Eating Stone (30 page)

Snowy tufts of evening primrose dot the upper decks of the sandbar, and the jumbled talus holds rock gardens of prince's plume with swords of yellow blooms and the distinctive fanned gray-green rosettes of narrow-leaf yuccas. The river flows by in a sheet of tawny water, sunlit and dreamy. Far upriver, the raft rocks gently on its tether. Dave stops hiking and appears frustrated. He wonders if we should take our sweep formation away from the river, higher on the talus.

I think about dropping down to the river. Rising thermals carry the spiced honey scent of wet sand along the scrim of water and sandbar. I wasn't going to cross the wretched camelthorn, but I do. And there it is, our quarry, in a spread of brush. I call to the others.

The dead ram lies on his flank, his neck braced back and his nose partly buried in the sand, as if he had slid a few feet on his side. It is neither the repose of violence nor of a go-to-sleep death. Skin, limbs, radio collar, ear tag—all are intact. No sign of bobcat, mountain lion, coyote. No blood, no puncture wounds. The cliff is set too far back from the sandbar for a free fall and crash landing.

Above the body—it is too fresh to call it a carcass—and higher on the sandbar, where the camelthorn thins, there are two bedlike depressions and a faint fretwork of what appear to be the tracks of a gray fox, a visitor rather than the perpetrator. In this dry air, there is not yet rot, not even a cloud of flies. The ram has not been dead for long. On cue, two ravens ride the air to a nearby outcrop and perch quietly, as if three pounds of ebony birds against red rock were invisible.

Sand covers the ram's nose. Eyes normally amber and having dark horizontal pupils have turned black and dull. The horns flare back in a swoop of rough, hardened keratin, their tips broomed and splintered. One horn has lost an inch-wide chunk of outer sheath, probably a battle scar. An uneven patch of fur on the forehead may also be an old abrasion from head bashing.

The ram is about nine years old, caught and collared when he was three, according to Dave and Nike's records. He is Ram 930, seen with a bachelor band along the river not long ago. He was limping, Mark said. Mark had watched the other rams pick on him. They butted him off his food and bed. One ram pressed against him and raised a front leg in a series of powerful ventral kicks.

Nike is surprised that despite what might have been a frac-
tured or broken leg, the ram stayed with the boys rather than sequestering himself. “An injured sheep usually goes off alone or to the periphery of the group. They don't intermingle as often. It's a protective instinct.”

The one-horned ram that resembled Ferdinand apparently crossed the river for this reason—to avoid harassment. (We had not seen him for some time.) But Ram 930 remained with the group. His bum leg might have resulted from a blow or a fall, but when Mark saw him, he was not removing himself from the aggressive rams. Judging from his age and horn size, 930 was likely a dominant ram himself.

We stand beside the dead animal. Dave is getting his knife, his very big knife, ready. He and Nike are edging toward a hypothesis that no predator was involved. Nor had the ram lost his balance on a cliff above us and fallen out of the sky to the camelthorn patch. The bad leg did not overtly kill him. Mark had seen him mobile, butting off the big rams that were butting him.

Nike looks down at the ram in the sand and camelthorn and pronounces her verdict: “Ram murder.”

I have never seen a knife as sharp as the one Dave holds in his hands, poised to begin the necropsy. If you put yourself within an inch of that blade, flesh would part by sheer entry into its force field. I kneel down and wrap a hand around each of the ram's horns to help Dave lift the head. This is the first time in my life I have touched a desert bighorn sheep. A teaspoon of blood spills from the ram's mouth, blood the color of fresh raspberries.

Dave removes the radio collar and ear tag. Nike works her hands up and down the injured leg from hock to shoulder. “No sign of fracture, no break,” she tells us. Dave examines the leg and agrees. They wonder if the injury is high in the shoulder instead, damage serious enough to cripple the ram.

I am astounded at how petit he is. This is a trick that bighorn sheep play on the human mind: not that large an animal, actually,
standing on its wild heights, apart, aloof, noble, looking as huge as an elk.

Dave wears rubber gloves. The hunter's knife touches the skin, and before I can breathe, the ram's belly and shoulder are open.

The ram's lungs are full of blood, his heart bloodshot. The front chamber of the sheep's chest is filled with red fluid. Internal bleeding was likely the direct cause of death, but what caused the bleeding in the first place? A blood vessel broken by a blow? A pierced lung? Did he injure his leg in a fall, then, weakened and less nimble, take a death blow to the shoulder?

