Eating Stone (41 page)

Several wildlife managers in Nevada copied her crate design, she says. “They told me, ‘You've got these figured out down to a gnat's ass.’”

The half door gets sheep inside without breakouts. For the release, the door opens at full height to an inviting panorama of freedom. Handlers wait behind the back wall, not wanting to startle or prod the animal, but allow it to bolt out on its own and find its way to safe terrain.

Mara recalls the “sensitive release” of a large ram. She unlatched the door and hid so she would not disturb his exit. The ram sat in the box for an hour. He would not move. She wiggled the crate. She rocked and tipped the crate. The ram sat, door wide open. Finally, he stood up, whirled around, and butted the back wall, where she was crouching.

Gary buzzes in and hovers over a crate. The muggers attach the cable and the chopper lifts the crate off the back of the truck and flies off. We watch the crate spin a few times. The weight of the sheep inside appears to cause a twirl. Gary tries to correct it by varying his speed; then aircraft and load disappear over the lip of the canyon. Too much spin, Mara worries. Already, in her head, she is designing foils or some way to stabilize the crates for the next time.

One by one, Gary flies the crates to the release site. He lines them up in a neat row on a sandy patch of open ground on the debris fan. The crate doors face up-canyon toward secure terrain.

A hundred yards away from the crates, the river flows over its ancient bed, a sunlit ribbon of jade water unbroken but for lacy ripples over submerged rocks. I see the place in my mind because I have passed it many times in a boat. I have explored its face of cliffs, where hanging springs drape emerald foliage over terracotta rock and brass-colored frogs hide behind maidenhair ferns, their bodies moist and cool. The steep, broken country is sheep
heaven. It is but a remnant wild; rugged, out of reach, a taste of all of the wild that we have lost to our own hubris.

Nike and her crew stand behind the crates and open the doors. Twelve desert bighorns leap into the warm October air and race upriver, the first natives to return to a place that suddenly does not feel so empty.

Paul Shepard writes,

How can this young bighorn ram, whose blood has spilled on my hands, not be “mindful” of us? We rob him of his mobility, his best weapon against predation. We incite terror. There is no way to explain that this capture is temporary and that sheep paradise— succulent plants, exquisitely edible stone, estrous ewes, the river— will soon surround him.

At the end of this second day of the translocation, the chase will be over.

The needle's draw has leaked sticky red blood all over my fingers. In spite of the leak, I still have enough blood to fill the four vials that Scott needs for his lab work. I try to cant the needle inside the glass tube so that I do not press the plunger too firmly and “blast” the cells, ruining them for the tests.

Today we have relaxed teams and feistier sheep. A young ewe
with a pelage the color of ash spooks in her crate and tries to bash it to bits, despite blocked-out windows that are meant to diminish her fright. When I lean against the truck, I feel the vibration of her hooves through the metal.

Dondi is full of teasing Navajo humor. He tries to convince Dave that yesterday's released sheep hiked upriver all night long, many, many miles, to return to their homeland. Using Pam's binoculars, he glasses the cliffs near the work site. “Dave! They're back.”

Out in the air above the canyon, the pilot spots fewer animals to match Nike's selection. The sheep have become more wary. Some hide behind rocks when they hear the chopper, for which you can hardly blame them. If I were a bighorn, I'd dress up like an antelope and hitchhike to the Mexican border. Nike does not want animals that already have collars. Many are older females. Two are barren. On the radio, she tells Gary that we have enough rams and asks him to find young females.

The chopper crew chases a band of ewes and a ram. When two ewes are netted and airlifted away, the ram tries to follow, as if his entire sex life were fluttering heavenward.

On a ledge above the river, the gunner nets a lamb. The muggers hobble her small feet and wrap her head in a blindfold the size of a handkerchief. Instead of dangling her sling from the cable, they put her inside the chopper. The lamb limo flies a few minutes longer, nets a ewe, then brings them both in. The lamb is so small, Dondi carries her to the work tarp by himself.

She is about six months old, progeny of a fall rut I watched and a springtime birth during the weeks of my quixotic attention. She was one among the year's crop of popcorning fluff beside the river, now weaned, lankier, and destined to run with the ewe band in their new terrain. She still has oversize ears and short devilish horns. Her black Y-shaped nostrils are so delicate, they hardly seem possible. Her docility and petite size incite an epidemic of tenderness among the men.

Gary brings in a single ewe, the twenty-fourth capture and the last of the Blue Door Band to be transplanted. For this singleton, too, there is the leisure of awe but not of time. Although she is the last and there are many hands to work her, we stay under the six-minute rule.

She is a beautiful ewe, robust and unscarred. She has the slender-bodied musculature of the Blue Door Band phenotype. She shakes uncontrollably from head to tail, the first and only animal to do so. Her mute trembling bears a message of fear so profound, it borders on grief, and I am not certain that I can move beyond it. Pam holds the ewe's head up by the horns while her nose rests in the palm of my hand.

Out on the mesa with the view of the entire world, we tie streamers to the antenna to give the pilot a read on the wind. We snack on smoked oryx meat. For the New Mexico crew, I name the landmarks around us. They live on the Rio Grande, in the harsher Chihuahuan Desert, so, like all dwellers in extreme landscapes, this is the first thing they want to know: Where is the water? I describe a confluence of rivers hidden in folds of stone, a spring on the side of the mountain in land so holy, you must sing every footstep you place on it.

