Eating Stone (3 page)

The weekend before, the hunters had arrived before dawn and slipped behind a makeshift blind of dried brush piled high enough to hide them. I did not notice them until I heard the firing of shotguns. As soon as the morning gave enough light, the
hunters shot a dozen geese off the ground like a skeet shoot, birds killed where they stood, bodies hitting the ground with heavy thuds.

“Jumping the roost,” it's called, technically legal but “illegal by proclamation,” say most sportsmen, and clearly unethical. Hunters of waterfowl usually fire at their prey on the fly. Airborne geese make ample targets. The birds plunge to the earth with a force of downward gravity that makes you gasp. But this is fair chase.

Jump-shooting wild geese off their night field is not fair chase.

Now, a week after the ground shoot, I thrash through rabbit-brush and tamarisk, which hit my face like whips. I am wearing a ragged sweatshirt, pajama bottoms, and socks. I am late for church.

I stumble through our cottonwood grove and by memory, more than light, make my way across the field at the low end of our property. Beyond the fence lie the ranch bottom and the geese; beyond them, the river. It is too dark to see the Mercedes in the field. In the middle of the open flats, far from any roads, sits the hulking wreck of an abandoned metallic blue 1965 Mercedes-Benz, its doors flung open as if gowned starlets would soon emerge.

The eastern horizon grows a band of light, whose strength the hunters await. I still move in the flat dimension of shadows and a fading moon, but I can hear the birds—low honks, feathers ruffling. What I need is a couple of the coyotes that live on the nearby river benches. Help me out with this, I say under my breath. But none appear.

As difficult as it is to sneak through brittle, crunching plant stubble in socks and pajamas, I sneak. I climb over the barbed wire and posts of a fence corner without suffering an embarrassing evisceration. At the edge of the flock, I lie flat on my stomach, my nose full of dust.

Among the dark bird shapes is a doomed glow of white: a
domestic goose, a lonely domestic goose, which joined the flock earlier in the fall. It mingles with a seething gaggle of gray-brown birds with jet black necks and ear-to-ear chin bands. I'm waiting for it to look around and suddenly shriek, My God, I'm white! On the ground, the snow-white goose stands out like a polar bear in the Kalahari, drawing every last photon of crescent moonlight into an explosive burst of shoot-me neon.

“Up” I rasp. “Fly.”Nothing happens.

Dawn washes out the moon and makes graceful necks and wings faintly visible. Knees knocking, teeth chattering, eyes bugged in fear, the rancher's Angus cows are worried, too. We're black! they cry. If mere minutes pass, a lot of us creatures will get our butts full of buckshot.

“Up!” I whisper again. The geese waddle about, all heads raised. Good, I think. Be nervous. Very nervous.

Muttering in a dust puddle in plaid flannel is getting me nowhere. I rise up on hands and knees and growl.

When a flock of wild geese takes flight all at once, you feel them press against your heart. I sit back on my heels as hundreds of wings push a mass of air toward me. The birds lift in raucous honking, giving sound, more than sight, to follow. Coyotes begin to yip and howl from the distant benches. I hear the geese bank a low turn over the Mercedes and fly in the direction of the river.

Can they see in the dark? Will they find the water before they bash their heads on the wall of sandstone on the far bank? The cliffs loom black and solid against a pale lemon sky. I put my trust in them. The geese tuck in their white chin straps and fly, carrying with them a bird the color of fresh snow.

Each time I look into the eye of an animal, one as “wild” as I can find in its own element—or maybe peering through zoo bars will have to do—and if I get over the mess of “Do I eat it, or vice
versa?” and overcome any problems I might have with an animal's animality, or, for that matter, my own, I find myself staring into a mirror of my own imagination. What I see there is deeply, crazily unmercifully confused.

There is in that animal eye something both alien and familiar. There is in me, as in all human beings, a glimpse of the interior, from which everything about our minds has come.

The crossing holds all the power and purity of first wonder, before habit and reason dilute it. The glimpse is fleeting. Quickly, I am left in darkness again, with no idea whatsoever how to go back.

