Eating Stone (31 page)

The raft slips downriver, below the heartland of ewe range. As the sun angles its way to the horizon, it leaves blue velvet shade in the cusp of each bend. Beyond the curves, we slip into the red-gold light again.

Binoculars. Notebook, pen, camera. A stash of nuts and yak butter. Mud and plant bits stuck to disheveled clothing: woolly and tweedy, handy for sleeping in. Hair that smells like swamp turf. Calf muscles as hard as cast-iron frying pans from brisk hikes across one mountain drainage and over a pass to another. Senses sharp, vision keen. Could spot the copulation of deranged pygmy badgers from several hundred yards away.

A ride in a skull-rattling Soviet-era helicopter the color of clothes dryer lint, the one and only map of the area sucked out of the open door during a nasty patch of turbulence hit shortly before the chopper sets down on a sodden patch of tundra that is featureless but for the steaming-fresh tracks of a giant but underfed bear. The chopper flies off, will not be back for days—make that weeks—because blizzards will ground it. You figure what the hell, set up your forty-pound canvas pup tent, kill the nearest marmot with your bare hands, skin it, and cook it over a Sterno can.

Time for science.

The image of the wildlife biologist and naturalist a generation or two ago remains iconic, especially from those who chronicled their studies on the page—Murie, Mowat, Mech, Schaller, Matthiessen—and worked when the Earth still offered up vast tracts of wilderness and a bounty of creatures to observe. Even though that bounty has diminished to marginal numbers and desperate listings, and wilderness has shrunk to nature preserves within commuting distance, who would not trade their left kidney for time in spectacular country with intriguing animals?

“I built and furnished a small log cabin close to a nameless little lake near timberline in the virgin wilderness,” wrote Valerius Geist as, in 1961, he began his study of Stone's sheep in northern British Columbia.

The neighborhood offered a rich menagerie of far-north fauna: moose, mountain goats, caribou, black bears, grizzly bears, wolves, lynx, waterfowl, grouse, “clouds of willow ptarmigan,” and handsome black to silver-gray thinhorn sheep with white bellies and amber horns. Because there had been no grazing by domestic livestock in the study area, Geist said, no introduced species, no mining, roads, or towns, the animals interacted under the relatively autonomous hand of nature.

In subzero weather, when the bitter cold slowed his note-taking hand and his binoculars and scope froze or fogged up, Geist observed the sheep from the warmth of his cabin. For filming, he put on white overalls and a white towel around his head and moved closer. Sometimes he simply placed himself in full view of the sheep and waited until they grew bored with him and resumed their routines.

He watched the Stone's sheep rut, raise young, eat, move about their range, and die. In winter, they foraged on south-facing slopes. In spring, he saw green patches on the mountainsides, where vigorous thatches of new grass sprouted around the edges of long-used sheep beds that were well fertilized by defecations. He noted kills (most by wolves) and shot a few rams of his own, studying their body conformation, beheading them, weighing their horns.

In the Yukon Territory in 1965, Geist fluttered up to sub-Arctic heaven to live with angel sheep—Dall's sheep, in habitat they had likely occupied since the Pleistocene. Research on Rocky Mountain bighorns in Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada, gave him more years in the field.

The Banff sheep did not live in a virgin wilderness, he said, but in country that had seen more than a century of human influ-
ences. Elk had plunged to near extinction. Replenished with transplants from Yellowstone National Park, they promptly over-populated and mowed down valley flora.

Wolves were poisoned out—twice—and bison went locally extinct. Bears lived in the garbage dumps. Moose hung out in parking lots, listening to tourists’ car radios. The gregarious mountain sheep, too, had the part wild, part zoo, part fashion model peculiarities of park inmates: not hunted, habituated to the proximity of humans, some nearly tame, others a nuisance.

Geist considered the tameness of the Banff sheep an asset. In his 1971 classic, Mountain Sheep, he claimed that a “close association between the investigator and his study animals is, during at least part of the study, a most desirable situation, as it allows him to gain insights unobtainable in any other way.”

