Eating Stone (19 page)

The ram ambles along the saddle, then stops on a ledge above me and acts like he is peering over my shoulders into my notebook. He shows off his petrified turban. It weighs about twenty-five pounds, nearly 10 percent of his body weight. He tips it toward me. Don't jump.

With another ram, the sheer size of his horns would start a conversation. Worn tips and scars on the main horn shaft come from abrasion, rubbing, and butting—butting other rams, butting cactus, trees, fence posts, rocks. The ram aims a vibrato bleat in my direction. For some odd reason, I think of biting, not butting. Bighorns are notoriously inept at biting humans.

The ram moves farther along the ledge, away from me. For a long time, he stares down-canyon. The stare is a fair indication that he is about to embark on a major move. He looks in the direction of his next excursion. Time marches on. I am sore and stiff from sitting. He stares. I think he's stuck. We could be out here a long time.

When bighorns die in the desert, they leave their bones. I decide to spend the remainder of my hiking life on the high river cliffs and in the big red side canyon, searching for a dying place, shelves of cliff strewn with skulls and bleached femurs and rib cages. Bones might shed light on the mystery of twenty years of invisible sheep.

A biologist friend once told me that there are ways to read “genetic signature,” to determine the Blue Door Band's founder herd and its relation to other wild sheep in the region. What is apparent now, without such tests, is that this native population recovered itself.

I close my notebook and pack it away. The side canyon whirls its stone meanders across the desert, opens its portal to the river bottom, and spreads a fan of coral dunes below its mouth. In the distance, the tilted slabs of limestone and marlstone mark the river's other bank.

Winter paints its final colors along the river's border: smoky-green greasewood and sage, charcoal black tamarisk branches, the mahogany trunks of Russian olive trees, swathes of bare red-gold willows. At the seam of sandbar and river, snow-white salts frost the rose-colored sand.

The river runs jade when I look at it straight on, cobalt when I look upstream, in the direction of the light. This light is why I stay so long. The telling of it is like talking secondhand blind. Skin knows this beauty better than voice.

On this February day, the bighorns have emerged from their thin air of invisibility. The big ram unlocks his gaze and moves
forward. Place-faithful to the core, he heads toward Ram Land. Down-canyon, the ewes are a few months away from lambing season and from teaching me, if I pay attention, the strength of imagination. My job is to be human.

The ram walks over the slickrock, a gray-brown animal against stone the color of a clay pot. The pale bands that run up his hind legs, from fetlock to hock joint and then to rump, are the color of dust. He and his kind deal in certainties that are opaque to us. Theirs is not an ambivalent species. When they go missing, we must simply refuse to turn them into apparitions.

The lingering cold, the powder-dry soil, the paucity of green—in early March, the Colorado Plateau is not yet pliant; the earth has no give. This is the month of nature's held breath and, at any moment, an abrupt exhalation. In wetter places, the transition would be described as the thaw, a melting that is fluid, headlong, and muddy. In this desert, the release is felt in rock and air, and you must pay close attention if you are to witness its precise moment.

Mark and I load up the big white-water raft with camping gear and slip down the river on an early-season trip. The sun has grown warm but not quite trustworthy. Along the riverbanks, the cottonwoods still rise as gray lace. The Russian olive trees expect migrating bluebirds in branches still laden with a few pale olives and limp dry leaves.

Beyond the banks, Mormon tea, yucca, and sage hold winter's scant green. On south-facing slopes, there are signs of spring's avant-garde: shoots of cranesbill and a purple mustard plant that emits a faint scent of stale washcloths.

The Canada geese do not fly off as we pass them. They are reluctant to leave their gravel bars, where they show brooding behavior in incessant bassoon honking and fretful struts, necks roped out straight ahead of their bodies. There are pairs; there are threesomes. They are noisy. As the day heats up, they spread their big charcoal wings in the sun. I put on my river sandals and peel off a few layers.

