Eating Stone (4 page)

The third ram is between the mosquito ram and the chocolate ram in age. His substantial set of horns spreads out and away from his head as if a tight circular curl had somehow flared into a surprised sideways curl. The flared horns could level small trees each time he turns his head. But this is a desert, and the shrubs are sparse and low and hardscrabble. The only thing he is knocking over is air, and the females are not impressed. They want to eat. The younger rams want to butt and sniff. At one point, they encounter each other and rise up on their hind legs in a false
charge. The chocolate ram remains oblivious of both of them. He is vastly interested in bushes again.

In lackadaisical strolls, the sheep cluster together and move apart. They pull at shrubs and grind mouthfuls of dry, abrasive plants with their hard teeth. Then, on a broad, flat shelf of rock, all eleven sheep lie down to rest.

At rest, they do not look into a companion's face, but appear to be concentrating on a thought or a bug not far from their foreheads. Several choose beds on the lip of the shelf and peer over the eighty-foot drop to a sandbar and the river.

A few of the nappers first paw their beds with a front hoof, scraping away rocks and duff. They like the dust. Day beds are not as complicated as night beds, so most of the sheep simply drop from standing position without pawing, lowering their front knees first, then settling their hindquarters. They tuck their legs under their bodies, a position that will let them rise up rapidly and flee. From my view, they look like eleven loaves of bread with horns. The flared-horn ram nods off sleepily until his chin rests on the ground, taking the weight of his rack off his neck.

Once in awhile, one animal stands up and butts another off its bed. Between naps, the two younger rams rise and look around, perhaps wondering if anyone has entered estrus since they last checked. Nearly every body gesture is a social one, drawing the attention of other sheep. The exchanges grow subtle. The group settles down.

Desert bighorns want a good view, and from their beds these sheep can gaze far upriver along a slender ribbon of khaki framed by canyon walls of red and gray, walls that seal them inside the universe.

Behind a gravel bar, a dense grove of tamarisk has turned the color of ripe peaches. An ellipse of pale rose sand lines the inside of a river bend of such beauty, you could set yourself on fire with the rapture of that curve. In it lies a kind of music in stone that might cure all emptiness.

At the mouth of a stair-stepped side canyon, the river tumbles over submerged rocks, a rapid I know how to run with raft and oars. Nothing moves but the water and two ebony ravens that glide along the chasm, their ebony shadows beside them.

I run my hand over my hair to understand the touch of sun on the bighorns’ backs. Each day toward winter, the sun's heat weakens and slips away from the air. Because, on this afternoon, the desert has quieted so, the warmth seems to intensify. The sheep rest. They take the warmth into their woolly backs and watch the river.

When I was very young, wild animals came to me as they come to most children: in dreams. In zoos and “habitat” parks, even in their natural surroundings, real animals occupied a world that had become intolerably small for them and tragically disconnected from children. Yet somehow I acquired some knowledge about wildlife.

Some of it may have been digested from Wild Kingdom, a baby boomer–era television program and the forerunner of Disney specials, and an out-of-breath David Attenborough wheezing around some camel-infested wadi looking for pupfish. I cannot fully trust my memory of this source of wildlife information. I was quite young in Wild Kingdom days, and my parents restricted my brothers and me to one hour or less of television a week.

Perhaps I saw the show in reruns at a neighbor's when we were cheating. There in my memory is Marlin Perkins, a man with a zoo career, silver-haired and dressed in an impeccably ironed khaki safari suit, not in the Rockies with sheep, but in Africa, where he stands on safe ground beside a miserably fetid swamp while his burly, mute assistant, Jim, strangles turtles or thrashes angry hippos.

Or perhaps it's Marlin and Jim, hot and thirsty on some sunbaked plain. Before Marlin's hairdo can wilt, Jim has scrambled
around and dug up a Chiroleptes, or flat-headed frog, from the sand, a frog that stores water in its body until it puffs up like a water balloon. Jim hands the frog to Marlin, who squeezes it and drinks, while we kids stare openmouthed at the screen, mesmerized by the idea of drinking frogs, and one of my brothers, deadpan, says, “Jim is Marlin's boyfriend,” although none of us knows exactly what that means.

