Eating Stone (34 page)

The bighorns live here in half a dozen relict bands scattered north to south along complex mesas and drainages. There are reasons to add them together and call them a metapopulation, the sum of all groups and habitat patches, which are roughly contiguous. Genetic exchange is not entirely hindered by geographical isolation. Where one band might go locally extinct, animals from another could, in theory, recolonize the empty habitat.

Their island is many times larger than the Blue Door Band's canyon fragment, all of it on public lands. Human impact comes by incursion into and out of the area more than from permanent development. Yet despite the country's breadth and its wild character, the sheep bands have stayed small and vulnerable since the mining era.

There are no reliable records of bighorn numbers before the miners arrived in force in the early fifties. But when it happened, the subsequent decline was as unmeasured as it was unchecked. Local anecdote gave the census numbers: The sheep went from “many” to “gone.”

Ranchers who used the region for pasture cast the blame
squarely on the local Ute and Navajo. While Indians did hunt bighorns, the same ranchers bragged of their standing order to their hired hands: “Shoot any bighorn sheep you see.” The bighorns, the ranchers said, “eat the grass our cattle need.” When wildlife biologists first studied the area in the late sixties, they were unequivocal in their conclusion that the number of sheep killed by stockmen and poachers significantly contributed to the decline of the bighorns.

Visitors to the mines at the end of the uranium boom found camps strewn with bighorn sheep bones. We hunted them on our days off, the miners said, “for something to do.” They noted that after dynamite blasts in certain areas, the ewes that had once lambed there never came back.

The best ore came from the Shinarump Member of the Chinle Formation, steep faces favored by bighorns for food and escape terrain. A web of roads across talus slopes put more animals in the crosshairs. Feral goats displaced an entire band from its historic range.

Prospectors used camps, but most of the developed mines and mills were manned by workers from towns on the fringes of the mesa country, workers who returned every day to houses, streets, and stores—not exactly the conditions of subsistence hunting.

Yet even the commuting miners claimed to live off the land, since going home to pot roast and Jell-O did not advance an image of rugged independence. In truth, they helped themselves to wildlife within a culture that condoned the custom of doing so. In normal times, such a custom might be sustainable. But there were simply too many hunters and poachers in the area and no curb on their appetite.

By the time a more rigorous science of game management arrived, with censuses, field studies, and a public interest to back them, the mining boom had gone bust. The waning uranium economy, not this armada of “enlightenment,” had saved what
was left of the sheep bands. The miners found new jobs or other outfits. Shacks, machinery, tailings, and “muck dumps” baked in the desert sun. The usable stuff was hauled away, including the trailer of one uranium miner. Underneath it lay twenty-three bighorn skulls.

While some habitat remained empty, in other places sheep moved into former range. Transplants from Nevada augmented one of the smaller herds. Guzzlers were built in terrain of scant water resources. Officials who called the range “severely overgrazed”—an uncommonly bold honesty for the times—were listened to, sort of, and a few habitat areas were restricted, sort of. (One field researcher noted trespass cattle in a closed area each year of his study.)

In the mid-1980s, animals in the northernmost band in the region began to sicken and die. Within four years, they fell into what was called “a spectacular crash.” Sick, coughing, and dying animals were observed in adjacent bands, implying the spread of disease to other reaches of habitat. Although the precise agent was never identified, chronic pneumonia was suspected. Once such an epizootic event has begun, treatment has little effect.

The circumstances of the probable pneumonia die-off added up to the kind of proof that everyone treated like eggshells. What is known is that a rancher, who was also a state legislator, had reactivated his domestic sheep-grazing permit inside known bighorn country after the permit had not been used for a number of years. On two occasions, wild desert bighorn rams were seen among the rancher's flock. Then the first sick bighorns and carcasses were found.

Recovery since the die-off has been slow. The groups hardest hit remain in remnant status. The bands near the uranium mines have stabilized, probably because they were the farthest from the disease epicenter. Although this enormous, largely unbroken expanse of desert appears to be big enough and wild enough, these
bands, too, fit the twenty-first-century desert bighorn paradigm: diminished in number, isolated on patches of habitat, counted, collared, managed, moved, more feral than wild. But ever clinging to the stone.

From under the juniper tree, I glass the face of the mesa. Mine tailings cascade off the talus, oxidized and darkened by age, as stolid and enduring as war monuments. I was told that mule deer, bighorns, and other wildlife use water that has surfaced from old mine tunnels, but I am too paralyzed by sanctimoniously obsessive, fluorescent-hair-falling-out terror—too chicken—to look for them there.

To think of the uranium-mining era solely as a kind of hunter's anarchy is to miss the point. The culture that allowed it remains deeply entrenched. Tight-lipped rural communities with defined codes of power. A hardbound work ethic. A self-imposed isolation and insularity that make people fear change. Conformity demanded, imagination undervalued. Distrust of government. Congenital xenophobia. The casting of dissenters as elitists, heretics, even perverts. Belief that public lands and their proteins were created for humans to exploit, that you will somehow fail your God if you do not subdue nature.

There are still trespass cows here, still an overgrazing crisis pushed further into hell by drought, still those who believe that no mining operation need ever be reclaimed, and still people too busy trying to make a living to ever comprehend why you would think of a two-hundred-pound wild herbivore as little other than red meat.

