Eating Stone (10 page)

Kevin has spent over two decades with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, working largely with the locals—rare southwestern natives that cling precariously to islands of wild. On another refuge, in the small streams and springs of the Rio Yaqui headwaters in southern Arizona, his wards were fish the size of a half-eaten no. 2 pencil, fish found nowhere else in the world.

Kevin has good-naturedly allowed me to accompany him on a morning in the field. Mere days before my visit, fifty-one wild sheep had arrived from Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, the seeds of a new herd for the mountains that had emptied themselves of bighorns. Kevin and his staff were checking on them nearly every day. SAE 067 now has company.

Yesterday's storm has lifted. The mountains loom closer, one of them bristling with radio towers disguised as yuccas. I am as curi-
ous as a crazed coconut to see this accidental wildland. I am in a white pickup truck powered by veggie oil.

“Biodiesel,” Kevin explains. “It's a soy-based fuel. We buy bulk gallons of it.”

The refuge office and compound are outside the preserve, near town. The staff of four travels a grid of scant dirt roads for their work, skirting the high sheep country at lower elevations and along rough four-wheel-drive drainages. In this vast tract, the refuge has few structures but the sheds and holding paddock at a small encampment called Little San Nicholas Camp. Other structures belong to the missile range, and I am not supposed to ask about them.

The view from the bajada across the Tularosa Basin—from here, it is a raptor's panorama—makes a person want to stay and stare for a few months. Fingers of jet black mark the lava beds, or malpais, to the north. On the floor of this playa, a valley without river or stream or other drain to the sea, the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument glisten snow-white in painful purity.

At the basin's lowest point, water from winter storms pools into the usually dry bed of Lake Lucero and scatters thin sky mirrors across the playa. Blue-violet in the morning light, the Sacramento Mountains line up with the San Andres in classic basin and range parallel. From our raptor's point, the earth's skin is corrugated.

The white dune field below us moves. It is active; it shifts, slumps, and advances. I want to watch the wind push it toward Alamogordo, but we will run out of veggie oil, and lifetimes, before change is evident to the naked eye.

From basin to bajada, the San Andres escarpment rises abruptly. We drive through a shrubby green jungle of aromatic creosote, a species with the breadth, across the intermountain West, of a small ocean. Creosote engulfs the remains of wooden observation towers left from the post–World War II days of rocket testing.

The aged timbers gleam silver in the sun, the view still superb but now abandoned.

White panel trucks and semitrailers replace the towers, gleaming like giant kitchen appliances. They are parked on platforms in paranoid circled-wagon clusters, their roofs thatched with satellite dishes and antennae. The trucks are windowless and self-contained, filled, perhaps, with very bored people watching compact video screens, eavesdropping on the Saudi parliament, listening to the universe hum. Maybe they have the refuge truck under X-ray surveillance, like airport luggage, and are observing our skeletons strapped in by seat belts. Maybe the vehicles are empty. What do I know? There is no one in sight.

I look for panic grass, a plant in the desert grasslands community, but we may be too high and on the wrong side of the mountains. Panic grass, I have always thought, should be the official plant of the missile range. I make a note to write the generals about this.

Partway up the bajada, here in the heart of New Mexico, USA, we of course spook up a dozen African ungulates. They canter away from the vehicle. Kevin puts on the brakes.

“Watch them,” he says. “They'll run away from the road. Then they'll stop and turn around broadside and look at us.”

On the run, the oryx show us their flashy Serengeti butts. Then they stop, turn around broadside, and look at us.

In the 1960s and 1970s, ninety-three captive-bred oryx were introduced to the White Sands Missile Range. Oryxgazella, natives of southeastern Africa that are also known as gemsbok, then hoofed their way into the Chihuahuan Desert, progeny of a state program designed to introduce exotic species for sport hunting. At the time, it seemed like a good idea, if you were a hunter, to transform the “empty wastelands” of New Mexico into an African savanna swarming with shootable horned mammals.

Since the mid-1970s, wildlife management has favored native species, and the oryx are considered pests. They breed, it is said, “like bunnies on speed.” Several months after they calve, they are pregnant again.

