Blessed is the face of the wolf…
You, whose sun rises when dark night falls,
Who stands up like a man in the snow and the rain…
– Dede Korkut(The Book of Dede Korkut, epic stories of Oğuz Turks
transcribed in 13th century)
Large predatory mammals, destructive to livestock and game,
no longer have a place on our advancing civilization.
– E A Goldman(Meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists, 1924)
On 1 April 2013, I was in the Langtang National Park in the Nepalese Himalayas. Located about 30km south of Tibet, covering an area of 1710km2 and between 1300 and 7245 metres above sea level, Langtang is the first national park established in the Himalayas. However it is probably the least explored. In the company of two wildlife officers from Nepal’s national wildlife authority, I was exploring the park to assess the presence of the clouded leopard and a few other large carnivore species. On this particular day, my mission was to visit the local people living a nomadic lifestyle within the park. After hiking for half the day, we finally reached a site where a group of families were camping. One of the families welcomed us to their tent and the three of us entered. The mother, wife of the livestock owner, and her two children were boiling milk on the fire. We sat on the floor and conversations started; I joined in as much as I could, with my companions translating from Nepalese to English and from English to Nepalese.
There was a word that our host, the father of the family, used frequently. Was it my mind making this up or could such similarity exist between the Nepalese language and my own native tongue, Turkish? I could not resist interrupting the conversation to ask one of my companions to write down this particular word in my notebook. He wrote the word in Latin letters so that I could understand it and returned the notebook to me. I was simply astonished.
What was written on the notebook was ‘canavar’ – the same word used by rural people in Turkey to describe wolves and other large predatory species. The Turkish word ‘canavar’ was read and used in the same way by this Nepalese family.