Eating Stone (39 page)

Dave and Nike talked of putting some bighorns in the bank, so to speak. They immersed themselves in studying the option of splitting the herd, of capturing and moving sheep farther downriver to safer grounds, to remote regions of the greater homeland, historic range of the canyon's bighorns but long empty of sheep.

Factors more complex than God had to be weighed in such a decision, yet the most critical were the most basic. The new habitat was superb—food, water, escape terrain. The source herd would not be jeopardized by the loss of selected individuals. The chances of survival were thought to be high. If the transplant were to happen, the work had to be done before the rut.

Across from me, the rams bedded down to rest and ruminate. Each animal's rumen transformed fibrous masses of canyon plants into nutrients, energy, and, out the other end, shiny chocolate pellets with nipples and dents. Mr. Perfect dropped his feathery eyelashes over his liquid amber eyes. How, I wondered, can one sleep with head upright when carrying twenty-five pounds of horns between one's ears?

There were other developments in Ram Land. A year ago, Dave and Nike had determined that their wildlife agency could offer a ram for harvest, the first of the native herd to be hunted (legally) since the band's comeback. The ram-ewe ratio and ram age classes, they thought, could support a single hunt.

Although not all research agrees about the effects of removing older, dominant rams, such selection by hunting is generally accepted as having no long-lasting harm. At eleven years or older,
the rams are thought to be near natural demise and thus expendable, not exactly useless, but geezers nonetheless. The hierarchy of dominance then changes and younger rams become active breeders.

The wildlife agency auctioned a ram permit for the Blue Door Band. In a somewhat carpe diem manner, the hunter chose and shot a ram with a radio collar. Collars are secure but loose and tend to rub the hair on a sheep's cape. This hunter took home a trophy with a shaved neck. He gave away the meat. The radio collar was taken in and retired.

The killed ram was a good ram, not quite a geezer. He left behind others of sound breeding stock. He was Dave's favorite ram: Ram 1000. The ram I am about to eat.

Since the hunt, our piece of meat had resided in the freezer, next to the orange juice. Thawed, it was a deep burgundy red with a pale white vein of gristle. I stir-fried garlic, poblano chilis, tomatoes, and cilantro from our garden. I sliced the meat, then sizzled it over the flame. Cooking, it smelled like mutton, tender but neither gamy nor strong.

We had not performed the rituals of a hunter, the wielder of death and handler of the animal out of whom all life had been drained. I felt uneasy with this, irresponsible.

Mark lit slim tapers in the silver candleholders that once belonged to my grandmother. We rolled up vegetables and meat into warm corn tortillas and sat down at the table. Desert bighorn fajitas.

Now, fork hovering over my plate, I think, This is want, not need. I could have given the meat to our coyotes. I can hunt and gather in the aisles of grocery stores. I need not kill, eat, and wear these sheep. I watch, record, and draw them, removed from raw flesh and blood. I prefer animals that are animated—I cannot bear
their stillness. This meal feels like a submerged soul reaching for a deep, deep bond.

The taste of the meat lingers on my tongue. Rain and river. Bedrock to soil to plant to milk to bone, muscle, and sinew. I am eating my canyon. Eating stone.

Sunrise in the redrock desert has the calm of water. Strange that it be thus in a parched expanse of rock and sand. Yet this is how it comes: a spill of liquid silence, sunlight the color of embers, every surface bathed in it. The heart aches to live to see the start of a day, every day, luminous in the unmoored distance.

How can there be such quiet among a most garrulous species grouped together in space and task—no voices yet? I believe that the quiet prevails because all of us are desert people. We are known gazers into the horizon at early hours. That pause between social discourse and the solitude of the senses feels acute today, a day that will deliver into our hands, briefly, the wildest flesh of the canyon.