No one is quite sure how many oryx roam the White Sands Missile Range—perhaps more than four thousand. They have populated the desert well beyond the spacious military reserve and the original confines of their expected habitat. They barely need water, they eat nearly anything with or without leaves, and they have walked to Texas. In Africa, their natural enemies were lions. In New Mexico and Texas, their major predators are human hunters.

No one knows much about oryx population trends or how these exotics affect the natives, such as mule deer, with whom they share a similar range and elevation. In the next basin west of the San Andres, oryx roam the flats with pronghorn antelope. Both the refuge and missile range allow controlled hunts, under escort, to reduce oryx numbers. Apparently, the oryx run, stop, turn broadside, and look at the hunters. Bang.

“What these oryx need is a pack of skinny, highly motivated African lions,” I suggest. “Maybe some starving cheetahs.” Kevin gives me a look that invites me to pop right on into HQ_and run that one by the generals.

To picture an oryx, think of antelope as rather beefy drag queens. The oryx stare at us wide-eyed from underneath lush lashes highlighted by a painterly black eye stripe against geisha-pale cheeks. Black patches adorn brow and nose. Thin horns rise from their pates like ebony scimitars. On sandy-gray bodies of considerable bulk, their black manes run from head to shoulders, and dark markings accent their legs and underbelly. Long tufted tails lie against muscular rumps. One of the staring males could easily weigh five hundred pounds.

The game managers of the late 1960s recognized their substantial investment in imported wildlife and quarantined the exotics
before release. It would be neither economical nor wise, they wrote, “to thrust them boldly into the wild, perhaps never to be seen again.”

The oryx took one look at the Land of Enchantment and thrust themselves boldly into reproducing. They went from a handful to herds, from quarantine enclosure to open desert like five-hundred-pound locusts. They own the place.

Ecologists, being big-picture nature people, try to get the rest of us, who have the attention spans of caffeinated hamsters, to see landscape in broad reaches of time and change. They would have us look at this piece of Chihuahuan Desert—cholla, mesquite, prickly pear cactus, whitethorn acacia, and, on higher, moister slopes, scattered pinyon and juniper trees—and ask us to see grass.

For several thousand years, southern New Mexico's vegetation has moved from grassland to desert scrub, prompted by time, shifts in climate, and, in the short term, domestic grazing. With every organism, from pond scum to seedpod, to charismatic curly-horned ungulate, to smart ape (us), bound in community, ecologists would argue that there could be relationships between the transition from grassland to desert scrub and how mountain lions interact with bighorn sheep.

We drive higher into the mountains. In stands of pinyon and juniper, the climax forest of the high desert, I imagine tawny cats at dusk, slipping behind evergreen boughs like liquid ghosts. Their amber stares—I have seen this gaze in my own encounters with them—penetrate so deeply, you feel as if you have lost the back of your skull. I envision a kill: a brief chase (cats are short-winded and invest much in the stalk), then a leap with a powerful blow, the severing of the spinal cord, a shift of weight to catch breath and adjust grip.

And there are the images of lions themselves as prey, of canned hunts, poisonings, and the spoils of bounty hunters. Photographs
of mountain lion skulls stacked like cordwood. A long-lived cultural contempt that holds big cats as varmints or vermin. Hunters who will tell you that mountain lions killed every last deer and elk in three states and then started eating one another.

The mountain lion diet in the San Andres is predominantly and, by biomass, overwhelmingly desert mule deer. Mountain lions also make opportunistic meals of rodents, rabbits, skunks, badgers, ringtail cats, javelinas, birds, and porcupines. They eat bighorn sheep and an occasional pronghorn that leaves its safer open terrain in the nearby basins. They have preyed upon the formidable oryx, taking calves no larger than adult female mule deer, victims that the cats can handle with less risk of injury to themselves. Sometimes they eat odd meals: a box turtle, a golden eagle.

Woody vegetation provides cover for stalking lions. Acutely dependent on eyesight more than on smell or hearing, the victim does not see what is coming and can't get away fast enough. With surprise on its side, a mountain lion can ambush and take down prey two or three times its own body weight.

