We had taken the day off from school and were climbing the Hengerabari hills in search of a missing cow. This was in the days when our hills were thick with trees- large, wide trunks and treetops so leafy that when it got really hot you could rest for a while in the shade and carry on, refreshed. Sometimes people lost their way, as in the jungle.
There were three of us, Bahadur, who owned the cow, Dilip and I, and we had packed some food and water because we knew we would be gone several hours. We had been into the hills before, but this time it was with a sense of purpose. We felt like grown men.
Twice we saw a fox flash past us, sleek and secretive. And once a pair of porcupines trying to copulate at the base of a boulder, as a crow swooped angrily down at them at short intervals. Snakes of different sizes and colours crossed our path but did us no harm. I remember startling one away from a wild fowl's nest built in the brambles by a narrow stream.
We had already trekked through parts of the range closest to our homes, but that day we went climbing the tallest hill, one that overlooked Narengi. I had named it Blue Mountain because from a distance it wasn't grey or green but a smoky blue that was darker than the blue of the sky. It was studded with massive boulders and there were fewer clusters of trees on it than on the other hills.
By 11.30 the sun had turned merciless and there was no sign of the cow that Bahadur had let loose the day before. She was fat and mild-mannered, he said, and probably pregnant, so she couldn't have gone very far. Although there was the occasional cow-lifter who came in from the adjacent village, Bahadur was sure she had strayed off into the hills and was trapped somewhere with a broken leg.
At the base of Blue Mountain, Dilip and I raced ahead and Bahadur shouted after us:'Forget it, I've been up this hill, it's too steep. She couldn't have climbed up.' We didn't respond, we kept climbing. And soon we were like dancers, skirting around rocks too smooth of surface for footholds, grabbing branches to pull ourselves up and feeling the stretch and hum of muscle in our arms and backs. The scent of our sweat was clean and sharp.
Suddenly the slope evened out. I halted, and as Dilip came up to my side, said, 'Let's take that bend and then we go back.'
We walked on for a few more yardsand then we saw the cow. She was on her back, her legs splayed out, the head twisted away from us. Her black skin shone in the sun and the stomach seemed bloated. Her tail, a shade lighter than the rest of her her, was twined round one of her hind legs. On the grass beside her the blood had thickened into purple clots.
'Dead,' Dilip said. 'She must have fallen.' We moved closer now but the stink from the flesh in the mid-day heat stopped us at some distance. From where we stood we saw that her stomach had been slit neatly lengthwise, as if for an operation; the legs, rigid and brown-black, splayed out at an unnatural angle, the hooves pointing to the sky. As I stepped a little closer, I saw the tail twitch and move, a tawny-brown rope uncoiling from around the hind leg. And in a flash the leopard was out of the cow's stomach, teeth bared in a defensive snarl, its sleek body caked in blood. I think I screamed. Dilip grabbed my shirt and pulled me back. The leopard went into a crouch, ready to spring away from us or at us. Then we were running blindly down the scarp, our senses magnified by a fear more vast and wild than anything we would ever again feel in our blood.
At the base of the hill, as we took a bend, we saw Bahadur rushing up the path with a dao in his hand. 'Leopard,' he said, looking past us.
Dilip and I followed his gaze. In the silence, against the clear sun-bleached sky, we saw the quick dark silhouette lope along the crest of the hill. It stopped for a second and then as the crows began cawing it slipped down the other side of the Blue Mountain and was lost to our sight.
When we recounted our experience to friends and family, we couldn't find the right words to express the strange and terrible splendour of what we had seen. In our confusion we only spoke of our fear.
The following year, when I was studying in Shillong and had come home on a vacation, Bahadur told me how the villagers had killed a leopard as it crept, around daybreak, into one of their cattle sheds. Some days later, a villager found two starving cubs beyond Blue Mountain.
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