Eating Stone (18 page)

They told his mother that he should try harder at school. Do more homework. Stop being a bully. I asked if the kids were frightened into good behavior.

“Oh, yes, we were good,” he said, laughing. “For about a week.”

For most of his adult life, he had worked off the reservation, as most Hopis must do in a wage-driven economy that has largely overshadowed a traditional village life—a life of farming with little water, of teasing corn from the desert with hoe and prayer, of affixing all of one's identity to a stone pueblo in a harsh, arid land. On retirement, he returned to his village to tend small cornfields off the mesa, to learn again, he said, “one way to be a human being.”

“My job is corn,” he told me with modest pleasure. “My job is to be Hopi.”

I decided to brave the street and make my way off the mesa. I thanked the people who had saved me from who knows what kind of hilariously rude encounter. As I left, I rested my fingers on the metate. It was still warm to the touch.

The So'yokos moved along their way, far up the narrow street, nearly obliterated by windy squalls of dust. A few children cried out in fright—had they been very bad?—and the ogres’ jaws clamped open and shut. Saws shrieked and feet pounded the hard-packed dirt. I was chased to my truck by a woolly, fleet-footed Heheya, his lasso so ready, so close, it whipped into a high-pitched scream. I dived into the cab and slammed the door. Safe!

Above the river's north bank, the earth layers itself in folios of thin rock, then tilts toward the water in gravity-defying flatiron slabs. Here, all appears to be sliding. On the south side of the river, all is horizontal and as solid as melting red elephants: voluptuous smooth-faced sandstone, a curvaceous massif of petrified sand dunes. The river forms a seam between these two contrasting fabrics.

On the tilted, flaky side, the limestone caprock is as abrasive as sandpaper, rough with sharp granular wrinkles and fossilized marine creatures. I am walking on the melting elephant side. The slickrock feels mammalian, more like my own body. Its warmth is faint, but it bakes up enough scent to arouse flooding blushes of memory, making a person too vulnerable to accomplish anything.

In the desert, February feels like a celestial pause. The troughs of winter silence still run deep. Soon, a more robust sun will dissolve the ambient brittleness, bringing appetite for green, the noise of birds. The morning bears a crisp chill and boneless clouds veil across a cerulean sky. I am in pangwúvi again, where the mountain sheep climb.

Every year during this time, I think about driving to the Hopi towns for the Powamu. In the end, I don't go. Science insists that the sun's arc will grow high again and the longer daylight hours will come. But one can never be too sure. On their mesas, the Hopi know what time it is, how nature's power must sometimes be danced and sung. I am relieved to know that, with their solid faith, they are helping the season turn.

Ahead of me, a side canyon interrupts the slickrock massif. Its mouth meets the river here; its headwaters lie miles beyond, in distant pinyon and juniper highlands. In this region, the canyon is one of the river's largest tributaries. It meanders in tight loops, sinuosity encased in salmon red stone. A thin glassy stream flows intermittently along its narrow bottom, framed by a coppery haze of leafless willows. In drier seasons, the wash runs only with blow sand.

For several days, I have taken hikes up this canyon, looking for bighorn rams from the Blue Door Band. Winter still conceals the home sheep inside the crack where they have vanished. I want to see the first nose peek out, the first hoof lifted in tiptoe, moving out into the world again.

After the rut, rams move from ewe range back to their bachelor turf. Although the heart of Ram Land lies a few miles downriver, inside steeper folds of stone, males may roam this way. They come farther afield, sometimes in pairs or trios, sometimes alone, though not for long, since for sheep, terrain without companions is neither “home” nor any fun.

Early on, rams develop home-range fixations, a fidelity broken by occasional idiosyncrasies. Once in a while, weather, food, spooks, a sudden lightbulb over the head, or a hair up the butt— who knows?—will prompt a ram to wander into this fringe country.

