Eating Stone (2 page)

As they entered the rut, the Blue Door Band numbered about eighty sheep. Out of this population, and depending on the season, I would sometimes see loners, trios, or groups that ranged from five to twenty individuals. I gave the sheep full, held-breath attention, sometimes lifting my binoculars to my eyes at midday, unaware of the passing hours until I dropped them, only then noticing that the sun had nearly set.

Or I would ignore the group completely and stick my head in a book, T. H. White's The Goshawk, trading ungulates for the arts of falconry. The wind whipped the pages. The sheep bleat-growled at my betrayal.

I gazed at distant mesas. Took naps. One minute, I swore eternal devotion to my little bovid band; the next minute, I entertained a feckless urge to hop in a boat and float down the river and disappear around the bend, ditching the sheep.

Sometimes I ditched the sheep. I left them for the seductive river or for other bighorns scattered in the far-flung deserts. I sent them postcards from New Mexico, California, Mexico.

For most of the year, though, I was loyal to the Blue Door Band, preternaturally attentive—how could anyone not be?—and shamelessly anthropomorphic. I wanted the bighorns to adopt me, a kind of reverse Bo Peep arrangement. Me, their lost human. Their pet. The primate among herbivores. The bovids’ equivalent of a wolf boy.

Being with these wild animals was like prayer, a meditation that ranged from dopey to dreamy to absorption so profound, it stopped my blood. Their habits and motions formed a liturgy that mapped the prayer, liturgy as “the sanctification of time,” a place where I was willing to wait in stillness, to count on nature's rhythms to calm my messy ones.

More often, it was the singular company of mammals I delighted in, just the sheep being sheep while I perched on a boulder or rock ledge, my feet falling asleep from sitting too long.

In the warm seasons, I could enter sheep company along the river. Winter conditions often kept me at a greater distance. I had to make long overland treks on foot to watching posts above a deep redrock canyon. The posts gave an unobstructed view of the Blue Door Band's range.

A remote fold of their canyon held a pile of stones that marked the remains of a hand-built shelter. Twenty years earlier, I had
studied the shelter before it collapsed into an indeterminate pile of rubble. Then the shelter had a domed roof, a flat stone hearth, and a door frame that faced the sunrise. The door's milled boards were painted blue, the deep blue of the sky where it meets the canyon's redrock rims. This place gave me the idea for the sheep band's name.

On my watching days, I often found sheep all over the place, Velcro'd to the steep, rocky cliffs. Other times, I saw no sheep at all. I glassed the walls for hours. Both the day and the canyon felt empty. This was when sloppy meditation moved to true prayer, to words said against fear.

While you are among wild sheep, they can move out of sight the moment you bow your head to notice that the zipper on your jeans is open. Then you look up, look where they were or might be, and behold only rock and sky. When they disappeared for an entire day, or if I was at a post for several days and could not find them, I was alarmed.

Certain days, with sheep flesh present, were gifts set against a worrisome history, a past that might too easily repeat itself. Smack in the middle of the red-boned desert, these creatures lived an island life. They occupied a small enclave of wild country, surrounded by perils that could (and not for the first time) nearly decimate them.

The story of their precarious, marginal existence—the story of the continent's native fauna on their unstoppable trajectory from bounty to scarcity and even demise—was a familiar one, repeated over and over like a six-hundred-pound mantra lodged between the ears. How had this tribe of bighorns escaped the slide toward oblivion? No one could promise me that they would continue to survive.

As I sat contemplating this, the air had an edge of glass to it, the trees no burden of leaves. The light was thin and brittle. Scattered brush dressed the rust-colored canyon in brown, silver, and
pale olive. For now, on this bright winter day on the Colorado Plateau, the river glistened in the sun and the sheep browsed nearby without fear. Several ewes interrupted their feeding and stared across the gorge. Their gaze gave notice of the direction they would soon take.

Then a pale turn of light, a shift of tectonic plate, some glimmer of a sheep idea, set them in motion. The animals glided down a precipice of jumbled boulders as if it were a wave of silk. I was not invited to go along. When the sheep disappeared from sight up a rocky arroyo, faith, more than sanctuary, affixed them to the canyon.

In the tensely vertical terrain of Utah's canyonlands, this band of desert bighorn sheep, creatures of considerable weight and evolutionary investment, had once vanished into thin air.

Their kind had likely been in the southwestern deserts since the late Pleistocene. Over the millennia, in a land of heat, drought, and food plants that resemble pot scrubbers, they had become a different race from that of their ancestors. Their pelage had paled in color and their bones had lightened. They had learned how to reduce body-water loss. They had struck ironclad allegiances to particular watering holes. They were, in short, the locals.

Barely a few decades into the twentieth century, we had the locals surrounded. Like every desert bighorn on the continent, the Blue Door Band lived on an isolated remnant of its former terrain. Intolerant of human activity, place-faithful to a fault, and with no other bighorns to naturally replenish them, they were, like many species on an island of habitat, vulnerable to catastrophe.

An aggressive predator, for instance, could wreak havoc if the bighorns were in weak condition or if their numbers were few. Contact with domestic sheep could expose them to debilitating disease. Competition for food could push them off their safe places to no place. There were few other places for them to go.

When the Blue Door Band declined in the early 1960s—too
few animals to keep the population viable—the word extinct was bandied about. Their passing garnered little notice from a public that barely knew the wild sheep existed in the first place.

Elsewhere in the Southwest, attentive shepherds—wildlife managers and advocates—nudged desert bighorns along through recovery and protection programs. But this band, as remote and as isolated as if stuck on an atoll in the middle of the Pacific, slipped through the cracks, their numbers likely fallen to a point of no return. They slid into a spectacular crash. Year after year, the river cliffs held their absence, air empty of blood and breath. The sheep were gone.

