Stanzin Pulit's yaks are his wealth,and in Ladakh's Zanskar Valley.

Herds are vulnerable to snow leopard attacks.Conservation groups help herders build protective corrals in return for their pledge not to kill snow leopards.Such aid gives locals economic incentive to preserve the predators-good news for the region's ecotourism initiatives,but mixed news for prey like blue sheep.One winter Dashdavaa Khulaa,a park ranger in the Turgen Range,watched a herd of 27 ibex take shelter in a cliff-face cave.A mother snow leopard with two partly grown cubs followed them in.Only 24 ibex made it out.For Khulaa,the tale is part of a large story.Though the Turgen Range,part of the Altay Mountains,saw some heavy wildlife poaching in the past,it has become a stronghold for ibex and their predators.One of the reasons is a grassroots antipoaching patrol in the Altay region known as the Snow Leopard Brigade.Ganbold Bataar,Former director of Mongolia's national park system here in the province of Uvs,is its founder and current chief.




With two employees for this whole province,we couldn't hope to keep up,Battar said.But we have more than 290 volunteers here.They were local herders,and their eyes were everywhere in the countryside.Whoever turned in a poacher stood to gain 15 percent of the fine as a reward.But that wasn't always the main incentive.Toward evening,three horsemen driving their flocks home galloped over to visit our camp.They all considered themselves volunteer members of the antipoaching brigade.They knew the mother snow leopard well,she'd had three cubs the previous year,they said.The two from her earlier little had gone off to establish territories of their own on the mountain slopes just across the river.One had appeared prowling the iron-red ledges there just recently.One of the horsemen said simply,I'm pround to live in a place with snow leopards.A small,soft-spoken woman named Bayarjargal Agvaantseren has found another way to enlist local communities in conservation.Twice every year,this former schoolteacher sets out from the Mongolian capital,Ulaanbaatar,to visit some of the 24 herder communities she has engaged in a handicrafts project tagged Snow Leopard Enterprises,a program of the snow leopard trust.



Most herder families used to sell the soft underfur of goats-cashmere-to middlemen,earning about 600$ a year.Thanks to Agvaantpseren,women in the community now also make an array of products using wool from their goats,sheep,yaks,and camels,skeins of soft yarn,felt and decorative rugs,seat pads,children's booties or Christmas tree ornaments shaped like snow leopards and ibex.My favorites were doll mice with whiskers of stiff yak tail hair-toys for little cats,designed to save big ones.