This uncertainty had me turning from side to side unable to fall asleep for half of the night. Jin Pao, on the other hand, slept very soundly. During these couple of days he told me of his plan: after this expedition, he was planning to say goodbye to the mountains and spend his old age with his daughter's family in Erdaobaihe town. He had roamed the ancient forest for fifty years and he felt that that was long enough. There were fewer and fewer wild animals in the mountains. It was also getting more and more difficult to hunt them down as his eyesight worsened and his legs no longer served him as well as they once did. I think that after he made this decision he calmed down somewhat. I could also suddenly see that his age was beginning to show on him. In two days' time, he was going to go home. No matter whether we could or could not find the Chinese goral, he was going to go home all the same, cuddle his grandson and enjoy his carefree retired life. It was at this time that his mind was at complete rest.
The next day we followed the edge of an area of low bush on the tundra platform and headed in the direction of the mountains. We hadn't walked far when Jin Pao, who was leading the way, suddenly chuckled. He crouched down to pick something up from the ground and showed it to me. Ah, there was a small black pellet in the palm of his hand. A Chinese goral pellet! The roe deer pellets do indeed look like a date plum persimmon; they are somewhat long and pointy. The Chinese goral pellets, on the other hand, are round and a bit bigger.
These Chinese goral pellets were the size of a date plum persimmon. They were still swathed in a layer of fresh bowel fluid, glossy and eye-catching on the white snow. Then there was also line upon line of hoof prints winding all around the bush. These hoof prints firmly pushed through the top light grey layer of snow and revealed the sparking white snow underneath. It was very striking.
Jin Pao walked around the footprints in a circle and even used his hands to measure them. He concluded that these footprints were left behind by a group of seven Chinese gorals. It was a complete herd, filled with both small and large and male and female gorals. What is more, it had only passed here yesterday night.
I restrained my excitement and proceeded to carefully examine the footprints. It turns out that in winter, in order to assuage hunger, the Chinese goral descends as low as the bottom of the birch forest, to the boundary between the shrub zone and the forest to gnaw the bark and winter buds of low Floderus willow and Mountain elm. From underneath a blanket of snow, they would also dig out Orange Day-lilies, wild spinach and Oxytropis falcata, milkvetch, pedicularis and other mountainous plants.
It seemed that Chinese gorals might still live on this mountain peak!
The Chinese goral has always been an animal that existed on the border between fantasy and reality in my mind. They only exist in folk ballads and legends. They leap across steep cliffs and ravines. In dealing with packs of wolves, they take their chances on treacherous cliffs, either luring the wolves to their death at the last moment or perishing together their enemies. This is a topic that all hunters delight in talking about. The Chinese goral is much more fiery than its cousins, the mild and docile kudu, the Black gerenuk and the antelope, which live in the pleasant climate of fertile and richly irrigated grasslands on the African continent. When leafing through foreign materials, I once came across pictures of the Arctic bharal, the Himalayan tahr and the Alpine Blue sheep. They more resemble what I imagined the Chinese goral to be like. They seem to have an air of pure mountain wilderness about them.
High mountain cloven-hoofed animals like to lick the salt crystals between the cracks in the rock. They even have a set salt place which they keep returning to at regular intervals to lick the salt-rich soil and rock debris. This is good for the growth of their bones as well as for their metabolism, especially during breast feeding. Wild animals that have never been frightened or hunted by humans will often treat us as their friends. One of my German colleagues once shared his experience with me: He once stretched out a palm full of salt to a normally very timid Blue sheep. The Blue sheep unexpectedly approached him without a trace of fear and started licking the salt directly from his hand. In his excitement my German colleague said one thing that stuck in my mind— "That was the most wonderful moment in my life. It was like being kissed for the first time."
When I heard that, I suddenly felt as if the cultural barrier between us disappeared completely. Zoologists often have more contact with animals than with humans, which means that sometimes, without realising it, they treat animals as members of the same species.
I was not sure how the Chinese gorals would react when they saw us. I could not stop myself from asking Jin Pao: "So what does the Chinese goral look like?"
"You will know when you see it," he replied, pantingly, and hurried me along a hardly discernible path that wound up the mountain through the boulder field. He said Chinese gorals often follow this path. Upon careful examination, the path seemed as if it was chiselled out into the rock by humans. Over the past several hundred years, there must have been hundreds upon hundreds of Chinese gorals that walked along here. Over time, their hard hooves had left numerous shallow indentations in the dark basalt rock. These were the footprints of the ancestors of the Chinese gorals that we were about to meet with.
Even though I had been prepared for this moment, I still could not stop myself from giving out an involuntary cry when I suddenly saw the Chinese goral herd: "The gorals are here!"
