Eating Stone (42 page)

Medical diagrams made at the time illustrate the brain's interior functions. An engraving from England, for instance, dated 1840, shows a human head in profile and cross-sectioned into thirty stamp-size compartments, each with a miniature scene rendered in colorful detail.

For some of the brain sectors, the artist could find no pictorial equivalent, so words mark them: Form, Comparison, History. Some are blank—air space or lurking unmentionables? Most of the scenes hint at allegory or symbolism. A man stands at an easel, painting a landscape (Imitation). A naked boy holds a monkey's head (Mirthfulness). Toward the back of the skull is Self-Esteem: A plump man in a top hat puffs up his chest and casts a haughty gaze over the tops of everyone's heads. The diagram depicts brain sectors for Sublimity (birds, water, trees), Amativeness (a cupid), and, above the left ear, the largest sector of all: Alimentiveness (two men at a table, one drinking, the other carving a roast).

When I envision the contents of my own not very bumpy head, I see compartments that are simpler and fewer than those in the phrenologist's diagram. There is the implication of a laboratory of some kind, or the nether quarters of a natural history
museum with stuffed otters and finches—a sheep-o-matic diorama sort of interior, curated by a pack of unruly imps.

The brain imps walk sideways like Egyptians, although their kilts are the plaids of my Scots ancestors. On their feet, inexplicably, they wear Mexican huaraches. The imps are running quite a spectacle: yearning, restlessness, wonder, trouble, terror of boredom, sniveling, curiosity.

The smug little neuron-munchers think they know the biological functions of art and music: the senses giving the brain small bursts of pleasure. A mob of imps, tongue in cheek, teams up with the mustachioed imps of sarcasm and caricature, making my tales a playful hell for the literal-minded. But the imps in the language and memory sectors are gray-haired and decrepit, shuffling along in orthopedic huaraches, wreaking havoc, turning the contents of my cranium into moon cheese.

What I fear is acute perception and sensory passion gone bland, like a flatlined heartbeat: a cerebral attic chamber, a cube of a room, painted government green, with a dimming bulb and dust motes. As long as the void does not come too swiftly, I shall surrender gracefully to the moon cheese, to the inevitability of my own biodegradability

The rescue line comes from intimate witness to nature's genius, to the pure facts of the nonhuman lives that are still possible in this far-off desert. To learn something, to jolt the imps and get along in a world whose wild grows increasingly thin with each passing year, I must, metaphorically speaking, listen to bats.

One summer night on a sandy riverbank at dusk, as bats swooped and fed in the air above camp, a zoologist friend handed me a battery-operated device that picked up the bats’ ultrasonic echo-locating calls. Because of its high frequency, the naked human ear cannot detect this chatter. But the bat detector opened to us the sound track heard by the creatures themselves.

While I watched what had been, without the detector, a silent aerial display, the bats showered my ears with faint clicks. I heard
warbles and whistles, random clicks and fluid clicks that ran together in strings, followed by a burst of sound as a bat found food. If an insect shifted from a leaf, if a moth flexed its wings, the bat that heard it sent out a sonic stream.

What could be seen only faintly with our eyes—the careening flight of winged mammals as night absorbed all light—came as sounds of extraordinary complexity. Above my head, small brown mammals were yelling. Above my head lay an entire world of which I was not aware.

The human spirit, it is said, yearns for glimpses into the “inte-riority” of a being that is different, not us, something not quite comprehensible, something that moves in its own complete universe. To bat-listen, to touch an otherworld with more than one sense, to reclaim daily the notion of layered miracles, I followed the seasons of the locals. I fed the imps the glories of the stone-eaters, who, inside their big river canyon, unfolded another year.

By the time Dave and Nike took their first look at the transplanted sheep—I named them the Downcanyon Band—it was nearly December and the Colorado Plateau had settled into winter. We entered the sheep range by the river.

Ice stiffened the bowlines and the wind carried a knife's edge of polar air. At its low angle, the sun reached the canyon bottom for only a few hours during the day. Most of the time, we floated and camped in the refrigerated shadow between the massive walls of rock.

