Eating Stone (11 page)

In similar circumstances of drought, desert bighorns have been known to succumb to group death. On the San Andres in 1950, fourteen sheep carcasses were found in close proximity. Bear grass, or sacahuiste, a Nolinaceae-family plant with coarse grasslike leaves, may have poisoned them. The sheep browsed bear grass as a last-resort food; the meal that saved them from starving ended up killing them.

Occasional poisoning would normally not matter. Bighorns and bear grass, as well as bighorns and mountain lions, have evolved with one another, a dance of victims and survivors. For that matter, bighorns coevolved with humans. The difference is the scale and degree of a human reach that now severely compromises the balance.

When a herd is healthy in vigor and numbers, multiple casualties are a misfortune. When the animals are rare, such losses are a collective catastrophe. In this light, the San Andres bighorns find themselves in a sort of dodo position.

The truck wobbles slowly over a rocky two-track. Folds of mountains close in behind us, erasing the vistas back into the Tularosa Basin. Ahead sits a blocky escarpment with a flat crest and a place called Ewe Skull Canyon, one of SAE 067's hangouts. We park and step outside. The winter air is sweet and clean. I want to thank Kevin for the ride, then bolt, and hike around until my feet blister and bits of plants stick to me.

Under the aegis of wildlife management, the oxymoron that is now a fact of life for most North American creatures, spins unbounded tinkering, with further tinkering made necessary by
past tinkering, effects of causes, effects of effects—a “cascade of consequences” precipitated by human intervention, well intended though it may be. I cool my itchy feet and stay put. Only with my imagination can I not meddle. I retract my idea of launching African lions at oryx. Let the generals prey-switch and eat them.

The unspoken loss in a highly mediated lion-sheep world is the loss of the two species’ own biology—the architecture of precise killers and keen-eyed escape artists, and the fluidity of habitat and climate that pushes their evolution—all of it under the relatively autonomous hand of nature. Here, as in other desert bighorn homelands, the choice against extinction trades wildness for “cultural biology” and the intervention of rescue.

To some degree, one animal in the San Andres Mountains eluded the tinkering and made her own covenant. She is standing on the cliff face about five miles away, bleeping a signal into Kevin's telemetry receiver.

San Andres Ewe 067 was born on the mountain in 1989 to a ewe that likely dropped her lambs in the same site year after year, in terrain more rugged than her usual feeding and resting haunts. For a highly social animal, giving birth was one of her few solitary acts. She chose a cliff shelter with an unobstructed view, perhaps south-facing for its solar advantage.

The ewe lamb born that season did not suffer hypothermia, as newborns can. No golden eagle struck her, as an eagle might when a lamb is a few weeks old and vulnerable. This lamb survived her first round of perils.

A refuge operation in 1993 captured eleven sheep for collaring and tests. Among them was a four-year-old female about to be assigned an identity: SAE 067. With the others, she was treated for scabies mites and fitted with a radio collar. Refuge staff would know where she was on the mountain. They could track her
movements. If her radio transmitted a steady stationary blip—a “mort,” or mortality signal—they would know that she was dead or had lost her collar.

During the capture operation, she broke her leg. She ran off from the release. Her broken leg mended. She chewed languidly from her day beds and scratched her ears. She may have slipped through pinyon, juniper, and brush, the lair of shadow cats. Or she avoided those places altogether, staying in the limestone ramparts she favored. The other bighorns around her were dropping dead.

Mountain lions, accidents, natural deaths, and unknown causes, but mostly mountain lions, picked off SAE 067's herd mates. With males and females on separate ranges, she likely lost the band of ewes and juveniles that ran and fed with her, but she was oblivious to the end of the rams until none came to impregnate her.

A 1997 capture came up with a ram and SAE 067, another helicopter to chase and net her. She tested positive for scabies and was treated. After the release, the ram disappeared. In aerial and ground surveys, a despairing staff searched the craggy peaks for more than SAE 067. The refuge manager at the time tried to be optimistic. He told me, “They are out there. They're good at hiding.”

