Eating Stone (24 page)

Overall, the discussions evoked a hesitant but honest admis-
sion: Biologists’ understanding of sheep-lion dynamics was full of uncertainty. The role of Puma concolor in today's naturalized ecology of the desert bighorn—small groups on reduced, isolated habitat—remained complex and changeable.

There was mention of adverse conditioning—“teaching” mountain lions to stay out of an area by using shock collars on the lions and sonic collars on the sheep. I imagined a future generation of wildlife managers, very fat, very bald, sitting at remote urban workstations in dim rooms, following satellite-beamed blips on glowing screens. Whenever eater and eatee came within drooling distance of each other, someone pushed the bad-kitty button and zapped the cat.

Such scenarios may seem nuts, but unlike past predator control—that is, wholesale, bounty-crazed wipeout—did they not allow both species to coexist? What would we do if we had to choose between robo-sheep and extinct sheep? Do we extirpate the animal's wildness to keep its flesh?

My head swam. Hell, I was one of those weenies. There was every place in my heart and my life for alpha predators like mountain lions. An ecosystem is neither healthy nor whole without them. Their loss can precipitate a series of disruptions (called “trophic cascades”), including secondary extinctions. Losing big predators may do their prey more harm than good.

Yet when I envisioned feline predators taking out an up-against-the-wall band of bighorns like so many crunchy snacks, I realized, much to my horror, that I, too, might yell for the trappers.

The low background hum of the room's air-cooling system seemed to come from inside my own body. I felt like a humming refrigeration unit. I wanted to go back to cliffrose and yucca, to the dry air of stone. I wanted to shadow the tracker, learn his mountains, read the map of predator and prey, every detail.

The conference came to an end. The tracker prepared to morph out of the room and into his pickup. I wanted to say some-
thing not completely dumb. So I said something completely dumb. I puffed out my cheeks and crossed my eyes in exaggerated gluttony. I held my head as if it were bloated with giant balls of Styrofoam. “Science!” I groaned. “So much science.”

The Cheshire cat grin rode slowly up his face. “Nature,” he said, as if to gently correct me. “Nature is fluid.” Then he told me about a mountain lion in the desert ranges along the California-Mexico border. It was known to have killed and eaten thirteen bighorn sheep, he said. Not long afterward, it died of malnutrition.

Once upon a time, I listened to the spokesman for a coalition of sportsmen's groups as he told an audience about “what works” in wildlife preservation. “Be realistic,” he said emphatically; “it's a business.”

You raise game animals, you manage them closely, and you shoot some of them. “You think in terms of returns on your investment,” Mr. Be Realistic said. “People will not conserve something if it doesn't have use or value.”

He showed a video of deer, elk, and mountain sheep running around to a sound track of loud rock music. He told the audience that the sportsman was far more successful with his message than the environmentalist. His comment “No Sierra Clubs ever spent a penny on wildlife” aroused no response from the audience. Perhaps our brainpans were still banging with rock and roll. (Later, when I offered examples to challenge the assertion, one of his cohorts called me a “witch.”) A raw dose of economics, however, drew nods.

Get real, the speaker appeared to be telling us. Politicians handle game department budgets and “politicians are not into [here, a fake flaky gesture of fluttery unmanly hands] the magical, mystical, ‘sacred animal’ value of wildlife. They are into cost-benefit ratios. I tell legislators the red-meat value.”

Better habitat means more rams and bull elk, means more hunter tags, means more revenue, he said. “If it comes down to four bucks a pound for red meat, then that's a pretty good return on investment.”

There is not a shred of doubt about it: The sportsman's dollar helps wildlife. Every government wildlife agency in the West depends hugely on financial and political support from hunters. This partnership has a long and intricate history. Even as the public increases its support of wildlife for other values, the hunter-game department partnership will continue.

When state budgets waver and shrink, sportsmen's groups often step in to restore or supplement funds. They underwrite permits and habitat preservation. The Foundation for North American Wild Sheep, for example, has brokered the retirement of numerous domestic-sheep allotments on public lands, paying the sheep rancher for a buyout that no government could afford. The buyouts add safe habitat for bighorns.