The human body wants safety. The human mind longs for satisfaction—pleasure, love, affinity, experience, imagination. Whenever I tell people that the human mind, the imagination, depends on animals, they give me a stuffed teddy bear.

I suppose that being handed a vicarious imagination stimulant is better than being handed a live cheetah. Real animals, animals as beyond the reach of our dominion as they can be in today's world, no longer figure in our lives. Our distance from them, the thinkers say, has left us with the anguish of missing the wild that is no longer in ourselves. Peering into the lives of creatures not similarly deprived soothes some of this emptiness. Attention, for all its potent sensitivity, may be the spark that rekindles imagination. It may save a listless mind.

For British writer T. H. White, as I learn when I read while out watching bighorns, a mind activated by beasts was a rescued mind. White averted mental disasters by keeping a proximity to animals and sustaining a voracious appetite for knowledge.

Described by biographer Sylvia Townsend Warner as “chased by a mad black wind,” this “hermetic and sometimes cranky man” wrote more than twenty-five books. He was an illustrator and cal-
ligrapher. He translated medieval bestiaries. He painted, fished, raced airplanes, built furniture, sailed boats, plowed fields, and flew hawks at prey. Late in life, he made deep-sea dives in a heavy old suit with a bulbous helmet, which made him look like a Zuni mudhead.

New skills “aerated his intelligence,” Warner tells us. For his 1955 translation of a twelfth-century bestiary, he taught himself Latin. Through a character in one of his novels, he hinted at himself. “The best thing for being sad,” the character says, “is to learn something.”

Much of White's knowledge of the natural world resurfaced in his teaching—he was for many years a schoolmaster—although greater experts in his subjects accused him of smattering. “But smatterer or no,” writes Warner, White “held his pupils’ attention; their imagination, too, calling out an unusual degree of solicitude—as though in the tall gowned figure these adolescents recognized a hidden adolescent, someone unhappy, fitful, self-dramatizing and not knowing much about finches.”

He wore scarlet. He was “nobly shabby.” He drank, he said, “in order not to be sober.” He kept owls and paid his students to trap mice to feed them. Fed, the owls perched on his shoulder as he sat under an apple tree, speaking to him in little squeals.

He wrote a story about geese and geese hunters, one of them a “mad general” who said one ought not to hunt geese and waved the birds away before anyone could. White's ardent love for natural beauty, his friends remarked, peaked in wild enthusiasm, then crashed into melancholy at beauty's transience.

The Goshawk, published in 1951, chronicled White's seduction by a great and beautiful bird. He used his wits and books (one of them a treatise on hawking written in 1619) to train his goshawk, but mostly it was the bird itself who taught him. He had a way of looking, White noted. “It was an alert, concentrated, piercing look. My duty at present was not to return it.”

Only several years after his time with the goshawk and other wild raptors—he called them his “assassins”—did White observe a professional falconer at work. With humility, he admitted his own errors and credited his instincts. “The thing about being associated with a hawk is that one cannot be slipshod about it. No hawk can be a pet. There is no sentimentality…. One desires no transference of affection, demands no ignoble homage or gratitude. It is a tonic for the less forthright savagery of the human heart.”

Unlike White, I have few ambitions of the autodidact. I could never bobble under the sea in an iron mudhead suit. Yet something in the mind's structure, something physical, thrives on, depends on, the notice of other beings. Attention, fierce or dreamy, affixes my butt to sheep country, to long hours on bare limestone slabs in a chilly wind. Sometimes the sheep are completely boring. Sometimes their animation moves me beyond words. Our “companionship” closes the distance. I am here to learn something. I will need this knowledge. Time is running out.

When you truly understand one thing—a hawk, a juniper tree, a rock—you will begin to understand everything. To understand everything, to know the nature of a single living thing, the facts
of a life other than my own, I chose desert bighorn sheep. Lucky me. As part of this quest, I watch very large animals having really wild sex.