Then they came back.

These late-fall mornings have a weight to them, air pressed down by steel gray clouds. Storms cross the desert, but no rain falls, only this heaviness of air. Then a curtain of wind moves in from the high mesas and pushes the weight east, stripping the cotton-woods bare of their leaves in a single gust. Behind the wind, silver trees rise from islands of their own, shed gold, and the crickets lose their voices.

Migrating bluebirds, dozens of them, rest in the storms’ wake, scattering electric blue shards in blond strands of salt grass. A single Russian olive tree holds some of the birds among its dried gold-green leaves, a Persian miniature I shall paint as soon as I study Persian miniatures for about ten years. The chile crop my husband, Mark, and I planted is harvested and dries to bloodred under a weakening sun, the summer's fire saved. From the Great Basin to Mexico, a high-pressure system settles over us. For several weeks, all edges will stay sharp. There will be no haze.

I try to spend most of my days with the sheep. November's thin light and ambient quiet make it easy to find them. They array themselves on a steep talus and stand at feed like perfect bighorns: heads down, all facing the same direction, shapely gray profiles against gray rock. Then they all turn to show white rumps atop graceful legs, more like glyphs than creatures.

At times, I post myself on a canyon rim and see no sheep.

Being with them spoils me for being without them. Then I hear a rock fall and clatter and, above the sound, I find a group clustered in a hanging arroyo, a vertical cleft in a cliff wall: tsétah dibé, in Navajo, sheep of the rock or mountain.

On one watch, I see fifteen ewes and juveniles bolt from their feed and run at top speed along a narrow horizontal ledge, single file, as if chased by a pack of starving panthers. The leader stops so suddenly—a panic-braking ur-rrch—her hooves leave skid marks in the limestone. Each one behind her crashes into the butt of the sheep in front of it: a pileup.

I spend an entire afternoon listening to horns clash, but I see no rams. The folds of the canyon hide them. I am so far from roads and humans, the only sounds are the river and the echoing impact of sheep skulls.

Another time, a thousand acres yields one bighorn. He is “skylining,” standing atop an outcrop in ram supermodel profile. Head slightly raised, muscles tense, he does not move. Ten minutes pass without a twitch. The ram is frozen in place. I follow the direction of his stare. A half mile away, high above him on the canyon wall, one ewe feeds. He knows she is there.

Occasionally, I see a group of rams and ewes together in full rut. Most of the time, I see ewes and subadults in their eat-move-eat-rest mode. This can go on for hours. Yet they are there, the day's gift, and I watch them until I am stiff or the cold bites into my hands.

Whenever I drop the binoculars or spotting scope, take my eyes away from the world ringed by a lens, the sheer distance of the horizon startles me. Desert space is space that is felt, completely and with certainty. Out here, I feel like a small dot and a big voyeur. The bighorns are not harassed (I am too far away). In fact, sometimes I can barely see them. The sky and open desert are so enormous around us, who would know if we were out here anywhere?

A few hours before dawn, the waning moon rises as a disk of nickel cradled in a scimitar of silver. The slim crescent of light makes the moon strangely bright in its own darkness. The entire orb is visible: nickel moon against indigo sky. This is the last of it. The new moon is two days away.

I load for a long spell afield: camping gear and a day pack with binoculars, spotting scope, notebook, oranges, water bottle. After a hot summer of half-clad abandon, and October's gift of edible light, I try to wrap my mind around winter and the Concept of Socks, maybe gloves if the wind picks up.

The season of diminishing light never brings out the best in me. November feels like the portal of a tunnel. Sometimes when I walk through night-dark shadows in nearby canyons, the shadows come home with me, wrapped inside my heart as if I had drunk them. Hundreds of square miles of rough, remote desert surround me, yet at times the boundless space seems to lurch and creak and shrink, then implant its mass on my shoulder bones. When this weight descends, it is time to go to church.

As morning approaches behind the moon, a cluster of flashlight beams bounces around the ranch bottom below my house. From so far away, they come as pinpricks in the blackness, but I see them circle and fuss, then switch off. The hunters have returned.

My house sits on a bench above a broad alluvial valley framed by redrock cliffs. A river flows below the cliffs, breaking up the parched desert into possibility. Between house and river, on a neighbor's cattle ranch, more than a hundred Canada geese routinely stay the night in a dense flock of brown and gray against the pale fields.

During the winter months, the geese rest and feed on the ranch bottom until the morning sun burns off the night's chill
and warms them. When the sun reaches a certain point above the red cliffs, they open wings as strong as sheet metal and as one thrumming mass rise and fly toward the river, carving a perfect arc in the cold blue air.

Several miles upriver, they settle down for the day on gravel bars and riffles of water over bedrock. Before dusk, they rise again and fly back to their resting grounds on the ranch bottom for the night.

You can set your clock by these daily risings and landings. The Canada geese will adjust for you the changing length of daylight as winter deepens. They begin and end days along the river, and that is all you need to know about time.

Although the hunters came from out of town, they know the habits of the river flock. From my window, I see their flashlights go dark and feel the tension of their waiting. I leave pack and preparations and slip out the door in a race with the light.

Would the geese forgive me, I wonder, for an act that I vowed never to commit: spooking them off their night roost, in the dense, confused dark, before they choose to go.

These are not golf course geese, the fat Branta canadensis that leave worm rolls of poop on fairways and lawns and wreak havoc on suburbia. These huge water-loving—shouldn't they be in Canada?—birds live in a desert.

They raise their goslings in a sandstone canyon and live by the miracle of the only wetlands for miles: the river and a few scattered farm ponds and livestock impoundments. They winter on the floodplain below our small town. Only the lack of open water—a rare, hard freeze—would spur them to migrate. They stay year-round. They live here.