When he watched Ram 930 with the other males, Mark was close enough to see that his breathing was not labored. With slow internal hemorrhaging, Nike says, the death might have taken time. Whether the two scraped depressions above the dead ram were beds of bachelor companions or beds of his own making cannot be known, but their position seems to indicate a place for dying more than a day bed close to escape terrain.

Dave's long experience as a hunter is apparent in his skilled surgery. The ram's heart is small and dark, once a fleshy pump of eighty beats a minute. His kidneys and other organs show the desert bighorn's adaptations to aridity, a physiology that takes moisture from the vegetation the animal eats and eliminates waste with relatively small water loss. Of course, this ram also quenched his life's thirst with the big sandy river.

The ravens remain like statues until Dave pulls aside a few coils of intestine and opens the gut, which is a swollen army green mass of rumen covered by a thin membrane. The fermentation vat. The desert eaten. The organ that transforms everything from creamy yucca flowers to camelthorn into bone and blood, flesh and sinew, the sustenance of keen vision and a complexity of aggressions with one's head.

The ravens hop off their outcrop and move closer with a guarded impatience. They have waited for something—I guess
it's us—to open the carcass for them. They are looking at what could easily be a week's menu of raw meat and guts. There is no frenzy, no circle of turkey vultures. We are surprised to note how little scavenging has occurred since the ram died. The canyon's food is lean, slow food.

After what seem to be but a few cuts, Dave says, “My knife is dull.” To me, it looks like it could lop off your entire forearm as if it were a hunk of Gouda cheese.

Dave bags up body tissue to be taken off the river to a veterinarian for analysis. Clues may shed light on the death of the ram and also on his life, his physical condition and signs of respiratory ailments, parasites, sinusitis, or other afflictions, all of which will give Dave and Nike more insight into the herd's health. The one thing that Dave must do for a complete study of Ram 930 is this: cut off his head and take it in.

Dave is so clean and deferential in his work. We know this must happen. We are not queasy. Yet there is in this act something that demands that we behave in a manner that eludes us. Perhaps our distress comes because Mark and I are not hunters. Until this day in May on a remote stretch of river, I have only caressed bones. I was a virgin to the touch of creatures that I had watched for months, alive and animated in their chasm of sun-drenched stone.

Dave and Nike tell me that despite their long experience they, too, feel this way. Nothing can be taken lightly, no gesture made without respect and reciprocity. An elk's body across a dead lion. Hunters who believe that to bring the horns of a wild sheep out of the desert is to invite wind and torment. Long hours of minding this herd, worry over missing ewes, lambs that die. All of the disheartening and exalting turns of creation ingrained in a deep-time bond between place and animal. “Live in Nature,” wrote Henry Beston, “and you will soon see that for all its non-human rhythm, it is no cave of pain.”

Mark walks to the river, fills his cupped hands with water, and comes back to the ram. He sprinkles it over the flank, the muscles that moved the ram through the canyon.

Downstream, afloat again, we tiptoe the raft past a feisty nursery. Several ewes have brought their lambs down to the banks. With six lambs are adult ewes and juveniles, a flock of fifteen sheep. Nike is adept at counting and recording them even as the sheep bunch up, spread out, then bunch together again like a puzzle in motion.

The lambs buddy up with one another when the group pauses. On the move, they take the flank of a galloping ewe, any ewe, then find playmates again and practice flawless leaps up and down ten-foot-high pinnacles. The commotion seems a combination of play and wariness. The ewes are alert because their lambs are so young. Later, they will act as if their own young bore them to tears.

Among the group are enough unmarked ewes to make Nike feel less apprehensive about her lost sheep. The ewes will be accounted for as ewe-lamb seclusion ends and the birthing season gives way to group life and a settling in for the hot summer. Nike estimates the year's crop at about fifteen to seventeen lambs.

On the mortality side, they can confirm one dead ewe, who likely fell or was caught in a rockfall loosened by last year's monsoons. Below a cliff, they found her radio collar and bones scattered by scavengers. None of us has seen the one-horned Ferdinand ram that crossed the river to sniff wildflowers. His fate may remain unknown. Ram 930, the “murder” victim, died of ritual.

