Eating Stone (21 page)

When the chicks matured and it was time to keep the hens and kill all but one uncorked, ambisextrous rooster named Hernando, I went inside the house and took a nap. The smell of terrorized poultry awoke me. I went to the yard and helped the neighbor whack heads and pluck. Scarlet-flecked feathers swirled in the air and stuck to the chopping block. The remaining victims took short, ungainly flights.

Centuries ago, during China's T'ang dynasty, it was taboo to eat any domestic animal that had died facing north. What could that mean? I thought with a mote of superstition. Dead and not-quite-dead chickens were scattered around the block as if they had been strafed by low-flying jets. Since they were headless, I could not tell if they were facing Canada or Wyoming.

Taboos, perhaps, underline the ritual of killing another being. They give ceremony to visceral acts. The most astonishing aspect
of my chicken ritual was warmth, body-temperature warmth— warm air, warm blood, warm feathers, warm steel knife blades, warm dead roosters. It took forever for things to cool down.

Few of us look our next meal in the eye, there to see all that is both alien and familiar. The superstore meat department tells us nothing about throat-slit goats or six thousand chickens raised in nine hundred cages. Reach into the bin and pull out a shrink-wrapped packet of skinless chicken breasts. The meat is pallid and tidy, cool to the touch.

In Montana, my life as a chicken farmer expanded into random ranch work. On occasion, I helped friends who owned a sheep and cattle operation on a tributary of the Musselshell River. Mark, my husband-to-be, and I slept in lofty down sleeping bags on top of a stack of hay bales set on an ocean of rolling prairie that ended in the startling snow-capped crest of the Crazy Mountains. When we stair-stepped off the haystack in the morning, we had to watch for rattlesnakes on the bales.

At times, I was recruited for herding work. One day, with the help of Mozart and three dogs, I moved over seven hundred sheep across the open prairie to a coulee, where they could drink water. They were not good at doing this by themselves, even when they were thirsty.

From a different direction, Mark, a more experienced herder, was pushing another band to the same coulee, but I had the Walkman, the Mozart tape, the dogs. I yelled, waved, or telepath-ically transmitted commands to the sheepdog, a border collie that held the sheep in a compact mass by encircling them entirely, even as they loped forward. Picture this: a three-thousand-legged table of wool undulating over treeless hills with a miraculous unity of motion.

The sheepdog was irrepressible. During off-duty hours, he
herded the ranch kids. The second dog, a Great Pyrenees, stayed with the sheep all her life, day and night. She was their protector, more endearing than carcasses baited with poison. She was also a sky-watcher, bred to survey the heavens for eagles and other aerial predators. She was huge. Her paws were four inches across. She was sweet and she could pulverize a coyote in fourteen seconds. The third dog, my retriever, pulverized tennis balls.

Peering far across the prairie, I spotted the sheep wagon of the neighbor's ranch hand, a man with flawless sheepherder credentials: independent, self-destructively pickled in bars during the off-season, acutely blue-collar. An old fellow, he had a crazed look that might be called “Wobbly nihilist.” He lived on coffee and canned chili—“jallypenno,” he pronounced it, “not for the timid.”

He drove a clunker Bonneville that sounded as if a handful of golf balls had been stuffed into the muffler. Each morning, his hundred-some ewes quietly surrounded his wagon. He threw open the door, rubbed his union suit, and pretended he did not see them. “Where's my girls?” he roared over their heads.

The sheep bands united at the coulee, where I left them and the dogs to Mark. We loaded four hog-tied wethers—castrated males—into the back of a truck bound for the corrals. Slowly, I drove cross-country on dirt clods and wheat stubble, the sheep bouncing around the open pickup bed like piáatas.

I looked at the sheep in the rearview mirror often. They did not appear to be upset. Ultimately, they were bound for the slaughterhouse. They would be packed into a stock truck like smashed Brillo pads and driven to their next incarnation as meat. I thought a lot about vegetarianism. I slipped Mozart into the tape deck so my cargo could hear. It was the least I could do.