The staff set up an infrared beam–activated video camera at a guzzler, an artificial water-collection unit for wild sheep. Mule deer put in cameo appearances. Javelina trotted in on high-heeled piglet hooves, grunting through long snouts, their grizzled hairs in stiff bristle.

No bighorns showed up on film. If some were in hiding, they died in their hideouts. Faithful to this rib of rock for centuries, the native San Andres bighorn was essentially extinct.

From 1997 to 1999, SAE 067 lived alone. Her radio collar located her for capture in 1999. She was quarantined in a pad-
dock near the guzzler and came up clean in scabies tests. When she bashed her head against the paddock fence, she broke off one of her horns. After a week, she was released.

Three years later, there she was on her limestone cliff, caught in a snapshot from the helicopter, thirteen years old, bald. A lamb sprang away from her side.

Before my day in the field, I had visited Mara Weisenberger, the refuge biologist. Invested in bighorn recovery in the San Andres Mountains for the past twenty years, she has worked here ten. Both of her two children are younger than SAE 067.

Gently blond and fit, Mara is mostly a big-mammal biologist. She studied under the Southwest's premier desert bighorn biologist, Paul Krausman, at the University of Arizona. With characteristic grace, she once convinced the White Sands generals to reroute a stretch of dirt road out of a streambed so that the riparian area could recover. It did.

Mara knows the San Andres Mountains on foot. She can hang out of a doorless helicopter as it flits about the jagged spaces of sheep country. She works with a species with a proclivity for disaster.

She is also quite ingenious at figuring out the least risk and stress to wild sheep while they are in her custody. Her engineering of holding pens at remote camps and of crates for transplanting sheep reflects an instinct for the animals’ well-being and for what can be inadequately described as their dignity, a quintessential bighornness that, in Mara's mind, need not be met with human indifference or arrogance.

For Mara, the recent translocation of sheep to the range marks years of work with an unruly assortment of government agencies. Although she was modest about it, I had the impression that her survival of the politics of wildlife was somewhat analogous to

SAE 067's survival of mountain lions. Now, she and her colleagues had reached a point in which the immediate future was up to the animals.

On her office computer she ran through recent data beamed down, more or less, from bighorns via outer space. Five of the new rams wore satellite collars, a next-generation tracking device. The head count that day was sixty bighorns: fifty-one new arrivals, “the old lady,” her lamb (elusive and uncollared, nearly a yearling), and seven more, all rams, alive today to impress us with the ineffability of ram lust.

Before any animals could be reintroduced to the San Andres Mountains, their habitat had to be mite-free. In 1999, the refuge brought in six “sentinel” rams and sprinkled them individually throughout the range. For the next two years, the rams were routinely captured and tested. Over that period, these bulky, four-legged miner's canaries did not contract scabies, and the range was deemed safe for a new herd.

The sentinel rams’ other job was to find any sheep from the original herd that had not turned up in two years of searching.

“Sheep can find sheep better than we can find sheep,” Mara said.

One would like to think of one cranky recluse from the old herd, butting mountain lions off his horns right and left, hiding in wind caves, never showing his hide—one that tiptoed in and impregnated SAE 067 in 2000 (she bore a lamb that eventually died) and again the following year, his offspring the leaping half a lamb in the photograph.

Plunked down in scattered places, the sentinel rams found no such survivors. However, within two years, and over more than ninety miles, they found the single ewe, and for the first time in about four years, there was a rut in the mountains. A sentinel ram sired the old ewe's offspring. Mara speculates that in a butt with a ram, SAE 067 lost her second horn.

The rams did their work as detectors of disease and lost sheep. Some of the original stock died and were replaced with animals brought in from other areas. Seven of the sentinel rams remain. Three crossed a busy highway into an adjacent range, from which they can peer down at a sprawling facility of the warrior nerds.