Perhaps the quiet is accidental prayer, an attentive stillness that conflates perception with desire. Maybe it is sleepiness at the early hour or the fact that some among our group are quite bashful. The low sun torches the buttes and mesas around us. Each saltbush stands distinctly silver-green on the cayenne red pediment, casting its own violet shadow. The light is what we watch, what steals our voices. When the light changes, when the fire in it passes, we talk.

Dave and Nike brief us on the day's procedure. The helicopter will bring two sheep at a time into the landing area. Two carry teams will move them to the work tent. Three or four people can carry each mesh sling by its handles, maybe more for a big ram. Another person should be on the horns, holding the head upright so the animal doesn't regurgitate its rumen and choke.

Dr. Scott Bender gives instructions, as well. The sleeves of his work shirt are rolled back. An object with tubing sticks out of his back pocket. You could pick him out of a crowd and know that he is a veterinarian. He has assembled an array of medical kits on the tailgate of his pickup. Earlier, he recruited Bill Downey, a friend, and me as his medics. I am to work the blood samples.

Mark works on a carry team. Dave will attach radio collars and punch in ear tags. For two days, Nike will not separate herself from a clipboard with papers that create the first profile of every sheep brought in from the canyon. She has the look on her face this morning of someone holding it all together. At several points, she will ride out with the chopper crew to help locate animals she wants for the translocation, seeking ratios of gender and breeding age for the new band.

Mara Weisenberger is here from the San Andres National Wildlife Refuge in New Mexico. She has brought two colleagues, Guy and Coby and four aluminum crates that she designed specifically for transporting bighorn sheep. Five others have come from the Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife.

We will be responsible for the following: blood samples, ear and nasal swabs, mouth drench, inoculations, parasite check, body measurements, body temperature, respiration monitor, physical exam, microchip, radio collar, ear tags.

“Two sheep will come in each load,” Scott says. “We'll work them at the same time. I want no more than six minutes per sheep. Our handling should be over and done within six minutes.”

We think we have a wait ahead of us: coffee, relaxed postures, quiet talk, the desert silence still an enchantment.

Scott hardly finishes speaking when a pinpoint of sound emerges from the direction of the river. Then it comes quickly, the five-rotor T-tailed yellow bubble and its throaty roar. A cable dangles from the helicopter's belly. At the end of the cable hang double-decker slings, one above the other: upstairs, in silhouette, the curl of a ram's horns; downstairs, two ewes. Three sheep.

After more than a year of preparation, wild sheep are being put into the savings bank. From the band of eighty sheep, twenty-four will be selected, captured, and moved to a release site far downriver. If perils befall the Blue Door Band, bighorns native to this canyon will survive in this second homeland.

The new range is deeper into the backcountry wilder, and farther from domestic livestock and development. The sheep will have abundant forage. Springs, potholes, and the big river can quench their thirst. The canyon walls provide nearly ideal escape terrain as well as niches and boulder caves for lambing. There are superb views into the Paleozoic chasm. There is room to grow from founder stock and to map a considerable expanse of home range. The new sheep place, in fact, looks like home. It is the habitat of ancestors, a slice of river canyon that has been empty of their kind for thirty or forty years.

You would wish, in a purist's world, that the animals could move to new sheep places by themselves, find their way to wild quarters of their own choosing. Yet their own evolutionary commitment as sedentary specialists—homebodies—makes them reluctant pioneers. And for surrounded, relict bands such as this one, the risk of self-dispersing to the “wrong” place is deemed too great. To colonize safe, unoccupied habitat, twenty-first-century desert sheep need this ark setup and our team of Noahs. They will take a high-tech ride to bighorn paradise.

They will be taken from the canyon of their birth to the nearby work site in mesh slings dangling from the helicopter, undergo less than six minutes of handling, and then be transferred to the San Andres crates. The crates will be trucked overland to a rim high above the canyon bottom, then carried by the chopper to the release site on the riverbank.