Out in the desert of wild sheep, the Blue Door Band's ewes bless me with their company. Closer to lambing time, they will with-
draw and scatter. To preclude any possibility of disturbance, I will give them wider berth than they need. What they do during parturition will create a blank in our year together, unwitnessed, as it should be. Until then, I take up the usual posts and spend my days among them.

At home, Stalin, the flicker, has disappeared. The Say's phoebes are building a new nest in the eaves. Out from his winter burrow, Jackie's tortoise blinked in the bright sunlight and ate a tomato. Out in the field, the sheep and I are a bit batty with the warming season. The globe tilts on the spring equinox, tickling the ends of the day with more light, more time for mischief.

A group of nine—ewes and juveniles—works the slopes above the river. They eat the strawlike chaff of old plants. They find tasty new grasses between boulders, where shaded crevices retain moisture. As the vegetation changes with the season, so will their diet. The rumen, one of the great achievements of herbivore evolution, lets them exploit the succulent green as well as dry, abrasive plants covered with grit and dust. They bite, chew, and dump the lot into their fat fermentation vats.

The sheep nap on a canyon wall that is no longer in shadow all day, but sunlit from rim to river. They rise from their day beds and break into random frolics. Even the heavy-bellied older ewes move about with great animation. It is almost as if the whole band had been eating funny plants.

Instigated mostly by the yearlings, the sheep fill their stone world with feisty play. One butts a companion off a shrub and is then butted off the shrub by another sheep. Soon everyone is butting everyone else off their shrubs. A gang of yearlings begins to butt everything in sight. They butt rocks, yucca plants, a prickly pear cactus, the air, one another. Two yearling rams put themselves in reverse, then charge each other with a loud clonk of horns.

A sleek young ewe with a small face and a dark cape jumps
straight up in the air like a piece of toast. Toast pops spread throughout the band like a chain reaction. There are chases and leaps and races along knife-edged ledges above sixty-foot drops.

A chasm of sandstone becomes a game. Several sheep line up and leap across it. One takes a look, then walks around it. The next sheep rushes down one wall and straight up the other.

The last sheep tries the same maneuver but doesn't make the second jump. It leaps upward, misses the wall's lip, and in a split second turns its body in a complete about-face, falls, and rushes back up the first wall. Ricocheting sheep. On a warm spring day in a redrock canyon far from the troubled human world, I am watching ricocheting sheep. For a while, they all race about as if chased by berserk bobcats.

Suddenly, all of the animals stop goofing around and begin to browse and graze like serious grown-ups who have read Valerius Geist's notes about proper sheep behavior: “Adult ewes play rarely,” he wrote. “Ewes play less conspicuously than rams.” Their tricks fit the cartoon of cows grazing on all four feet as cars full of people pass them. Once the people are gone, the cows stand upright on their hind legs.

In general, today's play fits Geist's description—that is, the occasional behavior of a species that must always weigh the costs of living against reproductive success. Stress, excitation, and aggressive interactions can drain energy needed to find the nutritious forage that supports fetal growth. Thus, Geist observed, ewes are under selection pressure to reduce actions that increase living costs.

Ewes interact less overtly than rams, which are always busy modeling headgear and messing around with flagrant displays of hierarchy. When rams are among females, there is more chasing and harassment, so apart from the rut, ewes avoid them by spatial segregation on their own home range, where there is good forage with less competition. Lamb play is expected, but adult play is

“now and then,” more likely in spring than in other seasons, and among well-fed, vigorous individuals.

While the ewes cannot afford to lose energy and vigor, they nevertheless need one another. More than one study of bighorn behavior notes the stress of “loneliness.” Both genders of this gregarious species, the ewes and subadults in particular, need the group. Alone, a bighorn is more vulnerable to stress. I do not want wild sheep to be lonely.

One ewe raises her head from her shrub and cocks it, as if she had just awakened and found herself in a strange and curious place. She bolts at the group. All nine sheep scatter, rejoin, then flow up to the next tier on the layer-cake canyon wall. Rocks fall noisily as they ascend. They feed, move, feed. Slowly, with more caution than they have shown all day, they descend to the river, cross a sandbar, and drop their heads to the water for a long drink.