The canyon walls narrow into a hurricane of upriver wind, and
we are stuck with it all day. Often the raft comes to a standstill. From blade to grip, the oars carry the tension of opposing forces—downriver current and upriver gale. Sand from the talus dunes blasts us so hard, the grains go into the mouth without the mouth being open. My hair hurts.

My bare toes freeze up and turn ivory and numb, like toes on a wax figure in Madame Tussaud's museum. I leave the boat to walk along the bank and circulate the blood. My toes turn pink again. The wind slams me, but I walk faster than Mark can row against the gale.

We camp across the river from three watchful geese, a male and female and a juvenile from last year's brood who resists long-overdue independence—the goose equivalent of clingy. The sun lingers; the wind leaves calm in its wake. In the quiet, we cook dinner over coals in the fire pan and, because I forgot to pack plates, serve it on a slab of driftwood set between us, like cave people at a banquet.

Before dusk, we spot two bighorns on the canyon ledges across the river. One of the animals is a familiar older ewe, distinct by her nearly white coat and a sagging radio collar. The other ewe has a taupe face that is darker than her body and a blackish spot that looks like a scar on her flank, near the rib cage. The bellies on both ewes are taut and furry. My binoculars are equipped with X-ray vision. I see lambs in utero.

Wherever you are, wherever you go, there are untamed creatures nearby that need your attention. Unplug your modem. Slam shut your self-help books. Quit standing around like a wall trout. Get to work.

Invite warblers to your neighborhood with shaggy plots of greenery. Learn everything you can about the bandit-eyed raccoon that stares at you through your sliding glass door, demanding enchiladas.

Mark the direction of jet black darkling beetles marching up a red dune like a troop of miniature helmets. East? South?

Let black widows live in your soffits.

Lie on your back on a breezy sweep of beach and stare at the undersides of magnificent frigate birds. Master a hyena's laugh and use it when in the presence of politicians.

Admire the male midwife toad, who carries fertilized eggs on his back for a month. Understand that certain species of mollusk can change their gender. Know that from a ball afloat on tiny filaments inside its fanned shell, a sea scallop can tell which way is up.

Crane your neck. Worm your way. Wolf it down. Monkey with things. Outfox your foe. Quit badgering your tax attorney.

Take notes on the deafness of coral, the pea-size heart of a bat. Be meticulous. We will need these things so that we may speak.

The human mind is the child of primate evolution and our complex fluid interactions with environment and one another. Animals have enriched this social intelligence. They give concrete expression to thoughts and images. They carry the outside world to our inner one and back again. They helped language flower into metaphor, symbol, and ritual. We once sang and danced them, made music from their skin, sinew, and bone. Their stories came off our tongues. We ate them. They ate us.

Close attention to mollusks and frigate birds and wolves makes us aware not only of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. “Without mystery life shrinks,” wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson. “The completely known is a numbing void to all active minds.”

In a small town near an immense expanse of open desert, there is rapt attention to the homeland bestiary. The new season brings it alive again, pitching it toward brazen fecundity.

Migrating white-faced ibis arrive shortly after we return from the river trip. Meadowlarks perch on fence posts, their melodic fluted songs not yet organized. Stalin, a red-shafted flicker with an agenda, returns to the premises. He batters the house's stucco like a schizoid jackhammer, obsessed with opening a passage so that he can personally inspect the roof trusses.

One day, Stalin knocks over a nest on a beam above the deck, a nest left empty for the winter by a pair of Say's phoebes. He does this every year, like clockwork. Between stucco-demolishing sessions, Stalin alights on the beam and shoulders the nest off the edge. The nest drops onto the stone deck and falls apart.

I gather up the wreck of grass, twigs, and fluffy seed-head tufts gathered from nearby rabbitbrush and Apache plume. As the phoebes built the nest last spring, I set out dust bunnies— my house breeds plantations of lint under the furniture—and the birds used them for nest lining.