No, Marlin did not waste his time on sheep.

By the time I was in my early teens, animal information and images from books and films, encyclopedic volumes of it, stuffed my head and made me feel intelligent. It was a nature documentary, one more sophisticated than Wild Kingdom, that first showed me bighorns in rut.

Behind two rams the size of backhoes, there was snow on the ground and a horizon of pines and craggy peaks. These were not wimpy desert bighorns; they were cinematic Rocky Mountain bighorns—larger, culturally emblematic, more Canadian-looking. The footage hinted of frigid air and distance, of animals from a difficult, untamed place, definitely not from a national park soon to be engulfed by sprawling Denver suburbs.

The rams postured like cover boys in the latest hunter-training DVD, Kalashnikovs and Other Deer Rifles. Rams are virtually synonymous with wild sheep. Football teams do not name themselves Ewes, nor do ewes give their likeness to hood ornaments. (Many people cannot easily identify a female bighorn. When they see a picture of one, they mistake her for a mule deer that has been left in the attic too long or for an ibex, a goat from Asia.) In the film, there were no ewes, only the sense of them, off-camera somewhere, batting their eyelashes, awaiting the victor in a feverish heat.

The rams pulled their heads down in low, menacing stretches and, muscles bulging, passed in opposite directions, as if pacing a duel. Suddenly, they whirled around and rose up on their hind legs, bodies rigid, forelegs extended.

They rushed forward on two legs, dropped their shoulders and heads, and pulled in their chins, adding downward force to the heavy horns. Across thirty feet of ground, they lunged at each other at twenty miles per hour.

Horns clashed violently, a blow described as a combination of karate chop and sledgehammer. For a long time, the sound of their clash reverberated in the mountains. The rams froze and looked off to the side in a present, or display.

Although this can happen, the wildlife films never showed it: The charging rams miss. Or they slip off one another and crash into the ground headfirst. Or one is knocked out cold by the other's blow.

Because neither of the movie-star rams missed, fell, nor passed out, no human male fantasy was cruelly demolished. The viewer had the impression that there was a victor, or more combat until there was a victor and some serious headaches. The loser would skulk away. The films implied that the triumphant ram would rest for about twelve seconds, then trot off and impregnate fifty ewes. In Rambo movies, the plot is remarkably similar.

Drawing us to the spectacular, such imagery selects—and often distorts—a fraction of bighorn behavior, a rare creature's life distilled into two males smashing heads. In real sheep life, described in detail by Valerius Geist in Mountain Sheep, the horn clash unfolds in a broader context; a horn battle is but a brief moment early in the rut. It can also happen outside the breeding season, year-round, when strange rams of similar age and size meet. It is not a direct fight for females, but a fight for rank. Ewes need not be present.

Earlier, on their bachelor grounds, the Blue Door Band's rams had changed passive tolerance of one another into ritualistic aggression. Those prerut encounters involved butting, kicks, neck stretches, body twists, grunts, huddles in tight groups, “homosexual” mountings, and other behavior that made their horn size— the quintessential focus of rank—conspicuous to one another.

Large-horned, older males seldom engage in full-force contests with small-horned, younger males, Geist has noted. Obvious differences in headgear translate into an obvious dominant-subordinate ranking. Instead, the most severe and lengthy confrontations occur between rams of similar physical size. Displays are not enough. These rams have but one means to establish dominance, to judge the other's clash force: fighting. Such contests culminate in hundreds of pounds of muscle and bone lunging at one another, skulls meeting in a violent crash amplified by the echo chamber of canyon walls.

Compared to wild sheep, elk are flatlanders. Elk organize their mating society by territory. A bull elk forms a harem by evicting other bulls and claiming all of the females in a certain area. His status is his plot of turf.

The harem strategy won't work on a bighorn's vertical terrain. The ewes favor cliffs and outcrops. They are not a very herdable mass; they are like a herd of popcorn. The dominant ram must guard them one at a time. He carries his status on his head, and shows it off. The mating behavior of elk and sheep tells us how closely land and biology are bound.

