Eating Stone (22 page)

With the warming season and longer daylight, I have left behind the worst of the brain fevers of winter, the garbled and temporarily unavailable words, the obsessive counting, the maniacal straightening of every crooked thing. I no longer ponder zombie drugs or feel compelled to subject the gooey mass inside my skull to medical imagery, to peer into its inexhaustible chaos as one would study a weather map, there to discern peculiar atmospheric patterns. So what if a few million of the 100 billion neurons and synapses have been devoured by obnoxious pests. At least I can still button up my own shirt.

Or can I?

As I pack up to go to sheep country, the zipper on my jacket jams. No matter how hard I try, I cannot slip the bottom pin in place and pull the slider up over the teeth. I face Mark, standing very still, arms akimbo but relaxed. He aligns the zipper and zips it right up to my chin. I feel like weeping. Suddenly, I very much want a pair of mittens.

Disguised as an adult, I venture into the out there, as I always do, to get a feel for the world, to learn something, to breathe deep drafts of desert air. Thousands of miles above me in the mesosphere, meteors are burning up. On its tilted axis, the Earth moves at an orbital velocity of 18.5 miles per second. Jacket zipped, I step off the deck and into Earth's hurl through space.

On their home range, the bighorns have returned to their ten-thousand-year-old daily workout: forage, move, stand, recline, ruminate, act vigilant. Biologists call this their “activity budget.” If you are wildlife-watching and expect to buff up your karma
by bearing witness to the electrifying kinematics of charismatic North American megafauna, you will be bored to death.

The band has abandoned playfulness for the serious business of eating and turning their white butts to the hard gusts of wind. Spring teases green plants from the ground with more vigor. The males travel solo or in bachelor bands. None have ventured upriver to piss on a rock in the big red side canyon. There is a lull in the impromptu walkabout and enough food to keep them in Ram Land.

I spend my days watching matrilineal bands of subadults made conspicuous by the absence of pregnant ewes. The ewes are harder to find because many of them have begun to move to isolated, remembered territory. During lambing season—from April to June for the Nelson's bighorns on the Colorado Plateau—the ewes usually seek the same lambing grounds each year.

Birth sites on the cliffs are chosen for weather protection and security against predators. From my observation post, I see caves, clefts, niches, overhangs, alcoves, and many other possibilities. When the time comes—any day now for the earliest parturition— the ewes will withdraw to their chosen spots.

On the day of the spring equinox, I sit across an arc of blue air from two ewes. They have ditched the juveniles, including their lambs from the previous year. They feed quietly on a talus slope. Both ewes have enlarged udders. Bearing the weight of near-term lambs, their flanks sink in front of their hips, forming dark hollows.

For the equinox, I have brought along the teddy bear in his undies, as well as Nelson, a stuffed toy bighorn ram with soft pile fur the color of a cappuccino. He has a black nose and white muzzle, belly, and rump. Brown velour covers a pair of curled horns. Ever loyal to homeland, his head is cocked in the direction of Vietnam, where he was made. Nelson is smaller than a real ram's testicles. He has none of his own.

I pull the toys out of my pack and set them on the flat boulder
beside me, facing the ewes. A side-blotched lizard, about two inches long, with a rosy-beige body and inkblot patches behind its forelegs, emerges from under a blackbrush shrub and spends the morning basking on my thigh, enjoying the warm denim.

The big female has a radio collar and ear tags. The other is the ewe with the scar across her rib cage. These bighorns, like so many in the Blue Door Band, have become familiar.

It is not difficult to recognize individuals, especially adults, by personality traits and distinct physical features. Broomed horns, nicked horns, broken horns, one horn. Gangly, gaunt, sleek, scraggly Mellow, nervous. Dainty legs, stocky legs. Rangy necks, wiggy topknots. Noses with bumps, bodies with scars. One-eyed sheep. Limping sheep. All shades of pelage from pale gray to tan to dark taupe to mahogany.