Inside the nest's downy well is the skeleton of a fledgling phoebe, one of last year's clutch. The bones are pure white and as fine as thread. The skull fits on my fingertip.

River, ibis, bighorns: These are not simple ciphers, but sensations, the season's pulse and call. They deflect a panic and pain at the rush of time. I use their rhythms to keep time in slow epochs rather than headlong years. I self-righteously refuse to be digital. I tell time by the herpetofauna in my friend's closet.

Jackie lives in a stuccoed adobe-brick house on two acres of plant and animal husbandry, a typical mix for many of us in this small desert town. Garden, horse, chickens, dogs, a handsome little grandson on frequent visits, all of this surrounds Jackie in routine motions of hard work and pleasure. I go over there to track one of the markers of spring.

In mid-March, like an eight-pound clock, Elliot, the desert tortoise, rustles inside a burrow beneath a mound of straw in Jackie's yard. All winter, he has hibernated in stillness. Shortly before the equinox, he will sense the warming season and dig his way out into the world again. Jackie listens daily for scrabbling noises.

For most of his ten years, Elliot hibernated in the closet. You would go over to Jackie's old house, have a cup of tea, and think, Oh, there's a desert tortoise in her closet.

When she built her new house, Jackie made him an outdoor home with a clay-packed turtle fun yard surrounded by a curving fence of close-set upright log posts. (Rectangles, she thinks, scream incarceration.) She buried the posts a foot and a half underground so Elliot wouldn't tunnel himself out and lumber toward the horse's corral and, if a hoof didn't squish him or a coyote or gray fox didn't eat him, head on down to Phoenix. Elliot is an expert digger, able to excavate a deep burrow up to thirty feet long with an opening shaped like his own profile: a half-moon.

From March to October, when he is outside, the tortoise follows the track of sun and shade across his yard. He burrows into the soil when temperatures soar—estivation, a summer dormancy. Water from a dripper hose moistens a patch of earth, keeping it cool when he visits it. It's a kind of paradise, this piece of Elliot's desert, although he did not mind his closet days. His burrow there was safe and dark. Shortly before his emergence, Jackie played reggae and other music with a strong beat to mimic the vibrations that springtime might naturally arouse.

Today, the only sign of life in the pen is a border collie puppy sprawled in the sun, warming her belly. The tortoise lies hidden in his winter burrow, his digestive system greatly slowed. Any day now, the metabolism of hibernation will change. He will need to eat, drink, rehydrate himself, and come out into the world.

With a fifty-million-year lineage, desert tortoises have adapted to the extreme aridity of the Sonora and Mojave deserts, displaying variations in each place. Their large bladders store water and convert urinary wastes efficiently, keeping them alive during long periods without rain. They are herbivores that occasionally eat bugs and meat along with grasses, succulents, cactus fruits, and wildflowers—a gluttony of wildflowers, for their moisture.

Desert tortoises can live to be sixty to a hundred years old. They reach sexual maturity somewhere between age fifteen and age twenty. In the wild, they may not run into a mate for several years. Females have adapted to male inactivity and population crashes by retaining sperm for up to two years, ensuring fertilization long after copulation.

A mature tortoise is about fourteen inches long, with a short tail and stocky limbs—sturdy forelegs for digging and strong hind legs, round like an elephant's. The dome-shaped carapace is horn gray, with fine-lined scutes. Underneath, the breastplate, or plastron, is yellowish. A male's plastron is concave at the posterior so he can fit nicely atop the female in his amorous mount. Her plastron is flat, maybe so she won't skid away.

Jackie has watched her box turtles mate. She made them a private semicovered place, but they preferred to do it on the patio, in full view, when she had guests.

On the sex patio, the act took a while, she told me. “I never saw any, uh, thrusting. Just mount and grip.” Desert tortoises are known to be a more gregarious species and, in their lovemaking, quite vocal.