A prevailing bighorn ram gains temporary possession of receptive mates, moving from one female to another during a period of several weeks, with about thirty to sixty seconds per ewe in fla-grante delicto. He is seldom alone with the ewes. Through blocking, horn display, and other interactions, he must remind the other rams of his dominance.

The desert bighorns above the river, though resting at the moment, have reached this courtship phase. Some of the head bashing will continue, but the rams’ prerut activity has already established a somewhat organic hierarchy.

For this group, the chocolate ram has earned the role of tending ram—part inseminator, part guardian. Among bovids, his species has some of the heaviest testes relative to body weight.

His testicles have doubled, or perhaps even tripled, in size for the mating season. Although multiple rams may inseminate a ewe, the greater the sperm volume, the more likely the paternity. A flood of sperm drowns out the wimps.

In this corridor of stone, bighorn sheep propagation takes time. It is flesh, blood, and desert transformed into ritual. If the rituals succeed, the bighorns will have saved themselves.

The Blue Door Band's seasons are the desert's seasons. If you are living by a desert bighorn calendar, you will note that it is governed by the simple factor of birth. By timing the birth of the year's young when temperatures are moderate and food is abundant for lactating ewes, the lambs have the greatest chance to survive.

For the Blue Door Band, whose existence is governed by four distinct seasons on the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, these optimal conditions come in the spring; the ewes lamb from late April to early June. Subtract the 180 days it takes to gestate a lamb and you arrive back here in November and December, at the rut and period of conception, with eleven sheep napping in the dust like plump loaves of bread.

During the fall, temperatures have cooled and the days have shortened. Now the sun rises, barely pauses, then sets on its low arc. For mountain sheep, day length influences a ewe's readiness to conceive. Her estrus is induced by light.

The bighorns gather. They mate. Sperm pierce ovum, in time. Add 180 days and the northern hemisphere's longer ride through sunlight. The green returns, heavy and sweet. The air is warm, the light is long, and there is good food. The lambs arrive.

The symmetry of survival is nothing short of miraculous.

At my post across from the sheep, I feel squirmy. I do not have the stomach of a ruminant, a fermentation vat that needs repose for its digestive chemistry. I have not been eating dried grass and sticks.

I stretch my legs, then stand on the lip of a twenty-foot drop and look at the footholds that I would take if I were a bighorn sheep. The rock face plunges down an unbroken slab of limestone. Entirely unsuitable for bipeds. I would die.

At the edge of a higher cliff, I lower the binoculars straight down. The magnified abyss makes me queasy. I turn the binoculars around and aim them at my feet. How very far away they are, claustrophobic in their socks. I peer down at a blackbrush, all woody matter and nearly leafless: winter sheep food, the edible desert. In the faraway end of the binoculars, the bush looks like a tiny silver cage for a hummingbird.

The afternoon's long shadow swallows the canyon with an almost detectable speed. The sheep no longer lie in sunlight. One ewe rises quickly from her bed and looks at the river gorge as if suddenly remembering something she left on the bus. The others leave their beds and amble about. The flared-horn ram stands behind a bush, near the ewes, staring at their asses.

“Let's see you get that cantaloupe off the ground,” I say to the chocolate ram as he rises. In one slow-motion push of his haunches, he leaps straight up a wall to a ledge above the bed area.

Map the day trails of a mixed group of desert bighorns and you will quickly see that ewes instigate “aimed” motion, the movement from one place to another. When a ram leaves a group, none of the other sheep follows. If you are anthropomorphizing about gender, this may set to rest once and for all who exactly is in charge around here.

Ears forward, body and stare fixed along a distinct line of sight, the first ewe off her bed now holds an attention posture.

With her gaze, she tells the others that she intends to move soon and which direction she will take. When she moves, the others follow … well, like sheep.

In their liquid leaps, eleven animals flow up a rock face to a narrow shelf below a steep arroyo. They pretend to act like a bunch of chewing herbivores. In fact, a bit of hell is breaking loose.

The flared-horn ram rushes at a female and singles her out from the herd. She bolts off at full speed. She careens and zigzags across the ledge, veering sharply around shrubs and boulders like a barrel-racing quarter horse at a rodeo. The ram is on her tail at every turn. When she pauses, he tries to mount her, but she wheels around to face him off and won't stand still.