Eating Stone (37 page)

He straps bighorn skulls, bones, and other body parts to his backpack and carries them out of the backcountry to his workroom—“the Morgue”—to study them, to find out how an animal lived and died. He has at times undertaken research without funding. “How could I stop just because of money?” he asked me. “I need continuity to understand the biology.”

He once drove a battered, duct-taped, runs-on-fumes pickup to and from trailheads. He trades his uniform of rumpled field clothes only for the black tuxedo he wears when he plays oboe in the local chamber orchestra. One of his close friends is a soft-spoken bronc rider and trapper turned mountain lion tracker. In the mountains, the tracker finds cat, deer, and sheep signs and, in the most remote and difficult places, the prints of John's size-thirteen shoes.

Wehausen grew up in Berkeley and claims he was “bitten by sheep long ago.” The animals “take me to the remotest corners of

North America, and such places are the wellspring of my soul. There is nowhere like the Sierra in this regard.”

Although John refers to bighorns, he could easily be speaking of the mountains, too, when he says, “There is something about them that keeps you going back. They are a wonderful reward for hard work.”

John watches trends as closely as he watches the bands on their mountain—ewes, subadults, and rams he knows well as groups and individuals. He has found sheep and he has lost sheep.

His science is not as ramcentric as the views of some big-ungulate people, who by a hunting tradition tend to see the animal in the frame of trophy. Yet he marvels at the stunning choreography of the rut, at males presenting their headgear to one another to shake down any ambiguities of dominance. Size is how rams determine hierarchy, John notes. “Rams only know themselves by looking at each other.”

When I spoke to him on a random summer day in August, he immediately knew, with psychic telemetry, where to send us to look for animals, to “look for rocks with legs on them.” Mark and I climbed to the alpine tarns. The beauty of the place eclipsed the finding, of course, which in the end is the delicious mystery behind the mantra “I walked and walked and I never saw a sheep.”

When I first heard John give a talk about his research, he began by saying, “I've spent an extraordinary amount of time collecting sheep shit.” Don't let shit fool you. The path from shit to big-picture ecology makes sense.

What the bighorn sheep eat shows up in their scat. Analyses of fecal content reveal much about nutrition. When it comes to nutrition for mountain dwellers like these, elevation matters. They must eat well to fare well. The recent crash of the Sierra Nevada sheep was, John figured, related to food. The sheep made a deliberate choice to eat poorer forage in trade for a gain of some kind.

After predictable seasonal migration patterns repeated over
and over like … well, like sheep, in the 1980s the Sierra bighorns began to abandon their low-elevation winter range. They stayed higher. In doing so, they did not eat as well. Poor diet influenced vigor, birth rates, and lamb survival. Mortality exceeded recruitment. The Sierra Nevada lost two-thirds of its wild sheep.

John and his colleagues saw certain factors responsible for this shift: drought and hard winters, late storms and quirky soil moisture patterns. They noted another influence strong enough to alter the bighorns’ homeland behavior: These sheep had a New Mexico problem—Puma concolor.

From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, John's fieldwork had revealed an increase in sheep kills by mountain lions. The preferred cat food was mule deer, but, as efficient opportunists, the lions were taking advantage of other meat by plucking mutton off low-elevation winter range.

Often a small number of mountain lions are responsible for a disproportionate number of kills. Certain mountain lions in the Sierra, John found, had become such “sheep specialists.” They worked the winter ranges. Removing the offenders, it was thought, might give the sheep a reprieve and check their crash.

However, Puma concolor, too, was a protected animal. By referendum less than a decade earlier, Californians had banned the hunting of mountain lions in the state. The bighorn sheep caretakers in the Sierra had to argue for emergency measures. Eventually, five lions were trapped and removed from sheep range.

John hypothesizes that the Sierra sheep reacted to the escalating lion predation by avoiding their winter habitat. In the mind of a sheep, this range had become too dangerous. Their response to a complex ecosystem shift was to trade food for safety.

