTURY, the vast and mysterious steppes of northern Tibet, known as the Chang Tang, were closed to Westerners. Then, in 1988, American biologist George Schaller began to collaborate with the Chinese government in studying wildlife there. Schaller has since returned annually. In the process, he helped to establish the Chang Tang Nature Reserve, one of the world's most significant wildlife refuges. The following account--from one of Schaller's early journeys into the bleak landscape just across the Tibet border in Xinjiang, China--is condensed from a chapter in his just-released book Tibet's Hidden Wilderness (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1997).

The kneeling Bactrian camels groaned and squeaked as Abdullah and Kurban lashed tents, bedrolls, boxes, buckets, a dead sheep, sacks of maize and other items onto their backs. I climbed up on a camel and settled on a folded blanket between his humps. A violent lurch threw me forward as he rose on his hindlegs, and just as abruptly I was propelled backward, barely keeping my seat, as he heaved up on his forelegs.

Our camels set off into the morning frost, up the Kokungu Valley in Xinjiang, looking like an ancient trading caravan. Each camel had a stick through its nasal septum like a miniature harpoon, and it was tied to the pack saddle of the animal in front. If a camel failed to keep pace, its nose received a painful tug.

Traveling in two sections, one with six camels and the other with ten, we had started at the village of Tula, where the Kunlun Shan (shan means "mountain" in Chinese) forks, the Arjin Shan following the Tibetan Plateau's rim and the Kunlun Shan continuing to the southeast. There were eleven of us--four members of the Uygur minority people from Tula and one from the Xinjiang Forest Bureau, four Chinese, my son Mark and myself.

I had asked Tochti, our caravan leader, a dour, chunky Uygur with a limp, why we needed 16 camels for a three-week trip, and he answered that there was little to eat for the animals on the plateau and that we needed extra ones to carry maize for them. I saw what he meant as we crossed the Kunlun Shan into uninhabited terrain. It was an utterly tired and tan wasteland, so desolate that even birds avoided it.

We rode in silence. There was only the wind, the soft shuffle of camel footpads on sand and the tinkle of a bell. The last camel wears a bell, its ring signaling to the person on the lead camel that all is well, that no animals have detached themselves.

On my high perch I was free to look around, almost free of the Earth, seeing the landscape as might a low-flying bird. The terrain ahead leveled, and we broke out of the mountains and onto the plateau. Ahead were alkali flats and low hills rolling south into the depths of the Chang Tang. Six chiru (Tibetan antelope) fled, pale ephemeral creatures afloat in heat waves.

This is the way to travel, not encased in a vehicle, but exposed to the elements, living the landscape slowly. A biologist's curiosity had prompted this journey, but it also re-created a world when explorers headed into the unknown beyond the security of their culture, solely responsible for their own lives, and I found atavistic pleasure in this personal engagement with the past.

Nikolai Przewalski and Pyotr Kozlov with their band of armed Cossacks had crisscrossed this region just over a hundred years before. Prince Henry of Orleans and Gabriel Bonvalot had headed south from here in 1889, the first Westerners to cross the Chang Tang in that direction. Sven Hedin came this way in 1891, Jules Dutreuil de Rhins and Fernand Grenard in 1893 (de Rhins was killed by Tibetans on that trip), and the Englishman St. George Littledale with a caravan that included his wife and terrier in 1895. All entered through Tibet's back door, from Xinjiang, starting as we did at the edge of the fierce desert called Taklimakan, a Turkic word meaning "enter and you will not come out." Like us, they crossed the Arjin Shan and Kunlun Shan and used Muztag, a 6,972-meter (22,874-ft.) ice mountain on the Tibet border as their beacon.

Western presence had been brief and transient, a mere crumb of history, its memory lingering in old books and topographical tributes to obscure persons on forgotten maps. And then as now, the land was unpeopled, without roads, houses, even nomads.

The only vegetation here at 4,600 meters (15,000 ft.) was a few Ceratoides shrubs, browsed down to ground level, and patches of a coarse sedge. Yet the region had wildlife. We had seen several chiru, and now off to one side were the massive, curled horns and a few bones of a Tibetan argali sheep. Perhaps a wolf dropping too, I thought, but I was too far away to be certain. In mid-afternoon we came to a mud-brown glacial stream and decided to camp, our tents and camels lost in the immensity of the land.

In the days to come, we would develop a rhythm of travel and camping. But the weather would not settle into a pattern. Serene sun gave way to sudden violent storms, the wind abrading our skin with snow and sand whipping horizontally like shrapnel. The camels plodded on. We sat with shoulders hunched, legs frozen in place, minds drawn inward.

My field notes were as Spartan as the environment. A pair of ruddy shelduck in an alkaline pool; a brown bear track; several chiru females, their abdomens bulging, the time of birth near. Old droppings from kiangs (Tibetan wild ass) and wild yaks showed that the animals had been here earlier. Perhaps they had moved east to lower elevations and nutritious green grass in the spring. Wolves canvassed these uplands for prey, leaving their droppings as prominent calling cards at mountain passes and the base of cliffs. We traveled on for hours and days, swinging east, yet seemingly staying in place except that the snows of Muztag were no longer ahead but to our right. Where an apron of grass spread along the base of low hills just west of the Qiemo River, we found a spring and set up camp so that the camels could eat. Beyond the river is the Arjin Shan Nature Reserve, 44,871 square kilometers (17,325 sq. mi.) in size, established as a national reserve in 1985, and managed by the National Environmental Protection Agency. As usual, the wind was raw and relentless, the terrain offering no place to hide.

There was grass near our camp, and it had attracted wildlife. I meandered over the landscape to collect droppings from kiang, chiru and other animals. Using a technique to identify plants by their characteristic cell structure, I could tell from the droppings not only what kind of plants an animal had eaten but approximately how much of each type. That gave me valuable information on food habits without in any way affecting the animals.

Leisurely tasks, such as collecting an animal's artifacts, give the most pleasure afield because the mind is more receptive to small and insignificant encounters. I found an old yak skull, a bull with frayed horns, sand drifted up to its orbits. A sand fox had placed a dropping tidily on the skull's forehead; in this way the yak had achieved reincarnation in the fox's world. To the fox, the skull had important dimensions as a landmark and signpost, a place of identity in this immense space. The fox had given me a lesson in geography: Its universe and mine were different.

I was disappointed that we had seen only 13 wild yaks so far on this trip, most of them solitary bulls and all of them shy. Climbing over a rise, I came upon a black boulder, a yak bull in repose. I was alone, and he was not afraid, no more than he would be of a lone wolf. When I strolled to within about 100 feet of him, he rose to his feet with his armored head facing me. His long mantle of hair almost reached the ground, obscuring his feet. He had the aura of a Stonehenge dolmen in a land of power and magic.

Leaving the bull in peace, I walked toward the river flats where I had seen several chiru. From the lee of a hillock I observed five males below me. They were in their drab summer coats, buff-colored with gray on the muzzle. Their ringed and lyrate horns, rising almost two feet, gave them their unique and elegant appearance. They grazed and intermittently asserted rank. One would arch his neck so far down that his muzzle almost touched the ground. With stiletto-tipped horns pointing forward, he would then walk stiffly past another male, intimidating him until he turned aside.