Eating Stone (33 page)

Watching this band, we have seen ewes nurse lambs other than their own. And here are these “twins”—a rare double birth, or a ewe with her own lamb and a foster lamb? Has inbreeding in some way affected identifying clues, how lambs smell and how ewes distinguish their odor?

The sheep rise from their beds and pick their way down the cliff. From across the wash comes the upriver group. They merge together, eleven ewes and nine lambs, which find one another in a popcorning bunch that obscures ewe-lamb pairs. With postures
of caution and in a more or less compact group—no stragglers— the flock heads across an open sand dune toward the river. There are stops to nibble scattered Mentzelia, or blazing star. In the shimmering heat waves that rise from the pale sand dune, they look like camels crossing the Sahara.

The nursery seems huge—and somehow reassuring, as if by entering deep summer alive, the year's lamb crop has crossed a threshold. The young are out in the world. In their natal bands, they hang on the canyon walls, learning the rock, growing deciduous (milk) teeth, testing the flavor of blazing star, tasting the big jade river that meanders through their homeland.

Last night's rams fattened up more than fought. The sun turns the remains of a ram death into leathered flesh, dried femurs, and bits of fleece among the camelthorn. Still intact, the rib cage arcs above the sand in delicate curves of white bone, preventing the wind from leaving the country.

All of this unfolds beyond our understanding. I, for one, am content with the mysteries. It is as if these highly social creatures on the river bottom have a dialect all their own, canted in the tumult of bloodlines, honed by their fidelity to this high, pitched rock. Time broken by their long years of disappearance somehow reassembled an ancient desert lineage, making biology more like story. The profoundest glimpses into their lives come in that instant before logic, like the blind surprise of a lunar eclipse.

As we slip past the ewe on the riverbank, she stands in attention posture, neck raised and rigid, ears perked forward. Mark ferries the raft from the river's center to its far shore, giving the animal as much distance from us as possible. His strokes are deliberately smooth and quiet. We drift by on a slow current.

The ewe stands on the seam between riparian willows and the scant cover of the open, beastly hot desert. The sun beats down
from its high-noon zenith, too high to cast shadows. The only shadow is the ewe's own, directly beneath her. In that pool of shade lies a lamb.

The lamb is so big in head, short in nose, and small in body— so newborn in features—at first I wonder if the ewe had given birth nearby, then, pushed by the heat, left seclusion and escape cliffs to drop to the river. She is a two-year-old ewe, alone and far downstream from the large nursery group. Hers is a late-season birth, one of the last of the Blue Door lambs to be born this year.

The lamb stands up. It fits under the ewe's belly with only a slight lowering of its head. The ears swivel. The ewe moves off a few feet to feed, taking her shadow with her, leaving the lamb in the bright sun.

Sweat drips down my temples, forms lakes under my life jacket. The ewe decides we are harmless and floating out of her realm. There is a listlessness to all of us. Summer's cauldron fills the canyon with its magnesium glare. The sky is so open, the pair so far from stone, from the sanctuary of the vertical, I start to look for eagles.

We watch the pair as we drift downriver. Each time the ewe moves to feed, the lamb stands for a moment in the white-hot sun, swivels its ears, then follows the ewe and lies down under her belly, resting in the pool of shade.

During summer in the desert, smart people mutter excuses, then disappear into darkened dens with frosted cocktail shakers and plasma TVs, and I am sure that I am alone out here with my animal life, treading the thick stillness of heat.

Beneath July's high-pressure system, no one talks of the cloudless clarity of the present, only of the monsoons, still weeks away. Despite this impatience, we know that monsoon rains require architecture: a belly of baked continental air rising, moisture-fat air from Pacific Mexico moving to meet it, and towering thun-derheads, violent and local, only when the air masses collide.

