Eating Stone (32 page)

Mammal young do not play simply because they are cute and
nutty. The exercise strengthens green bones and developing muscles. Each behavior is also an enactment, albeit an immature one, of an adult activity. I especially like to watch the sheep feign surprise at emptiness, or butt the wind, or race madly in circles, or stand up as if a lightbulb had just gone off above their heads. Ethologists refer to these as “vacuum activities”—acting as if doing something toward nothing.

So here I am, broiling my brain amid a bunch of existentialist Caprini.

In camp, day's end pulls the buttery sunlight out of the canyon but does not lessen the furnace effect. High walls of stone hold a radiating heat that will last nearly until morning. I place my sleeping pad close to the river's edge to make use of the swamp cooler effect. It is not unusual to wake up, walk a few yards, and slip into the cool garment of night water.

As the cicadas sing down the day, I think that my work is done. Time to settle down with a chapter on igloo building and polar bears on pack ice. Then one of the older ewes brings the whole lot down to the water for a snack and a drink, and I put my book away.

The lambs act like they have been let out for recess. Nearer to the river, they move with jerky caution, heeling close to a ewe, though the pairing seems random and changes often. A few lambs suckle. Two lambs try to nurse from one ewe. At first, she does not mind. Then she steps over one lamb's neck and moves off.

One of the unmarked ewes is quite elderly: scrawny neck, scruffy fleece, sunken belly below prominent hip and pelvic bones, a bony but sweet face. She moves slowly, a very small lamb at her side. She likely has lambed every year since sexual maturity, having perhaps ten or eleven offspring, her contribution to bringing the band back from near oblivion. This little one may be her last lamb.

The sheep feed in the garden of boulders and willows along the cut bank. From an early age, the lambs nibble at vegetation and increase this activity as they grow. Independence comes early in bighorn sheep life. Already the ewes overtly ignore the nursery, using subtle body language or low baa-aas to communicate. The adaptive strategy: Ewes are too small in body size, their horns not lethal, to fend off a large predator. Unless the lamb is but a few weeks old, she generally will not stand in valiant motherly defense. The lamb's best defense is escape. Thus, they are quickly agile after birth.

One would think that the searing heat would paralyze canyon life to a droning hum. Yet the river always moves, a flowing strand of serenity. Two mule deer does feed upstream, their russet bodies set against the smoky green furze of tamarisk. A family of Canada geese floats in, waddles out of the water, and feeds on a gravel bar. The goslings look like middle school–aged kids, gawky and unpredictable, with manic swings between good-natured youth and wretched pricks, their minds somewhere on Jupiter.

Chukars, portly heather brown birds in the same family as quail, zigzag around the legs of a ewe on the riverbank. They have in tow six windup toys—tiny speedy chukar chicks, the avian version of loose electrons.

Chukars, geese, deer, bighorns. An inevitable raven or two if I look over my shoulder to the canyon rim. Cicadas thrumming their thoraxes. The river parting around a rock, a conversation of water and oxygen, stone and eternity. The willows wrap the gray-brown bighorns in emerald greenery dotted with red-orange flower heads of Wyoming paintbrush, the tall, slender-stemmed paintbrush variety that loves to grow near water.

For a moment, the pungent opulence that enfolds us feels like deep jungle. A few yards beyond this margin, into the ricegrass and rabbitbrush, then up-slope into spiked yucca and scattered
cactus, all is jagged rock and brutal drought. When they finish eating, that is where the jungle sheep will go for the night—back to the safety of stone.

When they leave, I slip down to my bed near the cool sand, another heat-bitten creature, moving among desert sheep, dreaming of ice.

Mark and I are sleeping with boys.

Earlier the rams wandered along the canyon wall and fed beyond camp. They watched us for a long time, then engaged in a frenzy of body rubbing. They leaned up against slabs of rock and rubbed hard against the surfaces, back and forth. They scratched their ears with a hind leg. After the rubbing, their gray-brown hair stuck out every which way in bovid punk. When they shook, head to tail like dogs, their coats fell into place again.

Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep molt as snow melts and spring warms the high country. Thick clumps of winter fleece break off and dangle in the bushes. Sometimes the hair does not rub off completely, but hangs in matted woolly strips, making the sheep look like cheap mobile rugs. Because desert bighorns live in areas with milder winters and have coats lighter in color and weight, shedding is not as obvious.