As my brothers and I grew up, our childhood menagerie included a little rust-colored teddy bear with a music box in his belly. The music box and windup key did not last long, but one of my brothers lugged threadbare Brownie Singer everywhere, far beyond the average teddy bear life span. Family legend says that he did not plan to give up Brownie Singer—ever. We are quite certain that they would have gone off to college together.

Instead, my father removed, shall we say, Brownie Singer from the premises. To this day, my brother remembers being told that Brownie Singer had “gone away,” and he retains the image of a little brown bear walking away into the woods.

“It's a jungle out here,” I often say as I stare at the parched, rawboned desert and shudder at the idea of similar trauma. One of my shelf dwellers is a honey-colored teddy bear with black bead eyes and a royal-blue T-shirt. I have dressed this teddy bear
in a miniature pair of white jersey-knit Fruit of the Loom briefs— tightie whities—a doll-size version of the real underpants, complete with thin blue and yellow stripes on the elastic waistband and the fold-over front fly.

That there is a global shortage of Freudians is a lucky thing. Otherwise, my possession of this toy (and my brother's fifth decade of ardent longing for Brownie Singer) might evoke disturbing interpretations of guilt, ego defects, repression, and other psychic wreckage, all of which we would blame on our parents.

With Freud passé, the cognitive sciences now focus on our identity as Homo sapiens, a primate with high-order intelligence, and on the neurological and evolutionary bases for behavior. They posit an inherited “innately organized” psyche that has been shaped by culture and the demands made on our species for survival. They call imagination “cognitive adventuring.” Arrivederci, Sigmund. Hello, Charles Darwin.

Among those who study the nature of intelligence, there is fertile dialogue (and healthy doses of disagreement) about early childhood, imagination, and the developing brain. What makes us play? Act like brats? Hold funerals for dead birds or talk to rubber balls? Give animistic powers to bananas, sticks, or the nothingness of darkness (monsters under the bed)?

Children, the prototypical pretenders, appear to require the mental stimulation of elaborate make-believe. The links between pretending and the acquisition of language are complex and not well understood. The exercise of “fictive acts of perception” may be aspects of an adult brain in training, a rudimentary but useful way for people to develop skills that will become entrenched in their thinking as they mature.

Animals play compelling roles in young imaginations even if no real ones are available. When children pretend to be animals, they largely mix fantasy with indirect experience drawn from pictures, books, and other media. They can transform their bod-
ies into a slithering python or a kangaroo with limp forefeet. They will use a toy alligator to attack your ankles. They would quake in their Goofy slippers if they saw a real one.

Animal role playing reveals more about human identity than that of the alligator. Children often use toys and animals to push the limits of social convention, for by doing so they run less risk of disapproval. That room was never cleaned because sloths were in charge. I'm eating breakfast right out of the dog's dish because I'm a wolf. Something wild makes me do what I do. Much of this make-believe fades by the age of six, psychologists say, as children shed their nave biology and move toward an adult perception of layered reality.

And here we are: grown-up and stodgy. If we are in our fifties and still on all fours eating out of a dog dish, our mommies will call the therapists. Meanwhile, the grown-up, technophilic world is strangely lonely of the flesh-and-blood creatures that spark our brains and tongues and help make us human.

What remains of several million years of coevolution between humans and wild animals has become, in little more than a hundred years, mediated, barely experiential, and marginalized on crowded, surrounded scraps of refugia. The grizzly bears are distant, eating an occasional Canadian. Life with whales comes from whale-noise CDs. Anglers use bait that simulates the taste of hatchery food, since neither fish nor fish food are wild any longer. Unless it's a rug, we are not sure how to behave around a tiger.

As I eat my oatmeal out of the dog dish, I think of T. H. White and his goshawk. The story of his attempt to tame this wild raptor is said to resemble an epic eighteenth-century tale of seduction. Ultimately, White admitted that he would succeed only if he did not, only if he never became the master of his “lunatic bird.”

White longed to learn something, but he could do so only through the unrequited love of an imperfectly subdued and se-
duced wild creature. By remaining itself, the goshawk offered the hope of its own enormous mystery, its own capacity to teach. For White, the loss of such hope was the death of the mind.