Dave and Nike's published research shows that annual adult ram deaths in this population are four times higher than ewe
deaths. Exhaustion and injuries from the rut predispose the rams to accidents. Dave and Nike once watched dominant rams kick a young ram in the testicles. The ram withdrew from his assailants and died shortly after from an infection.

Rams use less secure terrain than do homebody ewes. They often travel solo and without the pooled vigilance of companions. Such trouble befell a ram that wandered near the open country of the canyon rim. Tracks near his carcass implied that a mountain lion, likely a transient and obviously an opportunist, had attacked him from above. At the site of another ram kill, much less of a carcass was left by his human poacher: a gut pile with a radio collar on top of it.

And there are what might be called “foolish sheep moves.” When the veterinarian examined the remains of a four-year-old ram, he found signs of a skull injury from fighting. However, the head wound was not the cause of death.

The year the ram died, the spring growth of cheatgrass was especially virulent. Cheatgrass fits the mantra of noxiousness: exotic, scratchy, an aggressive invader of disturbed (overgrazed) land. Cheatgrass bears supple stems and awns when it first sprouts. Bighorns eat cheatgrass while the plant is young and green, then shun it as the awns quickly dry into stiff quarter-inch quills with barbed tips.

The ram may have waited one day too long in the life of hardening cheatgrass awns. During the spring's unusually lush growth, perhaps he ate one mouthful too many. The vet found that a cheatgrass awn had lodged in the ram's throat, opening a window for bacterial infection. Swelling from the infection blocked the ram's throat and he starved to death.

“Number Nine-Three-Oh was a good ram,” Dave says as we float between the canyon walls. “I liked that ram.”

Dave often talks of individual sheep with the interest of someone who has read and remembered a remarkable biography. “One
of our handsome rams” or “one with lots of personality,” he will comment. He recognizes sheep in the bloodline of the band's big chocolate-colored ram, a ram notable not only for his color but also for his mature age and size.

There is no easy ticket to longevity. Some large-bodied, big-horned rams burn out early, while shrimpier rams in the same age class may last longer. “Number Nine-Three-Oh was a small ram but a top guy,” Dave says, grinning. “I watched him go through puberty.”

I am not the first to imagine a retirement home for old rams, a sunny ledge in the canyon ramparts with a decent view of the river and its ridiculous humans, a creaky-boned pod of toothless old geezers with a cloud of indolent flies orbiting their chipped but still operatic curls. Not exactly your hood ornaments.

Rams live by their heads. Horns are weapons, shields, and rank symbols. Combat is not intended to kill or injure, though harm can be done. Rams fight in a long, tedious sequence of blows and counterblows that take on impact like a shock-absorbing wall. Even if it must be determined by combat, rank lets males live in a society with a predictable vocabulary of aggression aimed at breeding success.

Bighorn rams ignore or occasionally charge a disabled animal. Persecution of injured dominants is a moment of directed motion, mixed with the motions of walking, grazing, resting. Mark saw limping Ram 930 among rams of equal size and age, the ones who so often challenge one another. We found his body not long afterward. In animal lives that unfold according to their own instinctive choreography, well beyond human view, this is more of a story than the bighorns usually tell.

The raft rides the slick caps and troughs of a wave train in a rapid. Tied at my feet, resting on the raft floor, is a heavy canvas duffel bag. The boat's motion presses the bag against my leg, and I can feel hard ridged horns through the fabric.

Once off the river, Dave and Nike will take Ram 930's remains to the vet. After the lab work is done, pieces of bone and horn will be given to Navajo medicine men. They will use tsétah dibé, the mountain sheep, in ritual and healing.

We have heard from Navajo that bighorns carry clouds on their backs. In the clouds are seeds for corn and other plants. It is also said that when people hunted bighorns in the old days, the hunters slapped the sheep's butchered paunch against a stone. The sound would bring rain. In this association of animal and weather, there is an echo of the faraway Cosos.

Any day now, the canyon will gain the thick summer heat and we will live in an oven of bare, baking rock, the air vibrating with ripples of cicada song. In this desert, you must drink the last of May's ephemeral coolness as if it were a tonic. For a split second, you think of bolting for cooler ground—a high mountain, the breezy seaside—but if, on the other side of that fantasy, you are still here, you will stay for the duration, living close to the river, the only habitable place for miles and miles.