Although experts like Dave and Nike can determine the age of a bighorn on sight, gauging from annular rings of horn growth and other physical features, I can only guess. These rams in the canyon tonight may be about four and five years old: long-legged and limber, with elegant strides and flaring helixes around their ears. For some reason, they brought to mind young sheikhs. They were so unbearably handsome after their body buffing, they turned around, all four animals at once, and showed us their south-facing profiles.

Toward dusk, the rams sauntered away from the river and up
the cliff. High on the walls, each pawed a bed, kicking up clouds of dust. They dropped to their knees and lowered their hindquarters, legs tucked beneath them.

Now Mark and I kick and level sand, paw at our tarp, and lie down on our night bed. We are sleeping with the boys. Among the hundreds of nights I have spent on desert rivers over the years, I wonder, how many I have unknowingly spent with wild sheep staring down at the top of my head?

Shortly before the full moon rises above the canyon rim, I push aside the cotton sheet and leave the sleeping pad to sit on a water-smoothed boulder that is half-buried in the sandbar. From here, I think, I will watch rams in moonlight. The lunar orb will flood their beds and brighten their pale haunches in vivid detail.

Are they vigilant at night? Do their heavily horned heads flop over as they sleep? Do they take off their headgear like a helmet when all is dark and no one is looking, then put it back on at first light? Do they have stiff necks in the morning? Do they dream?

The light behind the rimrock grows brighter. Any minute, the pearlescent globe will top it. The boulder feels warm on my legs and bare feet, still holding the day's heat in its mass. The thick darkness hides the river but not its presence. When the moon is up, I think, the water will shatter its light into fragments of liquid silver.

By sky, stone, and creatures, I am thoroughly, irrevocably, and delightfully dwarfed. From the viewpoint of some of my nature-averse fellow human beings, I am in a position of fear, albeit a small, anomalous island of fear. On this relict tract of wild, I am more likely to be killed off by the revelation of my own insignificance than by fanged carnivores.

The fear of being humble has walled all of us into separate geographies. Nature is a place “out there,” the not-home place,
much as history is “back then,” the not-us time. We attend both by random visits. We grab a few souvenirs, then scurry back to our six-inch-thick bulletproof Hummers and race off to the familiar terrain of rampant late-stage capitalism. More often these days, we take both Hummer and paradigm into the “out there” with us. Never has hubris had so much armor.

Under such weight, my bed on the river as I wait for the moon, my immersion in remote refugia, my insistence on an animal life in the everyday world, a crusty resistance to the segregation of human and nonhuman landscapes—all seem but pale and pathetic gestures. Dust bunnies for the nests of tyrant flycatchers. Mercy for a wicked Marxist flicker. Goose rescues. Boojum anti-depressants. Calendar markings by a desert tortoise that winters on a plug-in rock. And the long solace of the Blue Door Band, given by a curve of haunch or neck, a flawless climb along the face of my home stone, and the aching hunger to learn a language so unlike my own.

The tamarisk fronds behind me shift in a rogue breeze that suddenly tightens my neck muscles like hackles. The moon rises fat and full, but it is not white. It casts an eerie gray light over the canyon bottom, shadows blurred, rather than sharp, all colors drained. The river flows platinum; the sandstone walls are gilded in gunmetal. Mark is up and we watch the moon's ascent together.

A disk of smoky quartz, the moon is weighed down by the shadow across its face. A dirty moon. I feel a cold, end-of-the-world fear, ice around the heart. As if Earth's lunge through space is not silent but suddenly deafening, as if all life has ceased and, inside this remote chasm, we are the last to know. As if from the avalanche of our own fright, we will slide into the worship of snake gods.

The moment is startling for its sheer lack of intellect, its recognition, by pure sensation, of celestial transit.

Then we know. The moon is in total eclipse.

The people who inhabited the redrock canyons a thousand
years before us were not as ignorant of orbiting spheres. Seldom were they negligent in their tracking. New moon to full moon, the synodic month, and repeated lunar eclipses reassured them of cycles, not apocalypses, and in cycles are solace.

