By Zaid Bin Ishaq

That terrifying sound often comes in the middle of frozen nights, when the valley lies under snow, the rivers are trapped beneath ice, and the air feels ready to crack. It rings out like a thunderclap:“Whaaap.” A pause, and then again:“Whaaap.” It drifts through the mountains like something alive, heard but never seen. Those who recognize it call it the Yach.

The Yach is neither animal nor ghost, neither storm nor spirit. It belongs to a belief older than explanation, a spectral guardian of Kashmir mountains whose presence is felt rather than seen.

“When we were children, our grandmothers would tell us to stay quiet when we heard it,” recalls 72-year-old Ghulam Nabi from Gurez.“They said it was the Yach passing through, watching over the mountains. If you spoke, it might take your voice away.”

For centuries, the Yach has lived in the collective imagination of Kashmir highlands. Travellers crossing icy passes said the sound guided them when they were lost. Shepherds in Shopian whispered that a certain meadow“belonged to a Yach,” a warning to keep away from what the mountains wanted to keep untouched. It was not a creature of fear, but of reverence, a reminder that nature listens back.

“Mountains have memories,” goes the old Kashmiri saying.“We only pass through them.”

To understand the Yach is to step into a time when Kashmiris saw the natural world as alive. Every spring, stone, and breeze carried a presence. A mountain was a being, a stream was continuity. The valley's ancient saints and mystics spoke to these forces, calling them rooh-e-zameen, the soul of the earth.

The Yach was part of this sacred geography. In Kupwara, old men tell of how the sound appears only on certain nights when the snow is fresh, and the moon leans low over the ridges.

In Drangyari, near the Line of Control, villagers once believed the Yach's call warned of avalanches. In Pahalgam, elders said it emerged from the forests that no one dared to cut.

These stories are Kashmir's old philosophy, spoken through wind and echo. They tell of a relationship with the land that was both intimate and humble.“He who cannot hear the silence cannot hear God,” wrote the poet-mystic Lal Ded.

The Yach's cry was that silence given sound, a natural voice of warning, belonging, and awe.

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