Eating Stone (35 page)

I do not think there are sheep around here any longer. This mesa may be one of the places that lost them during the poaching years or disease epidemics. It is the kind of habitat that makes Nike say, “This place feels so empty.”

Now, as morning grows, the day promises to be summer absolute, summer unflawed, sapphire on its ends, blazing white at midday. I can stay here only as long as my water supply lasts, with enough left for the hike out.

The Birdheads line the rock wall behind me. Square-shouldered human figures with birds on top of their heads. Human figures topped with birds instead of heads. Duck-headed anthropomorphs. Duck-headed serpents. Kissing ducks. Kissing geese.

Here the rock artists forgot about the ubiquitous compulsion to etch bighorn sheep. They indulged in birds. I walk the wall for nearly a mile, and the bird petroglyphs never stop in either direction. I find other sheep beds, too, old and abandoned.

The birds on the Birdhead panels look like waterfowl—geese and ducks shown in legless sitting-duck profile, slender birds with long sticklike legs, perhaps ibis, herons, or other wading birds. The nearest body of water is more than thirty miles away, bending inside folds of Triassic rock. The birds of flesh with me today on this high perch are ravens too black to move in the day's waxing heat.

I find potsherds scattered among the boulders below the Bird-head panels, mostly bits of black-on-white pottery. Archaeologists believe that such finely painted ceramics were preserved for ceremonial use—the fancy china, so to speak. The plainer pot-
tery, gray, smooth, and unpainted or with shaped and pressed coils, a style known as corrugated pottery, was everyday kitchen-ware. When the pots broke, bits of them were saved for ornaments, pendants, game pieces, and other uses.

Among the artifacts left by these cultures is a pair of plain gray potsherds shaped into disks by someone roughly working their edges. The slightly convex sherds were bound together face-to-face with twisted yucca fibers. The string held the sherds flush but for a thin crack. Into the crack you would slip a reed or blade of grass. Head lifted, eyes on a wild sky, you held this clay bird caller to your lips and blew. Your notes would seek a bird's attention.

I sketch some Birdheads and wonder about the time when we were wild, too, when we threw back our heads and with horn or bone used our breath to call to animals. I wonder if the figures with waterbirds on their heads were icons of rain or flight, if they carried hope and prayer to draw the monsoons.

The day is young, but the sun is already fire. It dazzles and scorches. Today, no rain will rescue me from the heat. It is time to rescue myself.

Any water on this mesa is false or hidden. I would die before I found it. Yet a sizable mammal has shaped itself to such places. I lean back on a rock below a Birdhead, close my eyes, and picture a desert sheep.

The water in her rumen is body water. She has sweat glands. For evaporative cooling, she pants. Her woolly coat protects her skin from solar radiation that could elevate her temperature, roast her like walking mutton. She knows how to seek breezes, cooler soil, higher places, an ellipse of shade between wall and ledge, where the old beds lie.

She can trek long distances to find freestanding water. By memory? By hope? She can consume large volumes in one drink, as much as 20 percent of her body weight: one nicely hydrated ewe. She needs more water when she is lactating and thus brings
her lamb close to springs and potholes, warier than ever. In deep summer, she can butt a cactus until it cracks open and yields its succulent moisture.

Even with such extraordinary adaptations, what in the world will she do, I wonder, about global warming?

The sledgehammer heat beats down. I feel as if someone is watching me, boring holes into me with his glare. I open my eyes. About seventy feet away, two bighorn ewes stand on a boulder, staring at me. I freeze. They flick their pretty little tails.

Their horns are purple. Their nostrils, muzzles, and lips are stained purplish red. They look like they put on melting lipstick without a mirror.

There are still bighorn sheep on this mesa. They fooled us. They have been up here with the Birdheads, stuffing themselves silly with the purple fruits of prickly pear cactus.