Some bear the obvious markings of ear tags and radio collars and a life history recorded by the band's biologist caretakers. From this record, I know that the big collared ewe once broke her leg and stayed in one place for a long time, vulnerable to predators while she recovered. She is known to lamb early. She has in the past produced a rarity among desert bighorns: twins.

On the red-desert equinox, daylight widens and stretches. Life rests on the brink of a potent release of energy—leaves, lizards, lambs, a conflagration of wildflowers, riverbanks and hanging springs fat with food. To feel it, you must slip inside this pause between seasons, ride the current of instinct, notice everything, understand little.

The science of such life is at once complex and easy. So, too, the physical sheep, their sleek bodies, pale lashes over golden eyes, swollen bellies, a healed leg, a day of play. Harder to envision is their ascent through time into form, shape, and breath, the supple flux of an animal with a living tradition of homeland fidelity. To witness this, you must sit on a rock with a few friends and find in yourself an unfamiliar patience.

Stalin, the stucco-punching flicker, is trapped in the screen house. The one-room structure sits in our cottonwood grove, used in the warm months as a guest bedroom and refuge for siestas. The bird got in—somehow—and now he can't get out. Although he has been imprisoned for a while, I have only just discovered him. He seems weak. There are feathers stuck to the screen walls and scattered across the wooden floor. When he sees me, he breaks into panicked flight, raising a swirling cloud of feathers and dust.

Stalin is a powerful chisel-billed bird of the woodpecker family. From close range, I have a good look at his gray-brown back, stiff black tail, and crescent-shaped black chest bib. Near his bill, his “mustache,” a streak of bright red feathers, marks him as a male. His underwings, shown when he flies, are salmon red.

I feel wicked. Stalin, you ignorant slut. You are trapped. This bird batters the nest of our resident phoebes. He drills the house as if it were a giant sugar cube. He could peck away until only a roof on sticks remained. Or I could let him die here.

He stops flying and alights on a rafter. We stare at each other.

Stalin drops off the rafter and scrambles up the screen wall in woodpecker position. His toes snag on the tiny squares. He will not leave through the open door even as I circle the outside of the screen house, hoping to reduce his panic by keeping the mesh between us and herding him toward the opening. You simply cannot herd woodpeckers. He crashes from wall to wall in crazed flight.

I go inside. We are close. In slow motion, I pick up a straw broom and use the flat side to guide him out the door. It seems that I will inflict harm this way, so I abandon the broom and pull the cotton coverlet from the bed. I spread the cloth wide between my arms and cover the bird as he thrashes against the screen.

Wrapped and held, wings beating against my palms, Stalin gets a ride to the door.

A ripple of wind combs the cottonwood trees at one end of the grove and moves toward us, bearing the scent of April. Here it is, the exhalation of the season in a single rogue gust. Ahead of the wind, a flock of starlings—hundreds of them—explodes out of a cloud of ranch-bottom dust.

The moment I release the flicker, the wind burst reaches us, pulling him into the air in a hard, high rise to join the starlings overhead. The flocked mass is so dense, their racing motion so strong, I feel as if they are still and I am rushing forward through space.

The sky above the cottonwoods is filled with birds. They blacken the sun as they pass, then let the light through again.

In the painting on the wall, the mountain sheep peered down from an alpine slope flooded in a golden syrup of Bierstadt light. Contemporary western wildlife art seems to require this luridly primeval pigment—arcadian, radiant, as if Eden were not in the Holy Lands but in the Brooks Range.

The animals in the painting were not bighorns. They were Dall's sheep, a thinhorn subspecies found in Alaska and northwestern Canada. Cold sheep. Farthest north sheep. Altitudes of heaven sheep. Ice sheep.

Dall's sheep like wind because it blows the snow off their forage so they can eat without pawing and wasting calories. Avalanches kill them. Wolves eat the weaker among them. A few sheep lose their footing on icy chutes and cliffs. In one account, a wolf chased a thinhorn into precipitous terrain, where they both fell off a cliff to their deaths.