Dave and Nike have timed the two-day operation for sheep well-being and transplant success. Lambs are long weaned. The
rut has yet to begin; they will not be moving pregnant animals. October bears the gift of clear skies and calm flying weather. Because the day promises to be hot and sunny, we have begun early, reducing the addition of heat stress to the fright of capture. A portable canopy, a sort of minimalist gazebo on tent poles, shades the work tarp, where the medical and tagging work is to be done. Crates sit in the back of pickups, one per truck, ready for sheep storage.

From the work camp, it is impossible to see the chase and capture, the chopper's plucking of an animal from a chasm of vertical stone. About this I am insanely curious yet relieved to miss the split-second crossing from “wild” to “managed” as the net falls over a running animal and it becomes our hostage.

Instead, I imagine fat, temporarily deaf sheep with their noses in bushes, oblivious to a giant metal locust orbiting their heads. They dream a funny dream. They awake in a new place with a Where the hell am I? look and start eating again. I envision the old ewe in the San Andres trotting into her wind cave and staying there until every last chopper in the universe goes away.

The helicopter crew works on contract through a private company in Wyoming. Gary, the pilot, is reputed to be the best in the wildlife-capture business. On board with him are a net gunner and two athletic youths known as “muggers.” On the ground, a fifth crewman works the cable to its load and drives a fuel tanker.

After Nike briefs them on the lay of the land and desirable captives, Gary and his chase crew fly the canyon's spine until they find sheep—let's say a ewe, since the new band requires more ewes than rams. The ewe bolts and runs with a group that bounds across pinnacles and broken rock. Unlike pronghorn, bighorns are not endurance runners. They are climbers. Their lungs are not built for a long chase. A long chase also risks heat stress and a fatal metabolic disorder known as “capture myopathy”

The ewe may make short dashes, then stop and scramble under an alcove or boulder until the helicopter nudges her out. Gary uses the helicopter as an agile tool, moving up, down, sideways, or at a standstill hover.

Where there should be chopper doors, there is empty space, a wide gap at the craft's sides, where gunner and muggers hang halfway out, held by harnesses and safety straps. When the ewe runs into the open, the gunner fires a cartridge-propelled net over her head. The entanglement holds her. The muggers jump down from the helicopter and approach. They grab the horns, lift the head, and blindfold the ewe. The darkness of the blindfold instantly calms her. The blindfold hides from her the sight of her captors. It spares us from seeing her fear.

The muggers hobble her feet with a webbing strap and secure her into the nylon-mesh sling, her sternum down and her head upright above the sling's top edge: a ewe in a drawstring bag. They attach the cable and reboard the chopper. Gary slowly raises his aircraft and lifts the animal off the ground. Then she is in flight at the end of his pendulum.

The sheep seeking has unfolded quickly. The first round captured two ewes and a ram. Now the helicopter hovers over the landing knoll, spraying us with whirling dust and plant debris. Gary sets his parcels down as if they held the last eggs on Earth; then he lifts off to give safe height to the rotor blades. The carry teams run into the dust cloud and pick up the sheep.

The inexperienced among us glue our antennae to the experienced, learning from them with barely a word passed between us. I see in Mara the grace that keeps her New Mexico flock and hope alive. She is careful, smart, calm. I am amazed by the quiet of this work. No one has told us to whisper and glide our motions, yet we do so as if by instinct.

The hobbled trio lies on the tarp in (one hopes) a comfortable position of sternal recumbence, heads held up, no necks twisted or legs crushed. Scott moves from animal to animal, watching for injury, labored breathing, overheating, drooling, and other signs of stress. Bill administers vaccines. Mara and Coby help Dave affix ear tags and radio collars to the ewes’ necks. Nike assigns each collared animal a number and radio frequency.

I hand medical kits to Scott. He passes me a hypodermic needle full of blood. With the needle, I pierce the seal on a glass tube and press blood into it, dividing the rich red fluid among the four vials. Empty, the vial was as cool as an October morning. Blood-filled, it passes the animal's body heat through the glass to my hand.