The lunar gray does not illuminate recumbent rams. In the smoky light, I cannot make out any sheep shapes on the rocky ledges above us. Perhaps they have moved to other beds.

Back in our bed on the sand, we watch the darkness slip off the fat orb just a fraction, revealing the slimmest, slightest crescent of light, a rind of luminous white on the charcoal moon.

I dream that the rams line up single file and sneak past us, turning to look. Are they alive? one whispers. My dream turns. I am lying amid the legs of bighorn sheep, peering out at sunrise between slender gray columns of hoof, tendon, and muscle. When they drop their muzzles, their exhalations stir the dust.

Members of the tribe Caprini, including true sheep (genus Ovis)—the Asiatic urials, for example, the argalis of central Asia, and domestic sheep everywhere—bear twins. Aoudads, not Ovis, but a “sheep-goat” of North Africa, are known for multiple births, not just twins but triplets, as well. However, among North American wild sheep, twins are uncommon.

Although desert bighorn sheep have borne twins in captivity, twinning in the wild is infrequent and rarely documented. If twins are born in the wild and one dies shortly thereafter, the seclusion of this event allows no witness. And the ewe mothers have a few tricks of their own.

Downriver from Ram Land, under the blazing morning sun, Mark and I are looking at a big healthy ewe with two robust lambs at heel. We have seen the lambs take turns suckling her. She rejected neither. The ewe lamb is dark, smoky brown. The ram lamb, a little button penis behind his belly, has a gray coat.

According to Nike's records, this ewe and the two lambs have
been together since lambing time. Togetherness is not evidence of twinning, however. Maternal bands often have more lambs among them than adult females; when pairs are counted, there are extra lambs. Although it is not the norm, ewes will suckle other ewes’ lambs. The reasons for these differences in maternal care are not easily explained.

Upriver, we had seen eight ewes with three lambs. Here, the group has more lambs (six) than ewes (three). Although two miles of river separate the groups, we think they were once together, then jumbled up and separated. The lambs nurse less frequently; they are sturdy and growing up. If the ewes in the two groups have one another's young, nobody appears to be hungry or anxious about separation.

Mark and I are with the lamb-pack group, hoping all will eventually sort itself out. We have tucked ourselves under an overhang, out of the sun's brutal rays and quite a distance from the sheep. With binoculars, we press red rings around our eyes.

The heat chases the group into a shady shelf of stone on their side of the chasm. The lambs butt one another off the top of a rock pile, then off beds as some of them try to settle down. Soon the ledge holds nine resting sheep, a garden of statues with wildly twitching ears.

Parental care of offspring is much like one would expect of wild ungulates. Males have nothing to do with it. The mother forms an immediate bond when she licks and nurses her newborn. Thereafter, both ewe and lamb recognize each other with olfactory, visual, and auditory cues. When a lamb moves in to suckle, the ewe eyes and sniffs it. She will walk away from or butt off a lamb that is not hers. Lambs, too, know their own dam.

The evolutionary value of a single birth and an exclusive lamb-ewe bond, the research suggests, is reproductive success. Ewes cannot afford to invest the extra energy needed to nurse nonkin without risking their own fitness.

Along with these general assumptions, it is worth remembering how socially complex this species can be. A study of transplanted Rocky Mountain bighorns in Montana, for instance, documented patterns of cooperative nursing: ewes that nursed their own as well as a strange lamb, and ewes that lost their own lamb but took on and nursed a foster lamb. The allomothers tended to be older, high-ranking ewes. Somehow they supplied milk to lambs in addition to their own yet maintained their reproductive fitness.

Allomothering among these Rocky Mountain bighorns was believed to be a response to heavy predation by coyotes, an “adjustment” that favored lamb survival under this intense pressure. By letting strange lambs nurse, the ewes kept the nursery group larger and more cohesive and thus less susceptible to predators. Other studies have noted cooperative nursing when lamb mortality was high, and there are suggestions, too, that the allomothers might be investing in kin—that is, selecting lambs that are related to them within the matriarchal band.

For the Blue Door Band, heavy predation is not currently a factor. The nine sheep across from us, as well as their lost contingent upriver, however, typify bighorn organization by matriarchy, a group of closely related individuals, perhaps even less genetically diverse if, since its disappearance, the band grew from a few founders.