A radio-collared ram from the Blue Door Band once broke out of the canyons and headed southeast with a determined gait, as if he was on his way to Texas. He had an abscess on the back of his head, which may have scrambled his radar and propelled him into confusing terrain.

Sickness aside, such excursions may not be entirely erratic. This fringe country, now the outer limits for today's herd, may have once been part of a larger home range. Perhaps the rams are not wandering off, but going back. We do not know if desert
bighorns are capable of what wildlife biologist Valerius Geist calls “insights of sobering depth.” But as traditionalists, they will, Geist suggests, enter contiguous habitat and, possibly by repeated visits, extend their range.

Enlarging ram range in this upriver direction does not bode well for the Blue Door Band. Farther up the canyon and on the nearby mesas, there are still domestic sheep that can infect a roaming bighorn with pathogens, making him a vector of disease for his herd mates. There are feral dogs, cattle, roads, fences, poachers, impenetrable thickets of politicians.

I tromp up a steep talus near the canyon's mouth, seeking a watching post. Near the top, I scare up a few bighorns and a kestrel. The sheep are not flesh, but petroglyphs etched on a cliff face. The kestrel is real. In midflight, it twitches its wings twice, then speeds up sevenfold, the falcon equivalent of pedal to the metal. A raven passes overhead in a lazy glide, aware that I am not a dead rodent but curious nevertheless. It lets out a gargly chortle. Up-canyon, another raven chortles back.

Everywhere around me, along the river and especially in this canyon, the people of early Pueblo cultures pecked glyphs into the desert varnish, the oxidized minerals that coat weathered sandstone surfaces. Removing this mauve patina reveals the lighter terra-cotta heart rock underneath.

I like to think of petroglyphs simply—as the expression of people's thoughts. Around here, the canyon ancients were thinking a great deal about bighorn sheep. Of all the fauna depicted, sheep images predominate. Follow a canyon wall, pass a boulder, and there they are, trotting across the inert mineral-glazed stone.

The Blue Door Band's ancestors fed the thoughts, art, and bellies of the earliest desert dwellers. Many centuries later, there are more petro portraits than actual sheep.

No one tracked the historic decline with rigorous scientific scrutiny, only with the common litany of loss. Since “pristine”
times, and especially from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, the numbers of North American mountain sheep plunged dramatically. Although this desert was (and still is) sparsely populated by humans, its bighorns, too, succumbed to encroachment.

When I sort through the puzzle of recent years—the past half century—I work with scant pieces.

From the 1920s through the 1950s, there were observations of remnant desert bighorns along the river. Most of the sightings came from anecdote. Sophisticated wildlife census methods, on the level of New Mexico's San Andres Wildlife Refuge, were still years in the future.

As the fifties ended, the sightings grew infrequent. Whereas groups of thirty or more animals had once been reported, people were now seeing only singles or pairs, maybe three at the most, usually ewes. Herein lay a blueprint for a local extinction: diminished numbers, habitat fragmentation, isolation, a stubborn tenacity to natal ground. Nowhere else to go.

By 1962, the sightings ceased altogether. The river cliffs appeared to be empty of their native ungulates.

Twenty years passed without a confirmed sighting. In 1983, boaters floated past a sandy alluvial fan deep in the river canyon, the site of a rough-hewn stone shelter with a door frame painted sky blue. On this bottomland, they spotted a ewe and her lamb. The bighorns were back.

The lack of reliable information during those years renders the puzzle unsolvable. What can be assumed, however, is that the locals did not go extinct during that time. Rather, they went missing.

On the back of the elephants, above the canyon, things become a bit dreamy. Ravens chortling softly. Prehistoric thoughts on the rock behind my head like cartoon bubbles. The memory of black-
haired children alive with laughter around a table in an adobe house. Air with exquisite taste: clear, chilled, like iced lime. A redrock land that stretches a hundred miles into the sacrament of space. I am not paying attention.

I hear the sound of a waterfall. How nice, I think. A waterfall. Just like Tahiti.