The costs of security were high. The sheep gave up better forage, warmer altitudes, and the ease of feeding where there was less snow. Up higher, the cold was more severe. One band lost fifteen animals in an avalanche. A great number of sheep went miss-
ing; individuals accounted for in the fall did not return the following summer. Overall, John's field surveys showed high winter losses and, he noted, a mysterious lack of carcasses.

Declining numbers appeared to reduce the comfort of group living, a critical bighorn adaptation strategy. Sheep cannot eat well if they are always worried about being eaten. Instead of snarfing, they are nervously looking about. The smaller bands had fewer eyes and ears for vigilance and perhaps sensed this added vulnerability on their winter range, where predation risk was so high. So they stopped going there.

The emergency lion control, milder winters, the listing of the Sierra sheep as an endangered subspecies, a recovery plan that took into account everything from mountain lion monitoring and winter range security to stricter measures against infection from domestic sheep—all of this, John said, bought animals and biologists some time. “When the Sierra bighorn was listed,” he laughed, “I also got a better truck.”

From the alarmingly low count of one hundred after the winter of 1995, the bands slowly began to grow again. In 2002, the total number of wild Ovis in the Sierra was about three hundred animals. That number had increased slightly by the time Mark and I hiked in the mountains. Their caretakers want to believe that the bighorns have squeezed through their bottleneck.

We pass a water bottle back and forth, gulping but sorely tempted to guzzle. On the broiling bajada, there is little shade. Our necks are stiff from looking up to the high peaks above us, to blue-black conifers, glacier-polished rock, patches of snow in the deepest crevices, streams as cool as ice. From one area to the other, there is a difference in temperature of at least twelve degrees, and a difference in altitude of over six thousand feet— straight up.

John recommended another hike to a different pass to look for rocks with legs. Knowing that the sheep hangout cannot be reached until higher elevations does not deter us. Nor does knowing that we will not likely see them even if we climb up there. We are simply running out of energy. The desert entraps us with its heat and our own exertion.

In myth, at least, California evokes an image of love-it-to-death throngs marching up its seductive backcountry trails in long, polite queues. We expected to see at least half the state's population of mobile adults in the High Sierra. No one was at Arnie's campground. They all must be up here, we figured. However, during our foxtail-pine hike and today's death march, we have had the mountains to ourselves.

We were unable to extricate ourselves from town early enough to hike the desert stretch in the cool of morning. Town was busy.

“Why were all those people running around town carrying tickets and little metal tubes?” I ask Mark as he puts away the water bottle.

“Those were backcountry permits and food canisters,” he replies. “You put your food in them so bears can't get at it. Permits and canisters are required for overnights.”

Oops.

We are freelancing up here. No aluminum tubes. As soon as we reach the first trees, some bear will leap out of a ponderosa and rip my day pack off my shoulders with its claws and teeth, taking out a chunk of my back while taking out our sandwiches and peaches. Who cares? I think as I trudge up the steep incline with lungs screaming like parade bagpipes. I will soon be lying facedown in the dust, making a handy human tabletop for the bear's lunch. I am thankful that I did not bring that plump little muffin, Nelson.

Hikers who camp in the backcountry seal their food inside canisters and follow rigorous protocols for bear deterrence. The local black bears are in a crisis garbage-withdrawal program. They are learning that humans do not mean food. Every granola
crumb is under metal. However, we are day users—no plans to camp. We are merely going twelve miles up and down the six-thousand-foot face before dark. Or maybe not.

The chaparral gives way to California black oaks and shade, then a small creek embraced by the slender-leafed arroyo willow. We splash the cool liquid on our hot faces, then sit beside the water and eat our lunch before the bear can. From this spot, we are high enough to see across the valley to the White Mountains. The mountain shadow is hours away.

From crest to crest, the Sierra and the Whites are twenty miles apart. On the Sierra side, Ovis canadensis californiana (or sierrae). On the White Mountains side, Ovis canadensis nelsoni, the desert race of the Mojave, Great Basin, and Colorado Plateau. The races are ecologically distinct. Compared to the desert bighorns, the Sierra sheep have wider skulls and broader horn flares—signs of their isolation, John says.

From their lofty ramparts, the sheep groups peer across the blue air at one another. Maybe they want to just “sail right off.” Yet they rarely come in contact with one another. Perhaps one of those “They don't like to get their feet wet” explanations might do. But that discounts the curiosity of John Wehausen.

