Eating Stone (29 page)

The balance between natality and mortality, the stability of the population and its growth since its bottleneck years, pose complexities that underscore my ignorance. Will the band have enough progeny to keep it viable? Will the canyon always have native desert bighorns? We locals need one another.

What is born with the lamb across the river is more than a nine-pound neonate ungulate. A living tradition, too, comes with each birth: overt and subtle social behaviors, with much significance— the equivalent of language?—invested in horns, heads, rump colors, and other physical features. Each lamb possesses the tenacity, albeit often challenged, of what biologist Valerius Geist calls “a particularly durable ice age creature.” This ice-age ancestry encoded desert into its genes: smaller body, shorter hair, paler pelage than northern counterparts; a flair for sedimentary rock, a fondness for cactus.

The lamb I am watching is philopatric, an instant homebody, faithful to her natal ground and to matrilineal groups that endow her with the homeland map. This fidelity inclines her species to sedentariness, a biological term for creatures restricted to limited areas. These sheep are like mollusks attached to an entire canyon.

The lamb's heart rate will rise as distance separates her from cliffs and escape terrain. Unless the nature of predation on this range changes dramatically, a mountain lion will not likely eat her. She will run for her life when she hears a helicopter. She won't cross the river. She will hate to get her feet wet.

All four sheep have risen from their day beds. The adults graze as if they have not eaten since the Holocene. To reach some of the greenery, the sheep must act like giraffes. The young ram stands atop a boulder and stretches his neck to mouth a cliffrose. The lamb stares at me and wonders what else the cat dragged in.

Eventually, these animals will join larger groups of ewes and lively playmate lambs. It will be bedlam. For now, though, there is a quiet concentration on grass, leaves, and wildflowers.

Despite the drought, the sheep find adequate forage and maintain their vigor. They eat all my beloved familiars, the blazing miracle of spring growth in harsh, arid country: ricegrass, galleta, blackbrush. They devour the sticklike stems of Mormon tea— sheep asparagus—and the succulent young shoots of Russian thistle. These baby tumbleweeds are such a favorite among bighorns, some biologists call Russian thistle their “ice-cream plant.” In dry spells and hot weather, the sheep eagerly seek the dry stalks of sego lilies and dig up the bulbs of mariposa lilies. They eat the scarlet blossoms of Indian paintbrush, the fruits of prickly pear cactus.

I, too, would eat a mariposa lily, a million petals of paintbrush and cliffrose. When one of the ewes across the river lips the pure, creamy velvet cups that crown a yucca plant, I can feel the silken petals on my own tongue. The bankside willows are all musky sweetness, the pale rose sand warm on my bare feet.

Pavarotti slides his fearless voice, so full of grief and yearning, into the cool river under a burning sun. I want to rise up and bite the desert to bits. I want to understand what these wild creatures, this canyon and river, this spring day in the high-crowned desert, flooded with peach-colored light, are trying to express, for surely it is in some way akin to what we long to say in our own singing.

The biologists who study this band of bighorns divide their time between the desert and their home in Montana. As keepers of knowledge about the group, they are drawn by the critical time of lambing season into weeks of observation. They track radio signals and record details of physical condition and social behavior.

They know what everyone is eating. They map movements and grow uneasy about roaming rams. They note missing individuals and tally the year's lamb crop. They count sheep.

When the biologists arrive in early spring, I am at first reluctant to share the band. For so long I have been in deep sheep shadow, this uncommon refuge of sanctified thought. I watch them, and when I sometimes get bored, I read books in their presence. I amble around their terrain as if the canyon holds nothing but us and a rare contentment in a difficult world. I have become proprietary.

This selfishness evaporates the moment I see Dave Stevens and Nike Goodson Stevens at work. While I may be an anthropomorphizing, limpet-brained mote, these two are the true shepherds of this native flock.

On a rim above the river, Nike holds her antenna high in the air. She slowly sweeps it in all directions until her receiver picks up a signal bleeped from a collared bighorn. She runs through each assigned frequency and comes up with six bleeps—six sheep accounted for.