Relieved that the operation is nearly over and no animals were harmed, Dave and Nike shift to postcapture fretting. The clinical signs of capture myopathy—renal failure, shock, ruptured muscle tissue, ataxia, death—can show up within hours (none had) or a week or two after the transplant. Hidden on the canyon's stairstep terraces, animals with capture myopathy or fatal injuries would be invisible; their mortality signal would come through, but not all of the animals have the new radio collars.

What if the bighorns break their legs? Climb the rims, race very far overland to domestic sheep, poachers, highways, Wal-Marts? Will they take to habitat that is much like their old ground, with
water, galleta grass, singleleaf ash, blackbrush, the tasty petals of Indian paintbrush, the lush fruits of prickly pear cactus? Will the rams wander afar or, because they are on the eve of the rut, forget everything but crazed copulation?

Will the sheep be blessed with winter rains, clumsy mountain lions that eat only deer, healthy vegetation, lambs next spring, growing numbers? How will the source herd, the fifty-six sheep that remain upriver, respond? Dave and Nike will not be able to track the new band thoroughly for several weeks, and this worries them. I feel optimistic. But what do I know?

When we finish today, sixteen ewes and eight rams will be safely deposited in the bank, in habitat that greatly favors their survival. If the Blue Door Band far upriver succumbs to scabies, pneumonia, or some other catastrophe, these transplants will keep the native line unbroken.

Their lineage is ice-age deep. Their ancestral fiber interweaves with millennia of human witness. If you compared the DNA from the bone of a bighorn sheep made into a hide-scraper tool by an aboriginal hunter in this desert a thousand years ago with that of one of the animals we touched today, you would find a genetic link.

The new band reoccupies land emptied of their kind. No one knows how or when the old population disappeared, but with them they took their maps of the canyon—the lambing grounds, the dangerous places, the paths of descent and ascent on walls so precipitous, they seem to have no paths. The extirpation interrupted the intricate social mechanisms that pass information on home ranges from generation to generation.

A ewe or a few of the translocated ewes will reestablish such threads, describe the homeland with hooves and instinct, keen eyesight and memory. Others will follow. They are, after all, a follower species. The rams will define bachelor range, where they can strut about and bash heads and look at one another to know who they are.

To watch these twenty-four sheep stake out their place, establishing their fidelity to it, for the first time would be to witness everything that makes this animal what it is, its evolution and its hunger, its seamless, nearly molecular bond to landscape. To see how they map the stone would be to know this canyon with extraordinary intimacy. To see how they do it would be truly to learn something.

The muggers escort four of our crew to the helicopter, which will fly them to the canyon bottom to open the doors and free the sheep. With a flash of panic, I watch my husband inside the bubble cockpit of a mad-locust Hughes 500D, harnessed next to the pilot and, with Mara, Jeff, and Scott, whisked off into the general direction of Canada. I wonder if Mark will hang out the open door like Mara does.

At the canyon's rim, the ground fell out from beneath him, Mark will tell me later: the classic stomach-between-the-ears, plunging-elevator sensation. Next thing he knew, he was beside the river, in a familiar place, the high red cliffs and emerald springs, the sandy spill of rabbitbrush and sand fanning out from the side canyon into stream-bank willows and gravel bars.

Gary shuttled the crates down to them, setting each one on the ground like Irish crystal inside a box made of butterfly wings. The sheep, Mark reported, looked a bit airsick. They all had hiccups. None leaped out when the doors opened. They just sat there until little sheep lightbulbs went off in their heads. Then they bounded out and ran upriver, swiftly and together, climbing talus and crossing boulder fields, laying their tracks over the tracks of the bighorns released the day before.

Her nose lay in my palm. The warmth of her breath spread to every nerve in my hand. The short gray-brown hairs were silky along the muzzle, velvet and white near the apertures and cleft of her black nostrils. Her nose ran a clear mucus, and sand clung to
the moisture. Her nostrils were ringed with a rime of red sand from the canyon.

Finally, her trembling ceased. Despite her fear, her exhalations grew steady and unlabored. The fright lay in her eyes, the great golden orbs hidden behind a cloth blindfold. Darkness stilled her limbs. Strangely, it curbed all instinct to kick or twist herself upright. Stillness was not as much surrender as it was an instinct of passivity, as if eye contact with her captors would kill her.

How has this come about? I wondered. How have I come to a piece of October desert with the nose of a rare bighorn resting in my hand?

All year long, I had never crossed the agreed boundary between the Blue Door Band and me. I sat on a rock, my mind on Hopi Heheyas, while a ram studied the top of my head. I deserted the herd for phantom borregos in Mexico and rain doctors in California. Sometimes the ewe bands appeared on the talus and came close for inspection. They milled about and cocked their heads, as if I looked much better to them sideways. When the lambs grew to the strength of a nursery pack, the ewes brought them to my sandy alluvial fan by the river.

Now I feel as if I have crossed a threshold. The privilege humbles me. This would be the intimacy of the hunter, although against the hunter's hand there would be no heartbeat, no breath. I have touched her, this impossible survivor of a near extinction. I have placed my fingers on her flesh in a sacrament of trespass.

The blindfold stays her terror, stills her limbs. If I could see those eyes, I would see the wild, the second world. Her fear would cripple me. The palm of the hand is a most sensitive human organ. On it, the warmth of a breathing animal is pure solace.

Practitioners of phrenology, a “science” that was popular in the mid-nineteenth century, claimed that the brain was a mosaic of “little organs” that governed everything from vision and language to shyness and wonder. They believed that these phrenological faculties could be read and analyzed by studying the head's shape and protuberances.