The Everest Files by Matt Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page A

somewhere between a cry and a sneeze. An answering bleat came from the rocks and the children held their breath as a young cub moved cautiously out of cover to join its mother. It mewled a greeting and nuzzled against her cheek as she licked at its fur.
    â€˜There’s a second!’ Shreeya whispered. Her sharp eyes once again the first to spot the movement.
    A few moments later the second snow leopard cub crept with elaborate care out of the rocks.
    â€˜Keep totally still,’ Shreeya’s father whispered.
    The three of them held their breaths as the leopard scanned the scree slopes, ever vigilant, ever wary of any threat to her cubs. At one point she seemed to look directly at them, but they were well-hidden behind the bush and the creature began to relax as she suckled her cubs.
    They fed for several minutes before becoming restless. The two cubs struck off on their own. Mewing and calling, they started to explore the meadow, sniffing at flowers and leaping up at butterflies.
    The spectacle could have continued but a shrill cry in the sky above the meadow caused the mother leopard to take fright. A huge eagle had soared up the ridge, playing on the late afternoon thermals. The mother cat uttered an alarm cry as she saw this dangerous predator, an urgent barking noise which immediately caused her babies to rush to her side.
    The three creatures leapt with liquid bounds across the meadow and disappeared amidst the boulders that littered the foot of the cliff.
    The show was over and Shreeya’s father decided it would be prudent to quit the area as quickly as they could.
    â€˜Better to leave the leopards in peace,’ he said. ‘If they see us they’ll be forced to leave the den.’
    They crossed another watershed and found a different area of cliffs in an adjoining valley, which provided the final ten kilos of honey they needed to make the trip a success.
    During the trek home Shreeya talked incessantly about the leopard encounter, re-living every moment and pestering her father to tell her everything he could about the cats.
    â€˜I’m going to be a warden when I grow up,’ Shreeya announced proudly, ‘and work for the national parks so I can see them whenever I like.’
    Kami and her father laughed at this precocious proposition. But neither of them doubted her determination.
    Back at the village Shreeya’s father gave them five hundred rupees each out of the profit he made on the honey. Kami gave his to his father; Shreeya ordered a book from a shop in Kathmandu. It was a picture book about snow leopards, describing everything then known about the behaviour of that most elusive of Himalayan creatures.
    She read it cover to cover, again and again, and it became her most treasured possession.
    There were other memorable moments on that journey but Shreeya and Kami knew that the vision of those snow leopards playing on the meadow would stay with them for the rest of their lives.
    Not long after the honey-collecting trip, in the dying days of that summer, a stranger arrived in the village. A furtive-looking character with sharp features and a mouth full of rotting teeth, he walked with a pronounced limp and his thigh was bandaged with a dirty strip of cotton.
    Nobody knew where he had come from and he did not volunteer his name.
    He just limped out of the forest carrying nothing but an ancient Remington rifle and a greasy hessian sack.
    â€˜He smells strange,’ Kami told his father that night as they shared rice, ‘like blood.’
    â€˜No good will come of him,’ Kami’s father said, and Kami experienced, for the first time in his life, the unsettling feeling that his father was afraid.
    â€˜Is he a bandit?’ Kami asked. He had heard stories of the brigands who lived wild in some of the more remote valleys.
    His father just shrugged. But he couldn’t hide the disquiet in his face.
    In fact the newcomer was a hunter, as became clear over the