Marmots inhabit a landscape where the elements are finding their feet after escaping the clutches of the cryosphere, and the idea of life is, quite literally, just beginning to take root… wide mountain expanses where subsistence is a silent, unpresuming endeavour, eking out habitable spaces in environs that seem to revel in their merciless meteorology and geological grandeur… the high mountains demand humility and perseverance from anyone seeking shelter between their folds, and marmots have little choice but to acquiesce…
More than the succulent shoots they nibble on, one could say marmots live on hope… embarking on long hibernations hoping the weather takes a turn for the better… relinquishing consciousness, retreating deep into the burrows… one can only wonder if they dream, these hibernators, as the state of torpor takes over… something that, like the flight of birds, the human yearns for…
Despite their large size, maybe a factor of the energy stores they need for those long sojourns into subconsciousness, it is rather endearing to find marmots exhibiting the quintessential jumpiness of rodents… peeping, scuttling… looking askance at the surroundings, sometimes replacing it with a look of reverie, basking in the beauty surrounding it… life is seldom a soft and warm bed of green grass, and when it is, there is nothing else to feel but gratitude…
We’d just started our descent back into civilization from the base camp of Kang Yatze when a long-tailed marmot stared out at us from behind a cairn, feeling rather gregarious one felt as it stood its ground even in the face of more than a dozen human onlookers… perhaps ‘twas loath to retreat right at the beginning of the morning, its most active time of the day, and thus posed in between its nibbles at the grass… time was in short supply for both of us, and after a five-minute rendezvous, we duly bade farewell…