On Mara's office shelf, among photos of kids and bighorn sheep, lay a gray horn, a curved sheath of keratin with a rough lined surface. It was smaller and more delicate than I would have imagined. This horn broke off SAE 067's head when she rammed the fence of the holding pen during her brief capture in 1999. In a culture fixated on poster-boy rams, this unassuming crescent of protein carried far more power.

No one had seen SAE 067's surviving lamb in several months. It has never been captured. It was, Mara told me, well past “eagle-bait age” and may have learned a few evasive techniques from its mother. Meanwhile, the old lady stuck like Velcro to her piece of mountain, still an elusive loner.

Mara said, “She survived scabies, she survived mountain lions, and she survived us.”

Kevin Cobble raises the antenna of his telemetry gear in one hand and works the receiver with the other. He runs through each sheep's radio-collar frequency and makes notes on his checklist. Today's survey locates twenty-one animals. Others may be tucked into crevices that block the signal. Each day, each signal, is reassuring. Everyone on the refuge wants the new herd to take hold.

I have to wonder if the newcomers are a bit dazed by it all. One minute, they were chewing a jojoba plant in the Kofa Mountains in Arizona; the next, they were in a mesh sling, dangling from a helicopter, then in shipping crates on a truck trailer. Tucson whizzed by. The crate doors opened and they raced off into the bright sunlight of New Mexico.

They are bureaucratic bighorns (years of interagency planning, reams of environmental assessments) with a clean bill of health (vet check, blood tests, ear swabs, inoculations) and a neckload of high-tech sheep jewelry. They must now form a sheep map, become locals, stay out of the maws of Puma concolor.

Bennett Mountain fills the horizon, shaped more like a mesa than a peak. Below its steep red-brown face falls a wrinkled skirt of drainages etched deeply in the rock. The mountain spills itself at its own feet. From the heights comes a signal from the collar around the neck of SAE 067.

Kevin and Mara have tracked her movements since the arrival of the transplants. In a very unsheeplike manner, she avoids them and stays alone in her favored terrain, this corner of a craggy mountain. She is off-limits to helicopters and captures. “She is retired,” Mara told me.

When I ask Kevin about his last hike deep into the mountains to catch sight of the sheep from the ground, he repeats the mantra of human intent foiled by bighorn invisibility: “I walked and walked and I never saw a sheep.”

The contact between humans and the last native bighorn in
the Chihuahuan Desert is this radio bleep, this ripple of invisible waves on the electromagnetic spectrum, waves long enough to bend around the curve of the earth. The waves undulate across five miles of broken winter desert, from one mammal's neck to another mammal's ears. SAE 067's signal comes as a faint blip. I think of it as a heart monitor.

During my sojourn in New Mexico, the globe has spun. Sabers rattle in the Middle East. Ammonium perchlorate, a component of rocket fuel and hand grenades, has turned up in the nation's commercial lettuce at unhealthy levels. A pet-product company has, Frankenstein-like, crossed the genes of a phosphorescent marine plant with those of a sliver-size fish to produce an aquarium fish that glows in the dark. This is said to be the first animal genetically engineered for the sole purpose of human amusement.

In a zoo in Afghanistan, soldiers slash the nose of a bear. A hand grenade destroys the eye of an elderly lion. A zookeeper is murdered, and most of the animals starve to death.

In Washington, D.C., the White House unveils the season's “creatures great and small” Christmas decor: animal ornaments, animal scenes, photos of Woodrow Wilson's sheep (they grazed the White House lawn), sculptures of presidential pets, including LBJ's beagles and an alligator that lived in the East Room's bathroom during the administration of John Quincy Adams.

Down the street, Congress tries to hand Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the oil barons. Politicians jackhammer endangered-species laws, and the Department of Defense may soon be exempt from laws that protect plants and wildlife on military ranges, including default wildlands like the San Andres Mountains. At the whim of a base commander, the aplomado falcon, piping plover, bonita diving beetle, or Ovis canadensis mexi-cana can be declared threats to national security.