Much is rooted in the unsentimental premise that exploiting wildlife at sustainable levels saves them from doom. To have wild sheep, deer, elk, antelope, moose, and bears, you have to kill them. The people who kill them are their greatest funders. To sustain a game species, this view asserts, it must be harvested. Call it “conservation by trophy.”

Those with less banged brainpans will have to address the complexities of hunting as “good biology.” Meanwhile, an implicit goal in the work of bringing desert bighorns to healthy levels is the goal of hunting them.

State wildlife agencies are addicted to hunter money. From the millions of dollars generated from sportsmen over the years come budgets for monitoring, translocation, restoration, and other programs. The relationship is tight: The bedfellows seem married for life. A few would argue, like Mr. Be Realistic, that the bighorns’ nongame value—as an ecological mystery, as an embodiment of
wilderness, as an ancient, intimate relationship between human and creature—is irrelevant.

From attending the California conference, I had sensed a more broad-minded view. Capable, devoted, underpraised people were working hard to keep this species on the planet. The deepest truths emerged in the field and through the vision of biologists like the University of Arizona's Paul Krausman.

Over a professional lifetime as a field biologist and teacher, Paul Krausman has remained a staunch advocate of the desert bighorn's inherent wildness. The key, he insists, is habitat— spacious, far-flung, unbroken homeland, where nature's hand is relatively autonomous and vital.

With sheep confined to cliffy atolls in a sea of human activity, management of these animals has a tendency, and often an urgency, to intensify. Given this trend, Krausman fears that cultural selection will wholly displace natural selection, that wild will give way to something else: sheep behind really long fences, sheep altered genetically, like soybeans, to adapt to “humanized” landscapes, to stay out of swimming pools or taste awful to mountain lions. Animals will be ear-tagged, collared, tattooed, and trucked, mined and modeled for data, tracked from outer space, their lives lived under surveillance: a captivity based on the best intentions of those who wish to rescue and protect them.

“How soon before the habitat available for wildlife is so limited that the degree of management intensity becomes identical to farm management? Every bit of domestication takes a little away from the wild side of wildlife,” Krausman writes. “Is that choice more desirable than extinction?”

It seemed to me that Krausman and others believe in conservation biology in its richest sense: Wildlife is best served when humans honor the full spectrum of its worth, be it economic, biological, moral, aesthetic, and even spiritual, the miracle of a
species's evolution and remarkable adaptations, its place in our imaginations.

And the stories they weave are a vital part of this: a canyon hiker's glimpse, the hunter's chase, futile or full of meat, days of intimacy with mammalian blood that is not our own, creatures who know the earth is steep in every direction, who, like snow-white angels, fly off the cliffs with wolves.

Given time, you will eventually match your own habits, at home and afield, to the habits of the animal you study. Bird-watchers rise at dawn, peck at little plates of seeds and raisins, do their errands in eager swoops. Crepuscular in hot weather, diurnal and on the move when it's cool, desert tortoise people lumber up and over speed bumps, wondering if they will meet someone of the opposite sex sometime in the next two years. Desert bighorn people eat, move, stand, ruminate. They are vigilant. They nap.

On my last morning in the Palm Springs area, I roamed a quiet neighborhood on the people side of the four-mile fence, eating carrots, moving, standing, ruminating. Legal issues did not allow me to dip my lips into someone's swimming pool or take a nap on an agave and flagstone terrace. My vigilance turned up a random poodle with a friendly man on the end of her leash.

My internal refrigeration-unit hum had been replaced by a blood thrumming that matched the susurrations of lawn sprinklers. Inside, I hissed. Where the steep mountains and washes butted up against the neighborhoods, acres of mesh wire caged cobbles and boulders, keeping them from avalanching into streets, pools, and horsetail boutiques. A palm frond crashed down onto the roof of a parked Lexus.

After all was said and done, anyone in this community who was not a golf palace developer would likely admit a fondness for
their local bighorn sheep. Many had rallied to offer their support during the study of the dying lambs; the “cute” factor played hard. This was a nature-conscious place. According to literature about the local zoo–botanical garden, visitors could see “exotic African wildlife that exist peacefully with native plants.”

When I asked the poodle walker about the bighorns, he beamed with an unabashed thrill at their presence, at their tenacity. “Our mountains should have them,” he told me. “They belong here.”

