Eating Stone (23 page)

When you sang an abbreviated version of your map song, the Chemehuevi said, you knew the right shortcuts from one place to another. The back-road undulations of basin and range were more like long cuts. So much more song was needed to thread together the bighorn's remaining lands.

I stopped for lunch and a walk in Joshua Tree National Park. According to a park employee, Joshua Tree had a chemical problem (smog from nearby Los Angeles was affecting plant ecology). It had a dump problem (Los Angeles was proposing to build The Biggest Dump Ever at a site bordered on three sides by the park.) It looked to me like Joshua Tree had a Los Angeles problem. The park also had desert bighorns. There are two phenotypes, the park ranger said, one of short, stocky, fast animals, the other long, gawky, and “as big as horses.”

Over the last pass and into the Coachella Valley, freeway traffic and an exponential increase in people density sucked me up like a flea in a torrent of locusts. I rode the swarm toward Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, and other towns strung end to end along the base of the San Jacinto and Santa Rosa mountains, the seam where cordillera met desert floor and the valley's most watered and habitable places.

Then I extricated myself, pulled off the freeway, and found what had to be the last remaining vacant lot in Southern California. (Don't panic. It had a Realtor's billboard.) I wanted to take a long look at the mountains without crashing.

Despite the locust atmosphere, the landscape was stunning. The startling massif loomed above the flats in a serrated curtain of rock that went from 487 feet above sea level to 10,831 feet in a mere two miles, straight up in a neck-arching rise. I stood on the Coachella Valley floor with more than 300,000 people, 600 ten-
nis courts, several thousand swimming pools—some say 30,000 pools—and 100 golf courses.

High above the silvery veil of ambient smoggy haze could be found cliffs, crags, and pinnacles, plenty of stone to eat, and in it an unexpected population of sheep, one of the rarest races of desert sheep outside of Mexico, the peninsular bighorn. The Chemehuevi map had led me straight into the urban vortex.

Each spring, in a different venue, aficionados of the desert bighorn come out of their deserts to share science and talk sheep. The meetings draw wildlife managers, biologists, and academics from northwestern Mexico and every state with desert bighorns: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, California. This group exists in addition to the many sportsmen's organizations devoted to North American sheep. The constituency behind the animal is formidable. Few species have so many champions of their welfare.

The host who opened the meeting welcomed us to Palm Springs, where there are “wider freeways but narrower minds” and more golf courses than bighorn sheep. When he encouraged us to enjoy the “village atmosphere,” I blinked stupidly. Here, the golf-ball fetchers at a single country club outnumbered my town's entire population. Later, the host showed a slide of a bighorn drinking from a turquoise guzzler: someone's swimming pool.

The conference room held about a hundred attendees for two days of technical papers and presentations. I sat next to a mountain lion tracker, a man with such quiet manners, I thought he was nearly invisible, and near a cluster of elders, retired game wardens who spoke of bighorn herds that went extinct in their time. A few wives had come along. They were attractive, neatly coifed grandmothers, whom I liked immediately because each
time someone mentioned the Old Woman Mountains, a Mojave Desert range, they winked at one another and laughed.

Men and women, mostly men. A full inventory of Western boots and silver platter belt buckles. Great big veggie-oil pickups parked outside on the hot tarmac. Big-picture people, mentor professors, veterinarians, graduate students who collected sheep turds for studies of diet and genes. The curious-minded, who dug up old papers and challenged old theories, keeping science mobile and dynamic. The room filled with amiable, competent people.

There was a man with a thick curved-down mustache that took the shape of ram horns, and someone in a grand-slam T-shirt: portraits of rams from each North American subspecies—Stone's, Dall's, Rocky Mountain, desert—a grand slam if a hunter took all four. A throng of field geeks, lean and fit from hiking their terrain, proclaimed their horror of paperwork, noting that as soon as you became an administrator, you gained weight and lost your hair. An expert in mountain sheep DNA called himself a “psychogeneticist,” a denizen of the laboratory rather than the field, a man, he joked, who had “traded a personal life for data.”

It was easy to see how, over the years, these peer exchanges have shaped sheep management in the Southwest. Theirs was the business of tending to wild animals at the fringes of human dominion. They knew so much more than I did. I listened. I had much to learn.