The range of the California bighorn sheep once extended from the intermountain regions of British Columbia and Washington's Cascade Mountains south to Oregon and the lava beds of northeastern California and through the Sierra Nevada to the Kern River drainage on the Sierra's southern end—dry, rain-shadow country between coastal ranges and the Great Basin.

Traditionally grouped with the Rocky Mountain bighorn rather than with the desert races, the California bighorn was first described in the nineteenth century and eventually assigned the name Ovis canadensis californiana on somewhat shaky taxonomic grounds.

The more sophisticated tools of genetic research have placed the California bighorn under new scrutiny, with suggestions that it is distinct from the Rocky Mountain bighorn by geographic separation rather than by strict taxonomic criteria. Furthermore, the bighorns in the Sierra Nevada show traits that may not fit the conventional Ovis classifications. While official revisions of nomenclature are often plodding, this group may ultimately be known as its own subspecies: Ovis canadensis sierrae

Whoever they are, California bighorns usurp my attention, demanding I seek them out. I dump the home band—again. The ewes feed by the river. The lambs grow like weeds. The rams put on fat for the rut. Their hearts will break, missing me.

My new sheep friends, too, reside on islands, remnant habitat that is but a fraction of their former range. The older names for them say where they once lived—rimrock bighorn, lava-beds
bighorn—and where we now seek them: Sierra Nevada bighorn. They are, in a way, luring me away from home to go home.

Mark and I load the truck with food, water, camping gear, books. Nelson, the stuffed-toy ram, rides on the headrest, peering over at the devil duckie on the dashboard, a plastic bathtub duck with curving, pointed red horns and scowling, evil eyebrows.

This month, all of America is on vacation. All of America on vacation heads for cool mountains and breezy seashores. We head west for the hottest deserts, the ones that proffer a warning to visitors: “Summer is not recommended.”

We cross the Colorado River, then traverse the flaming-red plateaus of the Arizona Strip. Snow-white cauliflower clouds loom over the rimrock, moving toward the polygamist towns on the Utah-Arizona border, announcing the first monsoons. The Colorado Plateau and home may at last see the promise of afternoon thundershowers. Ahead of us, to the west, skies stay clear and superheated.

For a number of miles, the names on the land are biblical— Canaan Mountain, the Tabernacle, Babylon Butte—your last chance before skirting the heathen abodes of Nipple Bench and Satan's Bathtub, then hurling down the interstate across several basins with no choice but to point your doomed virtue into the magnesium glare of Las Vegas. The devil duckie's horns glow crimson.

Somehow we avoid the Las Vegas suction and slip through California's back door of basins and ranges, a plate of rumpled earth astride great quivering faults. We skirt the Cosos, a hazy blue mass crowned with a faultless, clear sky.

On the horizon, the seam between desert and the southern Sierra becomes famously sharp. A sky-scraping spine of granite looms straight up from the Owens Valley, mirrored by an escarpment on the valley's other flank, the Inyo and White mountains.

The Sierra Nevada run nearly four hundred miles north to
south along California's eastern edge. From the crowded Central Valley on their western flank, they rise in a gradual slope to that climax of serrated peaks and the abrupt drop into the sparsely populated Great Basin and Mojave Desert.

The southern end of the Sierra curves westward like the flicked tail of a northbound rattlesnake—mountains lower in elevation and less watered than the main rampart of the eastern Sierra, with forested ridges, broken cliffs of beige granite, and foothills of grassland and oaks. On an unmarked dirt road, we enter a rough drainage, mindful of a guidebook that said, “Careful use of a map is essential to keep yourself located.” We do not have a map.

The road dead-ends at a public campground that will be home for a night. No one else is camped along the rutted loops and sites overgrown with vegetation, a curious desolation when, by all expectations, at least half of Los Angeles should be on vacation in the mountains. The bulletin board sags; the wooden outhouses creak, their many layers of Smokey the Bear reddish brown paint peeling.