Until then, the heat broods. The river shrinks and tamarisks faint into the current, draping feathery green fronds. Melons ripen. Grapes swell and burst. In dirt scraped down to cooler layers, coyotes sprawl, sighing deeply and blowing dust out of their noses. Snow-white datura blossoms fold their deadly beauty away from the daylight. Nights fill with a palpable blackness, languid expectations, and insect sounds I try to separate but can't.

On days that peak in temperatures exceeding one hundred degrees, imminent brain death might be interrupted by random seismic zigzags, a sign that amid the drone some lizard's blink or raven's burp caught but did not hold one's attention. The strongest spikes in the scan happen to align with thoughts of mass murder, which the body, fortuitously plastered to a lawn chair, does not obey.

My notes of “Life with Sheep” follow this metabolic slowdown, periods of breathing and heartbeat punctuated with
mirages at the edge of vision. I do not know the sense of things when I see them. This is the pulse of deep summer.

Between the spring rains that never came and the late-summer monsoons of tenuous promise, desert life struggles to stay hy-drated. Potholes dry up. Dew never forms. Where sandstone crevices once seeped a slick of moisture down smooth rock faces, only a crust of blackened mineral varnish and desiccated lichens remains.

The Blue Door sheep live by the river. Beyond such a blessing, I wonder if animals are drinking sand. Although wild sheep consume water from freestanding sources, they also meet moisture needs with succulence from their plant foods and a metabolism suited to extreme aridity. Their water must come from somewhere. Camels and oryx they are not.

Nearly a decade of Mars-like drought in this redrock desert has underlined the extraordinary adaptation of this subspecies to its austere geography. Withstanding the heat, the chronic lack of snowpack and rainfall, the drying up of even the most reliable of springs, these sheep are living on the vapors of rain dreams.

Their drought, on the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, is the tropics compared to bighorn habitat in Baja California, Death Valley, the Sonoran Desert, and the southern Mojave and Colorado deserts, where for too many years it can forget to rain at all. Obviously, all four races of desert bighorns have survived cycles of the severest aridity. But no one is sure how.

Wildlife managers have dynamited steep-sided tinajas to make them more accessible when water sinks into a low death-trap pit. They have dammed springs, filled aluminum tanks, and built guzzlers—moisture-collection units—to augment natural water sources.

Research shows that guzzlers and other artificial water sources
have helped in marginal habitat and where livestock has usurped traditional bighorn water holes. Research also shows that sheep may not use guzzlers even in habitat where water is scarce or unavailable. They simply stick to their own maps.

Years ago, in a tinaja in a hotter southwestern desert, water receded to levels so low that the bighorns who came to drink from the tank fell into it and could not climb back up the ten-foot vertical sides and out of the pit. Thirty-four died there and left a boneyard.

A big river flowed only three miles away, but the sheep did not use it. They used the tinaja after it filled again. The presence of feral burros and a barrier of tamarisk, where, in the mind of a sheep, a predator might lurk, may have discouraged the animals from going to the river for its unlimited gallons.

During the longest, hottest, driest deep-summer months, most sheep stay within close radius of ancestral water holes. Summer range becomes defined by thirst. For thousands of years, they have lived off their own water secrets, without our intervention.

The windshield frames a brick-colored mesa overlaid with a band of sky so vibrant in its blue, it is neither space nor air, but silence become matter. On the mesa's caprock and upper flanks, pin-yon and juniper trees grow close enough to one another to tease the illusion of “forest” from the lips. The conifers—at this density, in a desert more rightly called a woodland—live at altitudes that reach highest toward moisture. The farther down the mesa's flanks, the sparser they become, until the bare rock takes over in a jagged panic of washes and canyons.

The outline of the windshield intensifies this view, as if all would be softer out of the frame and into the rest of the world. I keep my binocular span within the rectangle, pointed toward the mesa, aimed at beige sheep rumps against brick red rock. The
windshield has no glass. I can stretch my arm over the dashboard and out to a hood the color of electrocuted parrots, an alarming limes-on-acid green. There is nothing under the hood but air.