I learned that the proliferation of wind farms, with road building and noise, presented hazards as well as irony: The gains of clean alternative energy could mean the loss of habitat for wild sheep. Wind farms posed questions about how so visual an animal would react to as much as 4,500 acres of whirling blades.

I learned that for transplant stock, animals from Arizona's Kofa National Wildlife Refuge were the most coveted. “Everyone
wants Kofa sheep,” at least three people told me, widening their eyes with awe. “Big, big horns.”

In Texas, where the native desert bighorn went extinct in the early 1960s, the state had worked to rebuild its herds from Kofa and Mexican transplants. Much habitat lay on private land, posing challenges in access and cooperation. The Texas wildlife people reported that they were still beggars, in need of transplants to bolster the Trans-Pecos herds. For a single ram permit, a hunter paid eighty thousand dollars. Two permits drew twenty thousand applicants.

Slides and PowerPoint presentations brought animals into the semidark room. The lion tracker next to me went invisible. In his slides, one of the presenters had put cartoon bubbles over the heads of sheep to show what they were thinking. Pie charts and graphs peppered us with hard-earned data.

Arizona had “the best sheep.” Utah had “healthy numbers” as well, along with dizzying growth in off-road-vehicle recreation and oil and gas exploration in critical habitat. The Mexicans expressed the most enthusiasm and optimism, faced the greatest political obstacles, and boasted a giant benefactor in Cemex, the country's largest cement company and the primary underwriter of bighorn sheep recovery in Sonora and other states.

New Mexico reported a grim picture (the mountain lion problem) and some fine but empty sheep habitat. For hope, they had San Andres Ewe 067 (still alive) and habitat improvement from prescribed burns. California seemed to have the largest budget and the coolest outfits for sheep-capture teams: yellow jumpsuits, knee pads, caps with logos.

There was talk of setbacks and progress; of logjams of bureaucratic crud and breakthroughs in research; of tribal herds, managed to benefit native traditions but dependent for funds on hunting permits so pricey, no tribal member could afford them. There was talk of nightmare drought and dried-up water holes
and of global warming as a possible factor in extinction risks in low-elevation deserts.

About domestic sheep, I heard of only one crisis. In a northern state, wildlife managers had successfully buffered a population of Rocky Mountain bighorns from contact with domestic sheep and the risk of cross-infection. Suddenly, a flock of woollies appeared near the bighorn range, grazing away like lawn mowers.

On the other side of the mountain, a man had become upset about a neighbor's sheep, a flock that accidentally spent too much time in his backyard. He was at the end of his rope. He loaded up the sheep, drove them across the pass, and dropped them off on the other side of the mountain. In the jargon, this type of wildlife impact agent was known as an “anthropogenic factor.”

The litany of mountain lion troubles in New Mexico and California's Sierra Nevada brought my tracker back from the ethos. He gave me a lovely slow-motion Cheshire cat grin. Discussion-wise, in fact, this was the meeting's predominant topic: predation.

“Ten, twelve years ago, we all were talking about disease— scabies, pneumonia, parainfluenza,” one of the elders told me. “Now it's all about mountain lions.”

Along one of the town's sunny, homeless person–free streets, I found a bench and sat down with my binoculars to scan for sheep. The mountain range loomed above the lanky palm trees, its granite face carved in rough pleats of sun and shade.

The bench sat near a store that sold clothing slightly preowned by Hollywood stars and a design studio with an unadorned, rough-faced concrete wall and a concrete tub planter along its facade. Out of the planter sprung a vigorous thatch of what appeared to be electrocuted grass. In fact, these were horsetails:
tall, hollow, jointed plants that stand erect and “leafless” (the leaves are small sheaths at the joints), somewhat like a reed or a green straw. Two to three feet tall, these plants have an abrasive surface, hence the nickname “scouring brush.”

Horsetails grow wild along streams and washes throughout the West, including my home canyon country, creeping from a common rootstock into implacable thickets. They are adaptable, primitive, and remarkably ancient plants with Paleozoic, pre-dinosaur origins. An unlikely but intriguing choice for decorative horticulture, I thought. Le Corbusier meets the Devonian.