He seduced the Banff bighorns through their craving for salt. He brought salt to them as if it were candy. The sheep came to recognize him, follow, pester, and butt him. The rams broke out in “slugging matches” in their eagerness to reach the salt he carried. The sheep looked all over the place for him when he climbed a tree to load a camera. They used him as a snowplow, taking the path where he had broken trail.

“It is hard to imagine a wild animal more readily tamed than mountain sheep,” he wrote. “They habituate readily to man if not hunted and will accept him as a two-legged salt lick if he so wishes.”

Today's field researchers, in minimal-contact style, go to great lengths to avoid disturbing their subjects. They lurk in blinds or behind rocks or on distant rims, using powerful optical devices. They try to catch the animals doing something wild. In this light, Geist's style seems extraordinarily intimate.

Distracted by his salt offerings, the sheep let him run his hand along their heads and open their furry ears so that he could read the marking tags inside. From up close, he noted scars, broomed horn tips, bits of an opponent's hair stuck to horns, eyes with
cataracts, swellings of preorbital glands. He discovered that some had black tongues and some had pink tongues. The mucous linings of nose and palate could be black, pink, or piebald. The ewes were bigger pests than rams. The lambs were shy.

“They did not mind if I touched their bodies, parted the hair, and extracted ticks from their backs. Most sheep are extremely sensitive to being touched anywhere except their head. One could make most sheep bound up straight by sticking one's finger gently into their ribs just behind the front leg.”

Since Geist's work in Canada in the sixties, the basic techniques of fieldwork have not changed dramatically. Grunt hikes, wretched weather, hard boulders for seating. Boundless reservoirs of patience. Scorn cast upon sheep tickling. Less than charismatic note taking. (Day 1: eat, move, rest, eat. Number of lip curls and rear-end sniffs per Class III ram. Calcium content per dry weight of two leaves of Encelia farinosa. Day 2: eat, move, rest, eat.) In the past twenty years, however, sheep-watching has been joined by the business of sheep moving and the rapidly evolving technology that supports capture and translocation.

Sheep capture in the fifties and early sixties usually involved an elaborate corral or gate-and-panel trap baited with salt, sheep-food pellets, apple pulp, hay, or cabbage (they loved the cabbage), and a burly but quiet team to restrain the animals physically for tagging and treatment. (“A group of noisy, arm-waving men running up is sure to cause undue fright,” one wildlife manager wrote.)

Before plastic ear tags came into use, wild sheep wore aluminum livestock tags, plastic streamers, or tape. Handlers experimented with heat brands on horns and freeze branding that turned body hair white with a contrasting symbol or number. Odd bands of red-rumped sheep were sighted after they had been sprayed with dye from an electronically triggered nozzle set up at a water hole.

On many ranges, helicopters and nets replaced corrals and bait, with a gunner aiming a projectile syringe gun to zap drugs into a galloping animal's hip or rump. Immobilizers and neu-roleptic tranquilizers (followed by drugs that reversed the effects) numbed the sheep for the handlers, who noted that the drug etorphine often induced the munchies, an uncontrollable urge to eat, when the animal came around.

Today's capture method of choice is more often drug-free. The animals are restrained in soft mesh slings and hobbles. Blindfolds calm them. Small but efficient crews work quickly, among them a veterinarian to watch for signs of stress.

No animal has asked for his ears to be punched or his neck to carry a radio, for dye on his derriere, or for a juicy mouthful of galleta grass to be interrupted by a chase over a havoc of boulders, splitting him off from his companions.

The intervention is skilled, short in duration, and infrequent in the lifetime of these animals. It is, we believe, in their best interest. It is, as long as we refuse to relinquish our occupation of habitat or to curb our monstrous appetite for more, a strategy of island management. But it is not wildness.

