Lessons I learned from my friend, the leopard

Shaaz Jung is a wildlife filmmaker and photographer for National Geographic WILD. He has documented melanistic leopards in India over the last five years. But his first brush with a leopard was his most formative one. Writing for Times Evoke Inspire , he describes his friendship with ‘Scarface’:

After I graduated from university in Europe, I embarked on a journey off the beaten track. I arrived 10 years ago at the Nagarhole Tiger Reserve in south India. In search of a new life, I traversed the forest, seeking to uncover its mysterious beauty and trying to build a bond with those that inhabited it. Wandering in a labyrinth of tall, twisted trees, realisation dawned — the essence of this jungle lay not in being found, but in being lost.

The pursuit of wilderness became a passion after I saw my first leopard. The forest that morning was full of life as the songbirds sang the moon to sleep. A hawk-cuckoo sat on the outstretched arm of a neem tree, waiting for the sun to fully bloom. As the rays unfolded on the forest floor, the serenity was broken by the monkeys’ shrill warning cries.

They sensed a predator whose approach could be neither seen, nor heard, until he was amongst them.

We have all grown up in awe of tigers — but it was a leopard that left me astonished. That day, the monkeys had glimpsed a young male leopard moving like a shadow through the forest. The leopard gave us a fleeting sight of himself. He wore a scar with great aplomb. He established territory as he moved about, but he was also quick to understand who was a threat and who wasn’t. As I watched him intensively in the days to come, the leopard seemed to know I meant him no harm.

In fact, I spent the next decade discovering the forest with ‘Scarface’. My days started at the crack of dawn. This is when the jungle is at its liveliest. Leopards are most active at dawn and dusk and this gave me a short window to track Scarface. I would drive into his territory and sit in the dark before sunrise. If I was patient enough, the monkeys would lead me to him. After years of tracking Scarface for six hours a day, I learnt the paths he took, his favourite trees, his little idiosyncrasies. I saw his kin and I started to learn more from leopards than from human beings.

In our interactions, Scarface taught me patience, compassion and, most importantly, not to worry about time. As humans, we are obsessed with every moment, every hour, and as I counted the years and watched my friend age, I feared his loss. But he lived with no fear. And he taught me how to live by the day, not measure the hour — and find an eternity in the forest we shared.

I began using my camera to document my understanding of nature. To my eyes, the world started taking on a new shape. The deciduous forest trees resembled new beginnings when the winds carried away their leaves. Like Scarface, who is in the forest but older now and harder to track or see as he can’t climb trees so easily, every animal represented a journey of life. And each being’s characteristics helped shape mine. Nature is where it all begins — and where we must turn to now. I feel this powerfully during the current pandemic. Nature has a transformative strength and we need to come closer to it — showing it respect. In nature lies the way forward for us, and an opportunity to change all that we’ve gotten wrong.

And, as the forest and my friend within it taught me, we still have a chance. We can still strive for a world where we’re at harmony with nature’s array. We can still discover a realm where a human and a leopard can be friends. We can still find an enchanted forest somewhere. And we can still learn what it seeks to tell us.