The Call of the Mountains: Tales, Reminiscences, Encounters & Anecdotes

The Call of the Mountains is a collection of the author’s adventures and encounters with people, fauna, culture and ideas as they persist amongst the rough and at times hostile mountainous terrains of the Indian Himalayas.

…Amongst the rolling forested hills - plying the terrain over the many ridges and ravines - one could run into sambhar, kakar, wild pigs, and even now, sometimes a stray leopard or two. I had plenty of time at hand, no schedule to keep in the world, and my mind had spiralled down to a quiet, to a stillness, to a sort of singularity with being; when all of a sudden…

…The sun has been muffled out; the grey white peaks in the north are still glowing, but in a quickly fading red. At first, you can see the flashes of lightening within the belly of this approaching beast, as the dark grey clouds light up from within to expose their translucent vastness. But then, as they rumble into the vale you stand rooted in, you finally see the great big flashes of lightening falling to earth, cracking down like sparkling white whips to lash out at the great tall pines and firs on the ridges and the hill sides…

The sun had already crested the peaks, and yet it was bitterly cold. A raw winter day. He lay on his stomach amidst a patch of softly swaying grass and shrubbery, his legs spread behind him. He lay quiet and still - an insignificant speck in the grand vista of granite, ice, mountains, glaciers, snow and clouds. Peering out through his scopes, he was looking in magnified definition at a mountain antelope. This bharal was standing in a green patch close to a ford in a gentle stream some three hundred meters away…