A stratosphere of heat blankets the desert floor, breaking the old truck into shimmering waves of lime green. The mesa's shadow lengthens with a visibly moving edge. It soon engulfs the saltbush flats and the truck, dousing the fluid lines of mirage. When it reaches the juniper and me, the shadow is a mile long. The sun drops behind the mesa. A landscape leached of color by the day's white heat now deepens to bloodred on the flats and
molten amber on the highest buttes, which take the last slabs of sunlight.

At day's end, it is not cool, merely less hot. I am not sure if I can move. Actually, I am not exactly here, though it may appear so by virtue of the greasy smudge and two forlorn river sandals left under a juniper tree, where androgynous godlike beings from outer space have extruded me through their navels into an Olympus of blue ice, and I am staring at the likeness of the Holy Virgin Mother in a lime popsicle, listening to my hosts—more dryad-esque than bug-eyed, antennae-sprouting and gooey, kind of like stoned charioteers in kilts made of gauzy church linens—lean over and whisper, You are now in Permanent Contact.

It is bloody hot. I wallow in hallucinations for their promise of ice.

July in the desert without an afternoon monsoon rainstorm to temper the furnace is no time to leave the Blue Door Band and expect to make new sheep friends. Mark and I have camped and hiked in this country, but it hides its animals well. We have seldom seen more than a few animals, some scat, and tracks. They are elusive. Their thirsts are hidden. Their homeland is the size of a small Latin American country.

I wrest myself from the dryads, sling a pack on my back, and hike back to the arroyo where I parked my truck. I drive a back road to a different mesa, park, and pack up again. The coma-inducing heat and perhaps a pinch of atomic pixie dust have deluded me into thinking I am worthy of alien abduction. But tonight, I will be perfectly sensible, rational. I will camp with the Birdheads.

Dig into local oral histories and you may find a story from a range cowboy who works in the desert backcountry. While he was moving stock one day, a bighorn sheep appeared amid the cattle. The cowboy took out his rope and rode toward the ram.

When you pay close attention to the small details of your neighborhood, what you thought was particular may in the end give home no immunity from the rest of the world: the cold,
lonely estrangement, wild animal and human, the frayed loyalty to the beauty of other life-forms, an entrapment in the cycles of harm.

Deep in canyon country, a work crew built a wildlife guzzler on the side of a high butte. It is a unit of an older style, likely not put together beforehand and delivered by helicopter, but with hand tools and materials hauled in on foot and by pack stock. The collector is a tilted apron of ribbed sheet metal that slides rain and condensation into a gutter. The gutter feeds a buried pipe that runs a considerable distance to a ground-level cement basin on the side of a cliff, out of sight of the sheet-metal collector.

What a breathtaking view from this watering place: a sheep view. Their big eyes can survey at least two Latin American countries. No brush obscures the panorama. The few junipers and pinyons do not make them wary. The promontory is a split-second bolt away from escape terrain. Here they drink quickly and leave.

Wild sheep have come to this guzzler for many years, perhaps because it is safe, perhaps because long ago at least one ewe encoded it on her homeland map and passed the habit down the generations. For reasons that are not clear, they shun other guzzlers and artificial sites. This old guzzler on the butte is bone-dry in this interminable drought. Yet there are fresh tracks and pellets everywhere.

To reach their water, the sheep use trails etched into the cliff-side by the routine of cautious approach. At one point, their trails traverse a petrified forest—logs and stumps strewn everywhere, mineralized and as heavy as marble columns, banded in russet, green, rose, mauve, gold.

Ancient rivers and streams carried the trees here. Where the wood and other organic material formed massive debris piles, uranium minerals, leached by groundwater, clustered. The strata
of these old stream channels bear the ore. Mud buried the trees. The trees turned to stone. Erosion exposed them again, and now the sheep move through the ghost forest to their basin of collected rain.

Below the butte is a network of old uranium-mining roads, many of them rutted, eroded, and slumped, but of increasing attraction to a bloating fleet of all-terrain vehicles. Every year, more and more come. Their riders take the machines on and on, moving into the depths of canyon country.

The desert has a pattern: retreating escarpments and labyrinthine canyons. One of the escarpments, a flat-topped mesa, rises sharply, offering no easy purchase but for a broad ledge below the rim. At its foot, the desert unrolls into dawn. The mesa is ten miles long. The desert plain below it is vast enough to bend the Earth.

Except for eroded cuts that have removed great chunks of the ledge, you could walk the entire face of the escarpment on this steplike perch, one side a precipitous slide into talus, the other a blocky wall that forms the rim.

Last evening, I gazed down from the rim to the brassy green crown of a juniper and remembered a story of a ram that, perhaps during the frenzy of the rut, flew off a precipice like this and fell to his death. His skull and bones were found in the top of a juniper tree. Ever since hearing that story, I have looked for bones in junipers.

I scrambled down a rough rockfall from rim to ledge with barely enough light to avoid spiky patches of prickly pear cactus. Surprisingly, some of the cactus was bearing fruit despite the drought. The dark red pear-shaped fruits were lined up in rows along the edges of the waxy green spoon-shaped pads.

I slept at the seam between wall and ledge, tucked well back from the vertigo-inducing drop, but with an unobstructed view.

My bed was a shallow hollow of hard-packed dirt. I did not make it so. A bighorn did, probably decades ago. Perhaps it was not a sheep bed, although it was in the perfect position to be one. Perhaps it was a staging pad for Permanent Contact. I took it because, oddly, it was the only spot with a breeze.