Taking into consideration signal direction and strength and other nuances of radio telemetry—it takes practice to read them— she can pinpoint an animal's whereabouts. The topography below us is rough: tiered stacks of jagged rock, carved arroyos, shallow, hanging canyons, walls that break into cliffs and debris fans. If a sheep is in an alcove or behind a rock, its battery-powered collar may send a weak or uncertain signal. Time and patience refine the bearings. Notes are taken. The antenna turns.

Having noted today's clearest bleeps, Nike sets us the task of making visual locations. Even with binoculars, I cannot find a single animal. They are doing their rock imitations. Dave is a master at sightings even with unaided eyes. Eventually, we have several live sheep in view and under the scrutiny of binoculars and spotting scope.

All but one of the ewes have lambs. Only a few days before, Dave and Nike spotted the now lambless ewe with her offspring. They must now presume that her lamb has died. When you see a ewe band, the nursery seems abundant—lambs everywhere, scrambling up and down the rocks. Yet seldom is survival 100 percent, a lamb for every ewe. For the first two weeks of their lives, the young are vulnerable.

Another worry: Thirteen or more unmarked ewes are missing. Nike can estimate this number based on the ratio of collared to uncollared females. Out of the herd total of about eighty sheep, thirteen is a significant blank. Poachers prefer rams. Extraterrestrials prefer Nevada. That leaves rustlers or another vanishing act.

“Do you think they crossed the river?” I ask.

“Ewes hate to get their feet wet,” Nike says.

Jokingly, she tells me that the ewes were plucked out of the canyon by other desert bighorn biologists, rustled as illegal transplants by states that want to increase their sheep numbers and reap revenue from trophy ram hunts. But clearly she is worried. Nike frets over missing sheep, lost lambs, walkabout rams venturing too close to domestic sheep. She worries about poachers, bobcats, mountain lions, disease, die-offs, any of the numerous threats to a relict population.

Using binoculars, she once watched dogs wildly chase a young bighorn ewe. “The chase was serious,” she told me. “The dogs cornered the ewe on a ledge. She shook and shivered, obviously terrified. Dave and I were a half a mile away and couldn't do a thing about it.” The dogs slunk off, and Dave and Nike are still trying to determine if they were feral or wandered far into wild country from a human settlement.

The cadence of Nike's voice hints at her roots in Virginia and Louisiana, not the most likely places to spawn a lifelong devotion to western megafauna. Yet she had the kind of childhood intimacy with nature that seems almost storybook these days, one
that was possible before asphalt and minimalls devoured open lands and the media stream devoured young minds.

“From the time I was six until I was thirteen years old, we lived at the edge of Williamsburg and had woods and a field near our lot,” she said. “I used to ramble in the woods and field daily. I was a real bookworm and especially enjoyed books about animals, wild and domestic. When I learned, at an early age, that there were people who actually studied animals for a living, that sounded like an ideal job.”

Nike earned her own way to the West and a doctorate in wildlife biology. She worked on several studies with Dave, who at the time was the chief research biologist at Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park. Eventually, they married. After working together in Alaska, they made Montana the base of various research activities.

Early in her career, Nike spent a number of years studying the effects of domestic sheep on bighorn sheep. She is not shy about telling anyone and everyone just how bad it is to have the species in near proximity. She can make killer shrimp gumbo. She is allergic to deer. When she travels around the Southwest's canyons and mountains, she sees the land not so much as scenery, but as habitat. If places are empty of bighorns, she says, “This place feels so empty.”

Looking through my binoculars, I have in view a distinctive five-year-old female. “That's our weird ewe,” Nike tells me. “She has never had a lamb. She's probably barren, maybe a result of inbreeding.”

We are grateful for a day without wind. The spotting scope stays steady on its tripod. We gather information for each animal: age, condition, daily patterns (feed, rest, feed, move, rest, feed). We note whether a ewe is approaching parturition, if she has a lamb at her side, if a lamb is missing, or if the ewe is too young to lamb. Maternal behavior, group size, age-sex composition. Each
observation—Dave and Nike are out in the study area every day—adds up to a dynamic portrait of the band.

Against a trend in recent years from generalist field biologists to those with narrower specialties in a single species—the grizzly expert, the wolf-study woman, the person who spent forty years with sucker-bearing cephalopods—Dave's generation is at the tail end of the generalists. He worked in Rocky Mountain National Park for twenty-four years, keeping a broad array of fauna healthy, everything from mule deer and Rocky Mountain bighorns to greenback cutthroat trout.