“The nelsoni and sierrae races are closer than we think,” he once explained to me. “We are finding past evidence of some females crossing both directions between Sierra and Whites and successfully breeding to leave identifiable genetic lines. They have crossed the Owens Valley, but why they have stayed as distinct as they are is not clear to me.

“One reason I study bighorn sheep is because, for the most part, they can be well defined as populations. Population dynamics can be studied more cleanly where immigration and emigration are minimal. However, the closer we look, the less clean it is.”

The finest minds have worked with general assumptions about twenty-first-century bighorn sheep: remnant habitat, isolated bands. Hard-hearted homebodies, slow colonizers. Fidelity to
place to the point of doom as well as salvation. But the hoofy little buggers have a few surprises for us.

In the basin and range province of southeastern California, for instance, sheep considered to be captive on their islands have moved from one mountain range to adjacent mountains more readily than anyone thought they would. The animals cross the desert valleys to reach other patches of suitable mountain habitat. Their unexpected intermountain travel has prompted biologists to give philopatry a broader perspective and credence to habitat conservation on a larger-than-island scale.

Another sheep surprise unfolded on the other side of the mountains from our resting spot. Sixteen bighorns showed up in the headwaters of a major Sierra Nevada river. They had eluded even the most intrepid sheep seeker, John Wehausen. For nearly thirty years, John has walked the mountains to make ground studies of historic habitat, empty or, if he was lucky, with theretofore-undocumented bands. And here on a south-facing wall deep in the Range of Light were sixteen lost sheep.

Were they a Blue Door Band enigma—vanished, thought to be extirpated, then their numbers increased due to a few survivors, as if sprung from the wilderness itself? Or were they sheep missing from known bands, sheep that packed up and tiptoed out of known range in order to escape from mountain lions?

During the period of winter range abandonment, one of John's subgroups disappeared from its expected whereabouts and did not show up on its summer range. Rams had been sighted on the “new” area before. Now, ewes, lambs, and yearlings, as well as rams, were found there.

The movement was remarkable but not unexpected, John thought. “There is continuity of habitat from their traditional range to the new area. We just didn't know they would use it. Too many people treat wild animals as automatons. But these sheep are making decisions.”

Whatever the bighorns did, they did it by themselves. They moved to the deepest rhythms of a world that is so opaque to us, their own complete universe. John Muir believed that we would glimpse this world, begin to understand this animal, “as soon as we make ourselves acquainted with the rocks, and the kind of feet and muscles brought to bear on them.”

The creek slides down the ravine. The temperature approaches ninety-five degrees. For now, I do not care about the voracious suck of water by the city of Los Angeles, every last drop once it hits the valley below. Up here, before L.A. can steal it, the water cools our skin and draws ribbons of sun through the willows. A few hummingbirds hurl themselves at our foreheads. Beyond the water borders, the air is lifeless and still. Above the creek, the willow boughs move gently in rills of air created by the flow.

The granite beneath my feet, familiar and lost, the desert spread below us under shimmering thermals, the border of rain-starved mountains beyond: How many lifetimes are needed to earn the landscape merely within this line of vision? Perhaps it is enough to possess the fiercest aspirations. In this country, Mary Austin wrote, “it is possible to live with great zest, to have red blood and delicate joys.”

When we are not in the high country, I return again and again to a small museum in a valley town. Under bright ceiling lights and surrounded by a library silence (I am usually the sole visitor), I amble among the fossils, obsidian points, mineral collections, and shelves with cotton-lined boxes of bird eggs, from huge eagle and emu eggs to bushtit eggs the size of jelly beans.

The museum displays maps, guns, saddles, remnants of equipment from now defunct fruit farms, and photographs of mule
trains, dusty, treeless main streets, and grumpy-looking men with pale farmertan foreheads and woolly-caterpillar mustaches. Newspaper clippings from the early 1900s reveal the tenor of local outrage at the piracy of Owens Valley water by Los Angeles. “Steal my horse, run off with my wife, but damn you, don't touch my water.”