In the southern San Andres Mountains in the late 1990s, mountain lions were the main cause of bighorn sheep mortality. The cats’ major food source, mule deer, had declined rapidly; the cats’ numbers had increased in the region. Drought, the bighorns’ low and unstable numbers, and other factors also contributed to the band's extinction. From a habitat perspective, too, there are additional insights.

Bighorn bands are known to avoid, and sometimes abandon, habitat where the risk of predation is high. Habitat with obscured long-range visibility makes sheep nervous. For safety, they will go someplace else. In the San Andres, over eighty years of fire suppression left them without much “else.” Lacking natural cycles of wildfire, the dense vegetation closed in the sheep view. A concealed feline hunter could get close enough for a successful kill. Disease-weakened sheep made easy prey.

To bring back open-vista habitat lost to bighorn, the refuge
staff has been burning the San Andres Mountains. Given New Mexicans’ undeserved reputation as pyromaniacs, this is a brave move.

At several burn sites, Kevin stops the truck so we can examine the revegetation—forbs, browse, healthy swathes of black grama grass. Creosote has returned, albeit in fewer numbers. From foot to ridge top, some of the slopes resemble a vertical savanna.

“There aren't many structures in these mountains, no trophy homes,” Kevin tells me. “Fire was never much of a threat to property, but the army thought fires sent up enough smoke to interfere with their tests. So they always put them out.”

The long-standing national policies of fire suppression, the scolding glare of that mean poster bear in flat-brimmed hat and pants, more or less indoctrinated a public against wildfire. Even as we become smarter about fire's natural role in montane ecology, such enlightenment is often tested, most famously in New Mexico when, in 2000, a prescribed burn near the nuclear-lab town of Los Alamos went out of control.

On the San Andres, lightning fires are now left to burn themselves out. Prescribed burns are planned and watched. Here, the army has come around to support the fire program. Here, by the grace of the generals, go sheep.

“Since we started in 1999, burns have opened up acres and acres of old habitat,” says Kevin. “It will be interesting to see what the sheep will do, if they will occupy it now that the vegetation is reduced.”

“They” are not the last-stand natives, the locals who might sense that this part of the mountains puts them on big-cat menus. None of those local sheep are left, save one. The fifty-one new arrivals have no imprint of this landscape. They must learn the territory, including the habitat opened by fire.

Near the release sites, to prepare the neighborhood for transplants, refuge managers had killed any mountain lion that was
perceived as a threat to sheep. This strategy will continue for a few months now that sheep have been released, change to an offenders policy, removing only the cats that kill sheep, then cease altogether as the herd grows and stabilizes.

Sheep-predator interactions so intensely manipulated by human agent carry contradiction and controversy. Biologists talk endlessly about bighorns and mountain lions, but it seems they cannot easily lift the weight of uncertainty. By comparison, legal pyrotechnics, as long as you don't burn down a nuclear-weapons lab, seem methodically simple.

The sheep people, with their mandate to preserve bighorns, argue that mountain lion predation on small, up-against-the-wall populations of wild sheep will wipe them out. Lion advocates worry about the repercussions on these animals and question the effectiveness of lion control. They rightly argue that wild carnivores are essential to the dynamics of healthy desert ecosystems. Mountain lions eat mutton because they are hungry. They stalk because that is what they are designed to do.

Opponents of predator control think that killing mountain lions to rescue a declining species is a new rationale for an old war on “vermin” predators. They envision cat skulls stacked like cordwood. Purists want nature to “run its course” even if that means the lions consume every last bighorn.

This plodding work of wildlife recovery, this repairing of Eden, why is it so difficult? In a Darwinian view, it may be “natural” to lose local species that cannot adapt to change. We no longer have dodoes, such logic says, because the flightless, bulbous, docile dodoes were such easy pickings for hunters, pigs, monkeys, and other alien invaders. Add to their defenselessness a moral dimension, as people tend to do: The birds died off because they were such dodoes.

The exotic African oryx, far more adaptable than the dodo, took on southern New Mexico partly because southern New

Mexico was so perfectly edible. Predators and water were not limiting factors. During a drought, oryx can detect rainfall over great distances. They then move in the direction of new plant growth and find food.