There are a few creatures left in the world who live still untamed, prowling through the rocks, blinking slowly at the encroaching civilization far below. On Bountiful Black Mountain, a snow leopard hunts alone, artifact of a vanishing age. But hungry, desperate, as the snow leopard is forced away from his mountain toward the tents and fires of the valley below, he comes to encounter an impossible, startling world.

Through the eyes of the snow leopard, and as brought to life by the magisterial pen of Thomas McIntyre…here is a glimpse of humanity that’s at once profound and disconcerting, poetic and brutal, tender and deeply moving. Like all the best fictions, The Snow Leopard’s Tale does nothing less than offer us a new vision of our world.

Tom McIntyre has written a story so beyond the ken of our quotidian existence that it is un-human, inhuman, and super-human all at once. The Snow Leopard’s Tale is strange, in the sense of the Latin root of the word, ‘outside the place we’re in.’ McIntyre’s meld of man and beast alerts the beast in me and alarms the man.

P.J. O'Rourke I stand before The Snow Leopard’s Tale in awe and with a little envy. It is a gem, an uncanny evocation of the cold ancient dusty highlands of Central Asia, and could only have come from Tom McIntyre. It is his best.

Stephen J. Bodio The Snow Leopard’s Tale is a haunting, beautifully written, and thought-provoking tale, as all great parables are.

Ted Kerasote Thomas McIntyre has crafted a surreal, taut parable of wildness and civilization, an utterly original work that I can’t compare to anything I’ve read.

Matt Miller
The Nature Conservancy