His grandfather was a Forest Service ranger and his father was career National Park Service, as well. Dave grew up in Yellowstone, his front and back yards a multimillion-acre volcanic plateau with a hefty portion of the lower forty-eight's wild mammal biomass. His toys were elk teeth. His father did what rangers used to do before they became prisoners inside their pickups: He ranged. He made his backcountry winter patrols on skis, spent summers deep in the park, and then, when the school year began, moved his family to the small community of Mammoth, on the park's northwest border.

Dave is a hunter: a stoic, patient, nongadget kind of hunter, possessing what Mark, also a Montanan, calls “Buddhist stealth.” He has eaten the heart of a bear. He told us that he once found the carcass of a bull elk and, underneath it, the remains of a mountain lion. The lion had successfully killed the elk, probably by a neck grip and snap of vertebrae, but was pinned by the elk's huge bulk as it fell. In every death in the wild, there is a story.

After Rocky Mountain National Park and his stint in Alaska, Dave retired from the Park Service. To continue a life in the field, he and Nike took on a part-time study of the band of bighorns on this big desert river. Their office is the size of half a Middle Eastern country, remote and not easily accessible, a Chemehuevi-style geography defined by sheep rather than by human use.

The day's work is done. I open my pack to put away my binoculars. Two moths fly out. We load up and hike across the open desert to the kidney-smashing excuse for a road out. Dave and Nike will search again for the unmarked ewes, trying to establish, before summer's heat slows down all local mammals, a profile of the year's reproduction. They will also venture up-canyon to Ram Land to check on the boys.

This month, most of the rams appear healthy. They decorate the cliffs with their bachelor bands, woefully irrelevant this time of year, as the ewes do the work of bringing young into the world. But there is the limping ram that Mark observed. And another unmarked ram has made an unusual move: He has crossed the river. On separate occasions, Dave and Nike, then Mark and I spotted him near the banks, looking as if he were the only bighorn left in the universe.

The ram has but one horn, a curl so heavy on one side, you would think his head would tip over with the weight. Dave and Nike speculate that he lost a horn in battle. Ram horns catch and neutralize blows from opponents. One-horned, he is less shielded from butts to head and body and clearly at a disadvantage.

Perhaps the other rams harassed him until he packed up and left. He is fattening up on riparian vegetation that he has all to himself. We think of him as the sheep version of Ferdinand, the pacifist, matador-adverse bull in the children's tale, his nose full of wildflowers, a dreamy, far-off look in his eyes. Testosterone and the rut, however, may bring the errant ram back among the clashes.

“Rams,” Nike has told me, “have a rough life.”

On the riverbank, a dense thicket of camelthorn blocks my passage, and I must decide whether to lunge through or walk around it. The detour option means that I will miss a stretch of our search
area. A lunge through the thicket will expose me to sixty seconds of leg plague. With its inch-long needle-sharp thorns—thorns from root to tip on pliant, lashing stems—camelthorn will shred my bare skin.

River people, a scantily clad lot, do not like scratchy plants to inhibit their carefree flits along gorgeously bare and pure sandbars. What irks them more are exotic scratchy plants that inhibit their carefree flits along gorgeously bare and pure sandbars. If there is flesh to be lacerated, let native plants draw the blood.

Camelthorn was one among many nonnative, crazed colonizers to quickly occupy riparian habitat after dams no longer allowed the river to sweep and scour during floods. The plant spreads rapidly by underground rootstock. It is strong enough to push up through asphalt. It is in the pea family and appears on lists of noxious weeds in at least five states. Desert bighorns find this scourge to be quite tasty.

Camelthorn grows in brakes of togetherness rather than as scattered, loner shrubs, so you must find a way to walk and swim around a field of it. My choice at the moment is through or around: blood or beach.

Mark, Dave, and Nike spread out along the riverbank beyond me. We have spaced ourselves so that we can cover a broad swathe in our search. The clues we were given indicated we should comb only a half-mile stretch between a certain rapid and a bend in the canyon. In the earth-toned blend of rock and sand, Dave has told us to look for the orange plastic ear tag.