Deep in the canyon, Dave and Nike pulled out their telemetry equipment and began to listen for radio-collared sheep. We did not know where the animals had gone after being released. Some might be lost or beyond range. We dreaded a mortality signal from a sheep that had perished. Had any animals died of capture myopathy? Fallen off unfamiliar precipices?

Compared to the old homeland, the rock in this terrain was
redder, blockier, and more consolidated, the walls steeper and with fewer rockfall chutes and draws for ascent and descent. The sheep could be invisible, midway between river and rim on a wedding-cake tier, moving horizontally along the canyon wall, with plenty of food and water from springs and potholes. To travel vertically, to come down to the river from this middle world, few passages could be found on cliff faces so smooth and sheer that they seemed sliced.

Dave and Nike preferred to back up each radio signal with a confirmed sighting. In this way, they could also track and count the unmarked animals in the groups. However, this rugged landscape offered formidable challenges—an easy wildness for sheep, but difficult for biologists. “We will pick up radio signals,” Dave said, “but we may not see the sheep.”

Several miles upriver from the release site, the first signals came in. Nike matched their frequencies with her notes: two ewes and a ram. We floated farther downstream and received clear bleeps from the rest of the collars. A rush of excitement rode a wave of relief. All marked animals in the Downcanyon Band were present and accounted for. The helicopter rides and handling had not harmed them. They had survived us.

At one camp, we hiked to a perch on the canyon wall opposite the sheep range, high above a river fringed with ice and coral-colored sand. With her headset and twirling antenna, Nike appeared to be listening to another planet. But she drew in signals on two collars, and we all grabbed our binoculars. For the first time since their bolt from the transport crates, live sheep came into view.

A ram, one of the largest we had moved, fed on a talus with five ewes. All six animals were fat, sleek, and a bit glassy-eyed with the rut. Although breeding season held them to this piece of canyon, they were likely still wandering; where we found them would not necessarily be where they would stay. Eventually, the males would figure out their Ram Land. The ewes would map
lambing grounds and places of safe descent to the river when summer's heat came and they took their young to the water.

For now, they fed quietly in sheep heaven under the cold, dry clarity of a heliotrope sky. We watched them for a long time. The ram had no male company at the moment, so we hoped he and his plump love bunnies were making new little sheep like crazy, bringing the wild back to the high red stone that had been empty of their kind for so long.

In our last camp on the winter river, Mark dreamed that we were transplanting canyon wrens, gray-feathered denizens of the redrock country. We gave them tiny radio collars, rolled them up in miniature mattresses, and carried them to crevices near springs. Upon release, they fluffed up and sang their lucid melody of descending notes.

I dreamed of a sheep band on the run, alarmed by a predator or an unseen spook but clearly racing in a panic for safe ground. They rushed up a high slope. From their side of the rise, they were blind to a sheer drop-off on the other side. But I could see it; I could see that they were heading toward a cliff that could not be descended, not even by agile bighorn sheep. I feared they would rush to the edge and pour over it in a waterfall of broken bodies.

They ran up the rise, oblivious to the looming precipice, ewes and lambs crowded together in a side-heaving run. I tried to warn them, but I wore the cement shoes of a dream.

Less than ten feet from the abyss, at the last possible second, the lead ewe turned in a dead run. The turn was neither panicked nor abrupt, merely taken as if she were rounding a bend in a well-marked trail. She did not break her pace, and the others followed in a smooth stream that dismissed the chasm of space beyond their withers as mere scenery.

When I awoke from my dream, I wondered, Are the new sheep on ground so strange, unmapped, and unmemorized, they will not anticipate its perils? Will they know when to turn?

For bighorns, topography is memory, enhanced by acute vision. They can anticipate the land's every contour—when to leap, where to climb, when to turn, which footholds will support their muscular bodies. To survive, this is what the band would have to do: make this perfect match of flesh to earth.

Scott, the veterinarian, reported back to Dave and Nike on the tests that he had performed during the capture. The results showed the herd to be in good condition. He said he had never seen such “clean” sheep. Mites, parasites, pathogens, sinusitis— none of these presented serious problems. The native stock was healthy stock.

