Eating Stone (5 page)

Pursued closely by her suitor, the ewe weaves back and forth around the shelf of rock. Sometimes they pass within inches of its lip and an abrupt drop to the river, saved by their agility and the pure luck of galloping lust. The ram's strategy is called a “rape chase,” or “coursing.” In some cases, coursing works. Often the ewe rejects his attempts to mount, or the dominant, guardian ram broadsides the younger male and sends him sprawling.

The chase lasts for over eight minutes. Then the ewe leaps up a boulder, where the chocolate ram happens to be standing. There she stops, her sides heaving.

When the chasing ram spots the big chocolate male, I swear I hear a meek little Oops! bleat. In a split-second about-face, he whirls around and bolts straight toward the other ewes. His arrival splits the group apart and sends everyone fleeing in different directions. He dashes about, madly charging butts.

The chocolate ram, the tending, courting dominant, stands on the boulder with the tired ewe. He stretches his back and pees. He noses her flanks and pushes his chest against her rump. She half-jumps and lifts her tail. He noses and pushes her again. Then he mounts and humps her atop a rock the size of a Yugo.

Back at home, my services as goose whisperer are no longer required. The “hunters” have not returned, and the big birds peacefully track the arc of the day with their flights from field to river and back.

The canyon country sprawls under a tepid sun and ten years of drought, which has left hardly a stick of vegetation. I sit on the deck and draw optimistic pictures of desert bighorns eating the bounty of less desertified times. Below the house, across the valley, a coyote throws her song to the other side of the river. The high red bluffs throw the song back. The echo is so clear, at first I think I am hearing two coyotes.

The repeated song is purposeful; the coyote knows there is no other animal but herself. She is being a Zen coyote. She asks a question and receives the same question back as an answer.

She sings to the red wall for a long time, with lengthy pauses between howl and echo. When she finishes and moves on, I walk to the river and find the singing place. The coyote has taught me which piece of the escarpment has the best echoing wall.

“Rain,” I cry.

Rain.

“Snow?”

Snow?

A few days later, clouds move in and a fierce windstorm whips through the valley, mocking us with its rainless fury. Among Indians of Arizona's Sonoran Desert, violent winds came when you did not handle your bighorn kill properly, when you hunted but failed to put the horns in the place set apart for them. Each hunter had such a horn place. If he brought the horns home, he would insult the wind.

One day, I walk along a stretch of river in the usual existentialist coma: Do rocks have souls? What is the meaning of life? A slow-moving glassy mirror of winter light, the river holds all of my attention. It carries everything I need to know. This kind of strolling reverie usually ends up with me walking face-first into a bush.

Instead, I come across a bighorn ram, ewe, and ewe lamb on a rocky slope above the riverbank. They lie on their day beds. Were a swarm of fundamentalist Christians to stroll by, they would see a trio presenting portrait-perfect Ovis family values. Meanwhile, the rest of the canyon hides the depraved orgies of mixed rutting groups.

I slowly move away from the riverbank and watch the threesome from a distance that will not disturb them. They are aware of me but not alarmed. The river flows between us as an agreed-upon boundary.

The ram has a hefty set of flared horns, horns that have been described as a “cast-iron jester's cap.” From her distinctive gray-beige coloring and a radio collar and ear tag, I recognize the ewe from the summer. The lamb is likely her young of the year.

The adults lie on bare ground in oven-fresh-bread position. The lamb rests atop a horizontal slab of sandstone like a hood ornament. She still has a sweet young face and a dark brown neck cape with what looks like electrocuted fuzz.

When I first came to this canyon over twenty years ago, I saw thousands of desert bighorns. They ran single file across smooth faces of sandstone varnished by weather and minerals to a dark patina.

Some were simple rectangles with stick legs and arching horns. Others lifted their tails, spread cloven hooves, flattened their ears, and opened their mouths as if to tell you something, an animation that barely seemed possible in the medium of stone pecked by stone tools. The style said a great deal about bighorn sheep
anatomy and even more about stories, stories that were enigmatic or instructive of the things you must do if you are a hunter.

Up a canyon crack so steep and difficult that you have to spider up the rocks to reach it and earn the honor with bloodied hands, two bighorn petroglyphs attached themselves to the universe. A spiral emerged from a raised tail. The other figure exhaled (or inhaled) a wavy line from its mouth. The animals were contiguous with these lines, as if they trailed air or sounds.

The makers of the petroglyphs, pueblo dwellers who hunted and farmed the southwestern deserts a thousand years before, had left enough bighorn sheep to fill my dreams each night I slept in a canyon or on a mesa top. I never saw a real bighorn sheep. I never looked. The river blinded me with rapture. The river blinded me with rapture for twenty years.

Back then, I knew nothing of sheep scat, beds, and other signs. I saw no tracks, I found no bones. I met only their absence from a place where bighorns had once been, a past marked by their portraits on the canyon walls. Like most people, I presumed that overhunting, habitat loss, and the presence of domestic livestock in the vicinity of this canyon had doomed its free-living native bighorns. I presumed “local extinction.”

Beyond my notice, in those early years of river time, the Blue

Door Band would emerge, out of folds of sheer stone, from decades of absence. There would be wild sheep, like the three on the riverbank, in the flesh again, living on the cliffs that bore the images of their ancestors.

Now, the day is lazy and mild. The river sings a quiet song over submerged rocks. The bighorns stare into space, or at me. I am quite entertaining, but not entertaining enough for them to lift their butts off the ground.