The campground's shabby air has a quiet appeal. We pull into a site surrounded by live oaks, blue oaks, and digger pines with silky long needles and shade fragrant with their pitch. A ledge of granite holds a dozen grinding holes, or fixed mortars, where early Sierra tribes ground acorns into a fine meal.

The ghostly campground has a host, a bearded, stocky man who appears to be in his thirties. He is wearing a T-shirt and a baseball cap. A pistol in a holster is strapped around his ample girth. He rides up to our site on a motorcycle.

“You can't shoot bears,” he announces without introduction. “It's not bear season.”

“Can we camp?” Mark asks.

Somewhat taken aback, he looks around as if he were noticing his whereabouts for the first time. “Oh. You want to camp?”

Always, I am neurotically terrified around guns. Other than instilling a mildly creepy sense that he does not know where he is,
the fellow appears harmless. We, after all, do not know where we are, either. None of us is keeping ourselves located.

“I get trouble from off-season bear hunters,” he explains. “All the poachers come from Utah. I saw your truck plates.”

Once he is convinced that we are not poachers, he relaxes and gives his name (Arnie), then describes his life as a campground nanny. He has worked at this place for over seven years. He calls the forest rangers—his employers—“ineducated.” For the RV crowd, the campground is too primitive. Backpackers forgo these middle elevations for the alpine trails along the Sierra's crest. The campground is seldom used except during hunting season, when hunters harvest some of the area's abundant black bears.

“Utah poachers and Mexicans with too many spray cans, that's what I worry about,” Arnie tells us. “When the hunters aren't here, it's usually just me and my dog and my snake.”

Arnie keeps a California mountain king snake under his trailer, feeding it the mice he catches in a live trap. Nonpoisonous, handsomely banded in red, black, and cream, a king snake kills prey by constriction. Arnie watches this slow suffocation whenever he feeds his snake. The mouse's eyes bulge, he says.

He knows the drainage well and recommends a hike up a nearby creek. But when I ask about a well-known town ten miles over the ridge, he says he has never heard of it. “Jehovah's Witness protection program,” I whisper to Mark after Arnie leaves.

When I lived in these mountains years ago, most of the volunteers, seasonal rangers, and fire lookouts were poets and English literature majors. Visitors irked them. They wanted to be alone with Rilke and Durrell and an unfinished dissertation on prefem-inist Edwardian adverbs. They were lanky, nerdy and armed with notebooks. They lived on pots of brown rice.

Despite having the demeanor of a long-haul trucker on a seven-year coffee break, Arnie fits these wooded foothills with neither affection nor complaint, minding a campground empty of campers in the heart of California's millions. Although their char-
acter and motives may have changed, I am pleased to see that the tradition of backcountry loners lives on.

The hunters who use this campground left few signs of their presence. Either Arnie has tidied up after them or their light imprint tells how camping has moved into the habitat of self-contained, enclosed vehicles. The RVs set up a wheeled reproduction of the familiar, the home from which one is allegedly escaping, and a membrane of protection against nature and the messily homicidal “campers” in the sites nearby. The sun-dappled oaks, pines, and creek are but backdrop for a parking space, the picnic table an unused relic, warped and weathered.

During my tenure in these mountains, creeksides like the camp at Arnie's always evoked outdoor spaces of work and nesting, a kind of settling in, for a night or two, in a place with the simple abundance of shade, water, bed, and the exalted peace of exquisite mountain light.

The grinding mortars in the granite outcrops around my home sang with ghosts, ghosts of my mother's family, who knew these stone mortars before me (all of us used them for play), as well as the Indian women who made them. Beside the stones, under the incense cedars, I swore I could hear three hundred years of gossip.

The native people who used the mortars were transient but came back to the same camps year after year. The multiple hand mills in a single slab of rock give us a glimpse of the communal. To sculpt the cuplike depressions, the grinders used handheld fieldstones—pestles unworked except by use or the occasional indentation for finger grips.