At the café where, after my amble, I bought coffee for the road, I asked the young java maker the same question. “What sheep?” he said.

I nosed the truck around vegemorphic lawns and links and through fleets of big shiny cars. I found the freeway, then left it for a back road aimed at the Colorado River side of the Cheme-huevi map. The Mojave's basin and range rhythm, the very curvature of the Earth, soothed me.

In the sheep-habitable mountains and canyons between the Coachella Valley and home, some places have sheep, and some do not. The Chemehuevi map is patchy, and there are long interludes between songs, despite herculean efforts to bring bighorns back to their home deserts.

According to a reliable count, 50 percent of all populations of desert bighorns alive in 1990 were from translocations, defined as releases of animals into areas where no other bighorns are present. Rigorous research and preparation precede each such action. Wildlife biologists, including Paul Krausman, widely agree that reintroducing animals to their historic range is a vital tool of restoration ecology. Many restoration efforts have been successful. Some have failed. In one study, a map shows points of sheep reintroduction. The graphic for a successful translocation is the black silhouette of a right-side-up ram; for a failure, it's an upside-down ram.

At the Nevada-Arizona border, I approached a thin ribbon of highway atop 6.6 million tons of concrete wedged between the walls of Black Canyon like a giant gray Pringle: Hoover Dam.

Hoover Dam holds back the Colorado River into the fjords of Lake Mead. Where there were once canyons, there are now coves. Charcoal and brown mountains, Gothic chunks of volcanics and andesite breccia, jut above reservoir waters of man-made, unsouled green. The mountains hold cliffs, cracks, ledges, and unobscured views, all within reach of water. The mountains hold bighorn sheep. Here, one would think, Chemehuevi operas might be sung.

Overall, the Lake Mead bighorns have been a healthy lot; wildlife managers take good care of them. Without risk to the nucleus herd, they have transplanted animals to other parts of Nevada as starter stock in ancestral terrain. Lake Mead sheep provided founder herds in Zion National Park and in southwestern Colorado. At home above the reservoir, in the arid, ragged peaks and ravines, they struggle to eat and reproduce. They struggle through dreadful droughts. They struggle with terrorism.

Steep-graded switchbacks led me to the dam crossing. The crest of the venerable arch-gravity dam, completed in 1935, doubled as the highway bridge, the design of innocent, slower, less crowded times.

For the past twenty years, highway planners had charted an alternative to this crossing. The old route was strained by a delirious population boom in nearby Las Vegas, streams of through-traffic between Las Vegas and Phoenix and along what was now a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) route for commercial truckers, and by cars and buses spewing hordes for tours into the dam's bowels.

In a post–September 11 world, the place became simply too
bombable. Here lay security hell and gridlock on the hair-thin rim of a giant potato chip.

Traffic was heavy. I killed my engine and waited for an hour in a line of vehicles behind the highway checkpoint. Under the restrictions, trailers, RVs, and motor homes were inspected— armadas of them flooded this recreation vortex. Heavy trucks and commercial vehicles, anything large and enclosed, were prohibited. Their drivers took a route seventy miles to the south. If you were driving a rental truck packed to the rafters, you had to go the long way around, too, because inspection was so difficult.

Except for the threat of death by carbon monoxide, by electromagnetic radiation from the spiderweb of transmission lines, by the postal move of an overzealous security guard, I did not mind the bumper-to-bumper wait. It gave me a chance to scan the cliffs for bighorns.

When I whipped out my binoculars, a state trooper whipped out his scowl. I whirled my fingers around my ears in curling motions, the universal sign for a lunatic, although I intended to mime ram curls and my search for sheep. So I sat, squinted at the cliffs, and gagged on fumes, thinking, O. bin laden meets O. c. nel-soni. Indeed, it was a new world for the bighorns at the dam end of Lake Mead.

Not far from the dam, contractors were engineering the Hoover Dam Bypass, a freeway and bridge across the 840-foot-deep chasm of the Colorado River. The bypass would eliminate “numerous substandard geometric elements”—that is, it would have none of the old road's looping switchbacks, horseshoe and hairpin turns, its slowdowns, blind curves, and turnarounds designed for nothing larger than a golf cart.