Unmistakable: the splash of liquid on stone. This is most curious. No rain in sight. Not flash-flood season. No water except for scattered frozen puddles in the wash on the flats below. This place is as dry as old sticks. This is not Tahiti.

The water sound comes from a low saddle of slickrock above me, barely seventy yards distant. Atop the rock, in classic position—head erect, hind legs stretched back, back slightly depressed—is a bighorn ram. He is pissing out a thunderous stream on the sandstone.

The ram sees me. There is no doubt that I am a speck caught in his dark amber orbs. He is so impressed, he finishes peeing and yawns. I am accustomed to seeing gray-brown bighorns against gray-brown rock, seeing bighorns that are actually boulders or boulders that are actually sheep. The gray-brown ram against terra-cotta sandstone is startling.

I have not moved.

Run for your life! I scream at the ram without using my voice. Go back to where it's safe!

Where did the sheep go for twenty years?

Did their numbers drop so low, they found themselves staring, like the old San Andres ewe and the last of her band, into the tunnel of doom?

There are rumors, words as faint as white ash in white air, that the river band hid its missing generations somewhere in the cracks of this big red side canyon. Another scenario: The river herd died off. Meanwhile, a different group, already in the big red tributary, could have survived in some pocket of safety with
permanent water sources. Eventually, it recolonized river habitat. Still another scenario: Bighorns in groups far to the north moved south and did a rare sheep thing: They crossed the river. They established this homeland.

During this time, the area was heavily used by flocks of domestic sheep that were moved seasonally along the rims and into the canyon for forage and water. Fatal encounters would be expected. In the lost-sheep years, the last of a horde of uranium miners scraped the country for ore. Most of the miners were ruthless poachers.

After the miners left and sheep raising diminished, new visitors came to the region for recreation. If there were wild ungulates in this place, there were eyes to spot them. Instead, the bighorns turned into invisible sheep.

It is plausible to think that the Blue Door Band hid nowhere near this canyon, or anywhere else we might imagine. Perhaps they never left the home river corridor at all. Everyone missed them because they were too few in numbers to attract notice. Maybe they looked just like boulders.

If the herd had been reduced to two or three animals, some twist of fate kept it from becoming the dead end of a single gender—one last ewe, for instance, or two old geezer rams. Despite the odds, and the funeral dirges for lost populations elsewhere in the Southwest, this native herd began to rebuild itself, driven by thousands of years of resolute procreation.

The 1983 sighting of ewe and lamb turned into more glimpses of bighorns along the river. Unofficial reports gave counts of about thirty animals by 1995. Last fall (2002), after the addition of the latest lamb crop, the band numbered about eighty sheep.

Perhaps their disappearance for those decades was much like this year's occurrence of vanishing into a crack: wild sheep in the wildest corners of the canyon, slipping up and down cliffs like ghosts. They remained beyond the notice of humans, who tend
to think of wildlife in terms of our own desires rather than in terms of the animals’ hard truth, their unshakable fidelity to stone. For this truth, we are starved.

The ram remains on his cliff, doing Noble Ram poses. A nonchalant neck stretch. The cover boy, the hood ornament. Some casual skylining to show off his handsome profile. Through my binoculars, I can see up his runny black nose.

I recognize this ram from Ram Land. He is seven or eight years old and has thick-based horns that rise out of his skull, curl and flair around his cheeks like truck tires, then end in splintered tips. He is among the studliest in the herd. He is known as a loner and a roamer, a pioneer of new terrain.

The biologists who are now the band's caretakers say that going upriver from Ram Land and ewe range is going toward civilization—the wrong direction. If by some faint likelihood the big red side canyon was a past hideout, and if the roaming rams “remember” this, it would be much healthier if they were to “forget.” The safer habitat lies downriver. In fact, some of the ewes are sneaking downriver, especially as the drought prompts them to seek better food. The band is not only growing; it is stretching.