I sit on the truck's bucket seat (an overturned bucket) on the driver's side. Little remains of the interior but the hardest of materials—metal and Bakelite. According to a gauge marked with
DCH-CHG
and faint hatch marks, the battery needs charging. According to the odometer, the truck ended its life at 30,890 miles. Surprisingly, the speedometer needle still moves. The truck has no engine block, tires, or bed, just hood, grille, fenders, and the cab I sit in, perched on a bucket behind a melting steering wheel, watching the mesa.

The windshield frames one scene. No turns to a new angle of view, no lunging through space on a lost American highway. The truck is not moving. It has not moved since about 1965, its work halted, more or less, by a bubble of history.

The electric green Ford truck is one of several vehicle carcasses scattered on the saltbush flats across from the mesa. Most are trucks or the vital organs of trucks, thoroughly cannibalized and stripped, their tires removed or long ago puddled into licorice blobs by the desert sun.

The only sedan is a Buick of an indeterminate color. Its tires and axle have vanished. Its interior is bare to the frame except for a steel column with a chrome handle: the parking brake. The brake is set, as if the car were in danger of rolling downhill on its naked fenders.

Through the frame of the empty windshield, I see a mesa that, below the pinyon-juniper line, is made nearly porous by the gouges, scars, and perforations in its face. Road cuts zigzag to platforms of gravel. The black holes of adits and mine mouths spill aqua cones of uranium tailings over the side of the Chinle Formation, the stratum that yielded the ore.

The mesa is now an in situ dump. Its mined-out innards slide
off its face into the red pediment below. By all expectations, the bighorns on this mesa should be easily spotted, especially at night: Day-Glo Caprini.

Given the history of this place, the presence of bighorn sheep is somewhat of a miracle. Like the Blue Door Band, they have inhabited this terrain since deep time. Rock walls and freestanding boulders bear their portraits. They did not escape the wave of pressures that accompanied Euro-American settlement. Against habitat loss, livestock encroachment, disease, and overhunting, bighorn numbers plunged. Then they found themselves living among Cold Warriors.

The broken mesas and buttes accommodate the species with a sense so deeply hereditary, there is hardly a division between land and flesh. Nelson's bighorns are the locals. The human locals had tenets of their own, an ethos that with neither guile nor apology gave such animals no protection.

The abandoned mines and used-up car lot lie in a vast tract of rugged canyon country far to the north of the Blue Door homelands. Since the uranium-mining era ended, the region has become largely empty of all but transient recreationists. The nearest towns lie on fringes too distant to reach before a shower and air conditioning become hallucinatory cravings.

Because of its immensity and isolation, many visitors call this quarter “wilderness.” The mines and tailings, the roads, junked vehicles, half-buried cables, and radionuclides in the groundwater are at first invisible. That nearly ten thousand mine workers once swarmed within the broadest boundaries of this region seems improbable unless you are hiking with a Geiger counter. But they were here, roughly from the end of World War II to the mid-1960s, turning the mesas inside out for the core fuel of America's nuclear arsenal.

No bighorn saunters into the framed view of the truck window, only a red-tailed hawk on a listless thermal. The ore truck's
cosmotransuranic paint job threatens knicker meltdown, or is the bucket seat on this sizzling July day scalding my butt?

I slip out of the cab and stumble to the shade of a juniper tree. There is no river to cool me. There is no river to drink from. The bighorns in the mesa country survive on delusions: scarce springs, ephemeral potholes, a few guzzlers, dew, cactus juice. If scorn were a sheep emotion, they would look upon the river band as wimps in an easy paradise of flowing water. Up here, water defines where you go and how you die.

I have a water bottle and the patience to wait until the sun drops behind the mesa and leaves the stone cool enough to hike. Note-taking feels as intriguing as recording the hourly gestures of a narcoleptic barnacle. The lead in my sketching pencil softens to a near drip on the drawing pad.