Sheep sex is a fine place to go after crawling around a field with fat geese. For the goose “hunters,” I had asked the gods for simple redress: Shrivel their testicles. I am not against hunting, only slob hunting. There is, out there somewhere, a rare breed of dignified, low-tech, traditional hunters who actually care about their own souls, who believe, as Montana poet Paul Zarzyski wrote, “We owe our prey some grace, / some contemplation of their lives / here with us.”

Rescuing birds from slobbery has unnerved me. It has made me late for church—so late, the sheep may have disappeared.

At least once before, the bighorns had not simply walked over a ridge and out of sight; they had slipped away to a point of no return. They could do it again. I am accustomed to seeing them whenever I look, but is this experience trustworthy? These sheep, the Blue Door Band, are half flesh, half phantom. I witness them with astonishing calm and abject panic.

I drive miles and miles, loop around mesas, cross saddles and passes, backtrack in reverse gear, follow a map drawn on clear glass in colorless ink. After this expedition, foot travel is necessary. Pack slung on my back, I keep a brisk pace on the long hike into bighorn territory, a remote expanse of roadless desert. I move from a flock of one of North America's most ubiquitous species, Canada geese, to one of its rarest.

On this day, church has flying buttresses of upwarped sandstone and a ceiling of cornflower blue streaked with mare's tails. Vermilion mesas form transept walls. Nearly a hundred miles beyond, scattered mountain ranges raise their iris flanks into snowy peaks the shape of heaven.

Below my post, the river sings a robust hymn, flowing pale khaki with silt. Above the river, in a middle world partway up the canyon wall: eleven desert bighorns.

The sheep are animated by the motions of everyday behavior— eating, walking, resting—mixed with the conspicuous postures of a breeding group. The ewes and juveniles, here on their home terrain, try the hardest to attend to the normal. However, three rams have left their own range and now move among them.

A stocky ram lords it over the band with a sedate horniness. His headgear rolls from forehead to cheeks in a thick curl, heavy throughout the swoop and narrow at the broomed, or worn-off, tips. The round rump of his youth has taken a more angled slope and his withers are high.

While most desert bighorns are tan to gray, this ram is a dark chocolate brown. He appears to be about ten years old and, with maturity, has lost the paler hair on his belly and legs. With sleek coat, toned muscles, weight put on by summer's abundant food, this ram is in prime condition. His scrotum is the size of a ripe cantaloupe—a cantaloupe from Texas.

The sun rises to its midday height, slung low on its arc toward the winter solstice. Part of the canyon lies in shadow, but the bighorns keep to the light. In the sun, the ram's coat shines a burnished mahogany.

Over several seasons, throughout the Blue Door Band's range, I have seen a few young bighorns darken to brown as they matured, the pelage of this ram's line. In a population so small, it is possible to recognize progeny. The chocolate ram himself may be the offspring of a ram that lived in the canyon years before, a ram with a distinctive mahogany coat. For mysterious reasons, he fell off a cliff.

Today, his descendant pretends he is interested in bushes. Then he approaches a ewe in a low stretch and sniffs her hindquarters. The ewe squats and urinates. The ram nuzzles the urine and raises
his head as if looking for passing aircraft. He peels back his upper lip and drops his lower lip, revealing a set of even leaf-grinding teeth. He moves his head from side to side.

The lip curl is both social gesture and chemistry test, likely related to a ewe's readiness for mating. As he nuzzled, the ram passed some of her urine through a duct to his vomeronasal, or Jacobson's, organ for analysis. Then he casually moved off, since lip curling is usually associated with ewes that are near estrus but not ready to mate.

Ewes in a desert bighorn population enter estrus at different times. This spreads the band's mating season over about eight to ten weeks, during which rams must keep up with ovarian activity and await, for each ewe, a receptive estrus period of only about forty-eight hours.

Like most older, full-curl rams, the chocolate male lip-curls randomly and wastes few calories until the time is ripe. He exercises a rather regal nonchalance, smitten by his own very large horns. How, I wonder, can he move with that pendulous cantaloupe between his legs?

The other adult rams in the group are smaller, younger, and more frenzied. The younger of the two noses around the ewes as they feed. He stands by one of them, then suddenly tries to jump on her. He butts another. All of the ewes evade him as if he were a large mosquito.