My chances of being arrested for voyeurism were greater than my chances of seeing a bighorn with my binoculars as I sat on a bench next to a bunch of hothouse-green arthrophytes. Yet the sheep were up there, hanging above the golf courses.

The sprawl of Coachella Valley towns had sprawled right up into the bighorns’ lower-elevation habitat. At the northern end of the Santa Rosa Mountains, the sheep gazed at high-end subdivisions. They trotted through streets and yards tended by fleets of Mexican gardeners. They drank from swimming pools. They became entangled in fences and they ate new, tasty, poisonous plants, the exotic (nonnative) ornamentals around deluxe homes and country clubs.

The sheep were vulnerable to parasites. Parasites persist in watered areas; the golf courses were watered daily. Cars hit and killed lambs or killed the mother ewe, so the orphaned lamb eventually died, as well. Hedges and other dense bands of landscaped greenery soothed desert-baked humans but blocked the bighorns’ vision, making them more susceptible to ambush by predators.

No sheep showed up in my binoculars, so I gave the horsetails a good-bye stroke and drove to Rancho Mirage, whose city logo is a ram's head. I waded through streets of chic homes, boutiques selling gold-plated mushroom scrubbers, and golf palaces until
everything stopped at an edge of open, raw land, the abrupt rise of the Santa Rosa escarpment. I hiked across stone and dust. I splayed myself against an eight-foot-high fence and silently screamed, Let me in!

No, I thought, as four hundred sprinklers hissed onto a swathe of blinding green golf turf behind me. Let me out!

The decline of local populations and the 1998 listing of Ovis canadensis cremnobates, the peninsular bighorn, as an endangered species triggered studies, especially of the disturbing trends in annual recruitment: Lambs were born each year, but too many died.

In their study of lamb mortality, wildlife managers very, very carefully captured young lambs and placed blindfolds around their eyes to calm them as they fixed special radio collars onto their small necks. As the lamb grew, the collar's cotton threads would break before the collar became too tight.

The study found that “urbanization” was the cause of 43 percent of lamb mortality, both from direct effects (being hit by a car, drowning in a pool, etc.) and from the indirect effects of habitat fragmentation or loss. Bobcats and coyotes killed a number of lambs. Because of weak respiratory systems, the lambs may have been predisposed to predation.

As the valley filled with houses, the sites next prized for upscale real estate lay in fringe areas and higher on the slopes, terrain long used by the bighorns. Some in the neighborhood understood that, on the bajada real estate, Ovis had preceded Homo. Others complained that the sheep were “invading them.”

The option to remove million-dollar homes from sheep range did not go over well. Instead, the solution, hard-won by wildlife advocates, was a fence, a “bighorn-proof” camouflaged fence, eight feet high and nearly four miles long.

Ultimately, the community supported the fence and helped raise money for its construction. In one fund-raising effort, the
sale of sheep art—sculptures and paintings of the school of the Dall's sheep painting—garnered private funds for land purchases and easements. Angel sheep helped golf sheep.

After the fence went up, the roadkills and pool disasters declined, education efforts continued, and the day I visited, high on a slope, two ewes chewed nonchalantly and stared down at a screaming madwoman plastered to their fence.

Meanwhile, back in the lion's den …

Much of the conference's second day was devoted to the dynamics of big cats and wild sheep. Next to me, the molasses-slow gestures of my table partner, the tracker, said more about his vocation than words. He moved with the lithe grace of a cat—or a sloth, the metaphorical antithesis of the suicidal pace of our breakneck world.

“How do you track a cougar?” I whispered, hoping he wouldn't notice the imprints of chain-link fence on my palms. He leaned forward and gave me the precise technique. “Let me walk you through my mountain range,” he whispered, “every detail.”

Most big-ungulate professionals are also big hunters. Their work reflects the entrenched history of sport-driven management and funding. To some hunters, wildlife-watchers are hopeless weenies. Others hold the conviction that bobcats, coyotes, and mountain lions are unwanted competitors that take prey away from humans who love to hunt them. Of the mountain lion, one presenter said, “We have to educate these animals with lethal means.”

Some claimed that mountain lions, or at least the sheep killers, were “out of control.” Others believed that wildlife habitat loss and “human meddling” had triggered subtle ecological shifts between predator and prey.