The desert bighorn is an animal shaped by ice.

A creature that can break open and eat a spiky-bodied barrel cactus, that can go without water for days, then drink like a camel, that wears a fur coat in summer heat soaring beyond a hundred degrees—these are not images of an ice animal. Yet the design of wild sheep is very much an expression of arctic cold.

The route from ice to desert began in the early Pleistocene, in Asia, the ancestral grounds of ruminant mammals. About two million years ago, on the border between Pliocene and Pleistocene, a cooling climate and buckling mountain ranges saw an extraordinary expansion of mammal fauna from south of the Himalayas into Asia and central Europe. Among them were hoofed cud chewers, whose story you will know if you read the story of grass.

Ice ages, major episodes of advancing and retreating glaciers, marked the Pleistocene epoch, and mammals were the Pleistocene's art. At one time scrawny little beasts that scuttled under the palmettos, mammals had responded to changes in environment and climate with traits like flexible spines, young that nurse, jaws that chew sideways rather than chop, necks that move without turning the whole body. Four-chambered hearts pumped warm blood. Internally regulated body temperatures allowed survival from mountaintop to swamp, from the equator to the Arctic.

In the mammalian array came claws, hooves, toes, toed hooves. Aquatic rhinos, pigs of disturbing sizes, runt horses, rabbit-size camels, toothy grazers that ate whole nations of grasslands like huge lawn mowers. Efficient motion favored dispersal into new
terrain; mobile creatures could spread until they reached a barrier of land or climate, ice or food supply. The migrating vegetarians took the meat-eaters with them.

The subfamily Caprinae, classified into tribes that include the Caprini (sheep, goats, sheep-goats), grew massive head ornaments and the skulls to carry them. By the late Pleistocene, caprid stock had arrived in North America by crossing the Bering land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. From there, they dispersed during interglacial, or warming, periods. Some of their descendants now occupy a range from Alaska to the tip of the Baja California peninsula.

Life in the Pleistocene's flux favored the biological complexity of herd life, translated not only as behavior but also in their very bodies—as color, coat patterns, manes, rump patches, and scent glands in the skin. The visuals, postures, and olfactory signs carried meaning within a close society of companions and competitors.

And in no other epoch but this one, in ice, cold, and oscillating climate, was there anything quite like the evolution of horns as elaborate social organs. While the tribe Caprini may show a variety of physical characteristics among members, its members all possess a solid common trait: social behavior that is overtly frontal—that is, concentrated on their heads.

Out on the rims, a hardening cold seeps into every surface. Already stripped by its very nature, the desert now seems skeletal. Brittle stems on the blackbrush snap against my pant legs as I walk. The rough dirt skates underfoot like stones inside a dry gourd. On the limestone slabs where I sit, the cold rises up from the rock into my spine. When I stand with my back to the sun, I cast a Giacometti shadow—thin, reedy, fourteen feet long— across dirt the color of sandblasted bricks. Around me, the sheep
are hairing up as they rut, and the ravens take perches on sandstone, warming their skinny toes.

This is not cold, I remind myself. Once, near Montana's Glacier National Park, a snowstorm moved out of the night mountains. Beneath the cloud cover, the temperature had hovered in the low twenties. Mark and I put on our skis and slid cross-country under a clearing sky and a full polar moon. Behind the storm, the air suddenly dropped to fifteen degrees below zero. All moisture converted to ice crystals. The cryogenic plunge was tangible, a sharp sucking of air from the lungs. My hand and foot bones felt like X rays look.

“That cold was an ice age,” I declare perhaps a bit defensively to the ravens, who know a doormat when they see one. This winter desert is an interglacial banana belt, made obvious by the fact that I am hatless and wearing gloves with fingerless tips. I put my notebook away and call it a day.

I stop for lunch at a small café by the river. The place is nearly empty, the television tuned to the Weather Channel, which no one is watching, perhaps because the meteorologist is obsessively describing Chicago. The cook brings me a bowl of mutton stew and a piece of fry bread the size of an inflated sombrero. Powwow music plays in the kitchen. The stew is blow-on-the-spoon hot. Finally, I warm up.

The next time you buff up the Hummer with an auto-detailing cloth that came from the skin of a petite rupicaprid, bond with the ungulates that share with us a molecular past.

The ice millennia gave the world hooved animals that range in size from the thirty-one-pound female chamois, donor of the car polisher, to the burly 660-pound male musk ox. They come in brown, copper, black, gray, buff, and blond, sometimes two- or three-toned.

The Himalayan blue sheep, or bharal, is neither blue nor a sheep, but slate gray and a perplexing combination of sheep and goat, at best an aberrant goat with sheeplike traits. The bharal is the favored prey of the snow leopard, a predator designed precisely to kill it.

Horns of Caprinae are short, long, very long, very short; smooth, bumpy, corrugated; spiraled, curved, curled, corkscrewed. The horns on the now-rare Marco Polo sheep curl, flip, then zap outward toward the horizon in a sort of soft slash, Zorro's Z. Horns on the giants of the group tend to look like melting Viking helmets. The smallest species favor straight-out-of-the-skull sabers that stab wild dogs. Some sheep are experts at an operatic flare and curl.

Bibs, beards, dorsal stripes, ruffs, manes; mantles of hair that drape over rumps and flanks; flicking tongues, stretched necks, and tense, stocky bodies that look like sneaky hay bales—such features convey rank and aggression in a realm where status gives access to mates. Appearance is language.