Perhaps this is one reason the work of field research invokes such wraiths of nostalgia. Time with his wild Canadian sheep seemed for Valerius Geist such a pool of quiet, as much self-education as a documentation of mountain sheep biology. A nameless little lake. The virgin wilderness. The yearlings put their soft noses in your pocket, looking for salt. Your hand froze when you took notes. The mountain was not only a place but a process.

Thousands of years of evolution unfolded in a stage play of neck stretches and rump dances, dwarf birch and willow ptarmigan. Notes ranged from minute descriptions of horn growth to broad insights into postglacial dispersal. There was, too, the great, sweeping whole of the world.

“Clouds lay several layers deep over the valley and ice crystals
shimmered in the air if the sun broke through during the short winter day,” Geist wrote about his Canadian wilderness. “Snow drizzled down, winds scattered it over the slopes, and packed it hard in hollows. On sunny days standing on the mountains, I could see the sun reflected in the valley. It was cold, bitter cold.”

Binoculars. Notebook, pen, spotting scope. A stash of dried mangoes and gallon jugs of water, slugged down at frequent intervals. Sand and dry plant bits stuck to disheveled clothing: a swimsuit and sarong, a birthday suit to sleep in. Calf muscles sore from hiking, brain the consistency of polenta left in the microwave oven too long. Hair that smells like sun and river—Silt de Trias-sic mousse—from repeated swims and sixty-second styling under the cosmic blow-dryer, a finger-in-the-socket look that chic Manhattan salons would die for.

The raft brought me here, there was bear shit upriver and I ignored it, and the thought of a tent in this heat would incline me to strangle a bighorn sheep if I could get close enough to it. Screw the Endangered Species Act. It is bloody hot. I kill a cucumber with my bare hands and drink more water.

Time for science.

In a canyon heated to 105 degrees, I conjure Geist's words: “Snow.” “Ice crystals.” “It was cold, bitter cold.” Summer in the desert is a good time to read about arctic ecology, about Scott, Shackleton, Freuchen, about the explorers who froze to death or ate their dogs.

If field biologists in the desert tell you that they have on a single hike discovered half a dozen seeps in several side canyons, five new species of Eriogonum, and a rare hermaphroditic vegan pupfish, don't believe them. In truth, they have been sitting under the same juniper tree for three days, staring at a rock.

I am out here sacrificing my golden years for science. Camp lies on the beach below, a sweep of pale rose sand shelving into
milky jade water—cool water, swimmable water. My tongue hangs out. I have dragged my polenta brain to the shade of an alcove, shade that is 103 instead of 105 degrees, but without the sun's ferocious burn on the skin.

Despite the lure of the river and a cooldown, I do not want to leave this perch, for fear that my movement will alarm the sheep that feed across the wash—nine adults and juveniles, five lambs. By holding their ground in the cooler shade cast by a high wall, they are somewhat active. A few of the ewes know I am here, I think. They stare in my direction without alarm. These days, the lambs are older and more robust. They have crossed the threshold from shaky little toddlers to naughty little sheep.

One ram lamb mounts another ram lamb in what may be his first impulse of spontaneous mounting. (Among adults sorting out ritualistic aggressions, a dominant ram will act the role of a courting male and the subordinate will let him do so.) A third lamb mounts the other two in a triple hump. Already, along with the mounting, there are pretend charges with small hornless heads turned sideways, awkward rushes forward.

The lambs are born to butt. One butts a rock. Within seconds, all five are engaged in a butting orgy. They butt one another, they butt bushes, and they butt spooks. A sleek youngster with a soft face races pell-mell toward a slab of sandstone the size of an upended UPS truck. Without missing a step, he gallops up the sheer face at full speed, finding footholds invisible to me, defying gravity as if he were a big gray spider. Another lamb races up and knocks the first lamb off. Soon more join the game. They supplant one another as if the pinnacle had great significance.

The heat slows them in their play; the entire lamb gang beds down on the rocky talus, flicking their ears to keep off the flies. Suddenly, one lamb stands, jumps five feet straight up into the air from the ground. The other lambs follow suit and the place looks like popcorn gone berserk.