The painting froze a moment into bovid nirvana: alpine summer, no snow, no lurking wolves, just a fraternal pod of sunlit rams. Wildlife artists seldom waste a gilt frame on anything without testicles and Boone and Crockett curls. Yet the animals appeared petit, more like divine subpolar meat than trophies. One ram lay on a day bed of tawny grass. The others gazed out of the canvas as if they had just caught glimpses of themselves in a mirror.

The painting hung in an art gallery in a sprawling town in Southern California's Coachella Valley, just a ripple of mountains away from Los Angeles. I was far from the red canyons of home. The Dall's sheep were nowhere near Alaska.

Dall's sheep are white and have gold-brown horns. If you stood one next to a dusty gray-brown desert bighorn, the Dall's would look like the desert animal's ghost. In the painting, the Dall's sheep bodies were lunar white, the horns as burnished as a gold-leaf halo on a Byzantine saint. On canvas, wild western ungulates live in perpetual alpenglow, and this artist remained true to style, bathing his slopes in acrylic radiance.

In the art gallery, my friend Nike and I stared at the snow-white creatures with the golden horns. I felt like a Bedouin who had emerged from a remote wadi of squabbling tribes and shabby camels to behold something improbable but familiar.

We studied the painting. “Sheep angels” Nike said. “These must be sheep angels.”

The year I went to an annual meeting of the Southwest's desert bighorn managers and advocates, it was held in Palm Springs, California. I left the redrock deserts of home as the river cotton-woods sprouted a green haze of spring leaves. The road slid me off the Colorado Plateau and into the Mojave and Colorado deserts, into warmer air and basins of creosote and sand.

I carved my road trip into what I called a Chemehuevi map.

In historic times, the Chemehuevi Indians lived in the deserts of the lower Colorado River, land that falls on both sides of the California-Arizona border. They were seminomadic people, known to be fast runners and ardent storytellers and singers. One of the best places to sing, they believed, was among the melons in their gardens.

They measured distance by tiiravi, or “desert,” also the word for homeland and source. From the top of one mountain range across a valley to the top of the next mountain range was a unit known as cuukutiiravi: “one desert.”

Chemehuevi land ownership matched human territory to the
territory of a herd of bighorn sheep. A particular bighorn sheep song defined this terrain; the song was both deed and map. A person who inherited such a song claimed its myths and stories, its bajadas, buttes, water holes, and other landmarks. The words of the hereditary song unfolded a land traversed, the route traveled.

From southern Utah to the California deserts, I dreamed up my own map of animal songlines. Since I cannot carry a tune, I was careful not to sing aloud while driving, lest, Kuwait-invasion style, I left a wake of smoldering minivans, smashed buses, and jackknifed semitrailers, their drivers the victims of my feeble screech.

The spread of land between the Colorado Plateau and the West Coast is a geography of real sheep and sheep ghosts, places where they persist, places where they went extinct—an estimated twenty-seven populations in the twentieth century. My Cheme-huevi map was spotty: isolated remnant bands that clung stubbornly to their stone in a few ranges in the basin and range provinces. With land so empty of them, how do we know where to go?

I slept under a tamarisk on the Arizona side of the lower Colorado, where it runs sluggishly between the dams and reservoirs that stair-step the river from southern Nevada to Mexico. Craggy bare mountains held the strip of ultramarine water in an embrace of jumbled chocolate-colored rock.

A band of emerald fringed this once-mighty muddy river: tamarisk, Russian olive, skinny palm trees with spiky topknots. Behind the riparian thicket, away from the reservoir, all water was concentrated in boat marinas, trailer parks, and RV camps. The pale, scraped-raw desert lay in scattered patches between lawns as green as Ireland.

On the California side of the Colorado River, the road ran well north of the Salton Sea and crossed a space so immense and
misunderstood, it felt like home. I crossed a few cuukutiiravi. I aimed the truck's nose toward the Pacific and what I knew would be, with each mile, an escalating din of humanity.