Soon after the winter trip, when the rut had ended, one of the older rams crossed the river, climbed out of the other side of the canyon, and wandered far to the north. He took another ram with him and left younger rams behind with the ewes. He sent no postcards. Although he frequented an escarpment well away from domestic sheep, Dave and Nike kept an eye on him. The fall rut— his blood instinct for access to mates through the ritual of head bashing—might bring him back to the canyon again.

In the spring, the radio on one of the ewes sent a mortality signal. Her carcass lay on an impossible (for human hikers) precipice and could not be reached for a necropsy. Nike speculated that she had fallen, a victim, perhaps, of still-unknown terrain, a turn not taken in time, a misstep or miscalculated leap. Now she was raven food.

The ewe's death and the walkabout rams left twenty-one of the twenty-four transplants coming out of winter in their new habitat. By late spring, the ewes brought seven more to the water, seven healthy lambs.

On a midsummer trip, Mark and I floated past a group on the banks: two lambless ewes, two ewes with their young of the year, and a long-legged young ram so handsome and virile, he seemed
destined to become the Downcanyon Band's Mr. Perfect. As we floated, they walked along the river in the same direction, stopping occasionally to feed on hackberry leaves. Eventually, we lost sight of them and camped eight miles downstream.

In the morning, we awoke to find all seven sheep directly across from us, a hundred feet up on a narrow ledge, dozing in their beds. Somewhere along the way, they had picked up an extra lamb. This young female seemed unattached to any adults. (When we told Nike about the extra lamb, she wondered if it might be the orphan of the dead ewe, old enough to feed and climb and rejoin her matrilineal band.)

From their perch, the sheep watched us as we sipped coffee on the beach and did our camp chores. I set Nelson, the toy ram, out on a boulder to stare back at them. I could see the horizontal black irises in their amber eyes; they were that close, a choice of resting place that seemed almost deliberate. “They followed us,” I told Mark; “they wanted to be with us.” That chopper crap, they said, all is forgiven!

A band of lemon yellow sun illuminated the sheep on their morning ledge. Ears twitched. Necks were scratched. The sheep acted as if they had lived on these walls forever, with no memory of the Blue Door range. One of the recumbent lambs rested his head on his mother's rear flank. She was approaching her prime, a well-conformed four-year-old with a pale, smooth nose that had rested in the palm of my hand. For this gift, for the wild-ness that she surrendered to my intrusion, I had still found no reciprocation.

A stubborn survivor of mountain lions, drought, captures, a broken leg, and an epidemic of disease, San Andres Ewe 067 had lived on her New Mexico mountaintop alone after the catastrophic die-off of desert bighorns on the San Andres Wildlife Refuge. Later, she was joined by sentinel rams, her own offspring, and the
transplanted stock, which brought with them the promise of wild sheep back in the mountain range again.

In her fourteenth year, the last indigenous bighorn sheep in southern New Mexico died one winter day on a steep slope above the shimmering white playas of the Tularosa Basin.

Mara Weisenberger, the refuge biologist, tried to piece together the circumstances of the old ewe's death. I found myself reading her note with a wildly beating heart.

“We knew she had been on borrowed time for the past few years and were expecting her life to end at any time,” Mara wrote. “But it didn't come any easier when it actually happened.”

When she and Kevin Cobble examined the death site, a nearby leg snare held a sixty-pound female mountain lion. “Kevin gently pulled [the ewe's] carcass just away enough from the lion so that we could perform a necropsy. It was surreal as we worked, with the lion a few feet distant, hissing at us, and only wanting to get away.”

The site showed no blood in the area, no sign of a struggle or the hemorrhaging of a neck wound, things that typify predation. Her radio collar bore no scratches or scrapes. The carcass had been dragged a short distance. Only her heart and lungs had been eaten.

They found a compound fracture in the ewe's front leg, the same leg that had been broken in a capture ten years earlier. Mara didn't think the second fracture was a fresh or debilitating break. “The ewe had fat on her internal organs and her bone marrow looked good, indicating she was in good condition. She was pregnant with a ram lamb.”

Mara and her colleagues could not determine with certainty how the old ewe had died. Had a mountain lion attacked and killed her, or had she died in some other way—in her sleep, her eyes closed and heart stopped—and then a lion scavenged her carcass?