On Trails (17 page)

I had been warned that the Begays' sheep had a reputation for being “a difficult flock,” but as we left the homesite and dipped down into a series of sandy stream beds, they seemed sane enough. (Admittedly, I had very little frame of reference.) After spending all night penned up, they walked with vigor, only stopping to nibble once every few steps. The lambs leaped into the air in fishy wriggles. From time to time the young males paused to buck heads, then jogged to catch up.

When the flock encountered a trail, they sometimes jostled into single file—“stringing,” shepherds call this—and broke into a senseless run, their ears flapping up and down, until one of the leaders
became distracted by a tasty piece of forage and broke up the race. The geometry of the flock varied according to its speed: As soon as they slowed down, the sheep would fan out into a triangular shape, with the widest part leading the way. When the forage was particularly good, they would slow to a crawl and form a roughly horizontal line, like protesters marching arm in arm. As soon as they sped back up, they resumed stringing. As I watched the sheep running in single file that morning, I quickly realized how and why sheep trails form: it was a matter of speed.

But over time I came to notice that even when the sheep were walking slowly, they sometimes showed a strange, almost idiotic, fidelity to these trails. They liked to graze along the trail's edge until it intersected with another trail, at which point, if I didn't intervene, some or all of them would absentmindedly turn onto the new trail rather than follow their former trajectory. They were apparently happy to follow any trail, anywhere.

According to the rancher William Herbert Guthrie-Smith, when domestic sheep are brought to a new area, they immediately begin to establish a habitat for themselves by creating trails. He watched this process firsthand after he purchased twenty-four thousand acres of rain-soaked New Zealand wilderness in 1882, which he patiently converted into a sheep ranch. The first action of sheep in a new land, he wrote, was to “map it out, to explore it . . . by lines radiating from established camps.” The sheep trails snaked outward, skirting around bogs, cliffs, pitfalls, and “blind oozy creeks.” Many sheep were reportedly “swallowed up” by the wet earth in this exploration process. But eventually, the trails that failed to reach adequate foraging grounds faded, while the useful ones improved. The radial pattern that Guthrie-Smith describes is common for sheep; sunken paths (called “hollow ways”) have been found radiating out from Bronze Age villages in Mesopotamia.

Reading Guthrie-Smith, I began to formulate a two-part theory
as to why the Begays' sheep placed such blind trust in trails. In the absence of a shepherd, paths provide the basic guidance sheep need to find their way to food, water, and shelter. As they do for ants and elephants, trails function as a form of external memory. Just as the notion of building a road that leads nowhere seems absurd to us, it would never occur to sheep that one of their trails might not lead to something desirable. So they follow them, trusting that the destination will be worthwhile. At the same time, sheep trails also carve out new sunny spaces (what ecologists call “edge habitats”) where different species of grass take hold; in New Zealand, Guthrie-Smith noted that along sheep trails sprouted “succulent green stuff such as white clover, suckling, cape-weed, and sorrel.” I would not be surprised if something similar was happening in Arizona, because the sheep showed a preference for grazing along roads and trails (assuming the forage hadn't already been picked clean by another flock). In this simple fashion, sheep use trails to begin bending the land to their needs.

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In the calmer moments that first morning, I was able to able to admire the desert. The soil was the mingled color of pencil shavings, in turns a pale yellow, a powdery pink, and a dry black. Out of it grew a stiff yellow grass. I recalled John Muir's description of California's Central Valley in late May: “Dead and dry and crisp, as if every plant had been roasted in an oven.” Actual tumbleweeds actually tumbled across my path. Things poked at my ankles as I walked: spiky tufts of grass, tiny bamboo groves of the green ephedra plant called “Mormon tea,” ankle-high cacti with spines the color of old toenails. The only shade came from the scattered juniper trees, which writhed against an ageless wind.

Off to the northwest, I spotted a windmill, but it looked as tiny as a tin toy. While I was contemplating whether, and how, to turn the
flock around, the sheep—as if hatching a whispered scheme—began to divide into two equal-sized groups. I watched the split slowly forming, but I couldn't move quickly enough to prevent it.

One group drifted downhill, off to the east, while the other nosed up the hill to the west. Placing my faith in the directional sense of the leaders—my biggest mistake yet—I focused my attention instead on the tailers, figuring that they would be less headstrong. I broke into a run and skirted wide around them. Then, shouting curses, I attempted to rush them up the hill. But now their gait—which all day had been brisk and light—was suddenly slow, their hooves leaden. They stopped often, glancing about, as if entering unfamiliar and dangerous territory. Growing increasingly panicked that I would lose half of the Begays' sheep, I left the sluggards where they were and ran up the hill in the direction I'd last seen the other half of the flock.

The land rose to a flat tabletop, runneled with narrow washes and forested with pinyon pine. I imagined that sheep were lurking behind every stand of trees, and I even heard the spectral gonging of their bells, but they were nowhere to be seen.

As I reached the top of the mesa, something trotted across my path. It moved from my right to my left, low and quick. For a moment I thought it was one of the dogs.

Then I recognized it: a coyote. Ears up, mouth open, it glided over the sand with the cool certainty of a missile.

A sick feeling bloomed in my abdomen. I envisioned finding one of the lambs torn open, its red chest toothed with white ribs.

Running in a circle, I shouted for the dogs, whose names I did not know. Then I ran back down the hill, where I'd left the other half of the flock, only to find that they, too, had disappeared. It seemed impossible, an elaborate practical joke. I turned in circles, feeling dazed. In my mouth had grown a cat's dry tongue.

The word
panic
, fittingly enough, refers back to Pan, the mischievous goat-legged god whose bellowing used to terrify shepherds and
their flocks. Suddenly I felt its true meaning—a blinding electricity that floods the mind, prompting action without premeditation. I ran back up the hill. I found nothing. I ran back down to the valley: more nothing. Then, losing hope but unsure of what else to do, I ran back up the hill.

It was not yet ten in the morning on my first day of herding, and I had lost every last sheep.

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It is perhaps no accident that the idyllic stereotype of the happy, lazy shepherd—as popularized by poets like Theocritus, Milton, Goethe, Blake, and Leopardi—began to crumble as soon as it reached the wide expanses of the American continent. John Muir, a self-described “poetico-tramp-geologist-bot. and ornith-natural, etc.!!!,” spent the summer of 1869 with a sheep outfit in the Sierra mountains as a young man. Most of the time he left the shepherds to mind the sheep while he traipsed around making sketches of glaciers and pines. He hated the sheep (deeming them “hoofed locusts”) and had scarcely more respect for shepherds, whom he found to be filthy, intellectually dull, and mentally unstable. “Seeing nobody for weeks or months,” he claimed, the sheepherder “finally becomes semi-insane or wholly so.” Archer Gilfillan, a herder of nearly twenty years, agreed. “Considering all the things that can and do happen to a herder in the course of his work,” he wrote, “the wonder is not that some of them are supposed to go crazy, but that any of them stay sane.”

I was beginning to see what he meant.

Looking to the south, I spotted the Begay's blue pickup truck inching along a dirt road. I wondered if they had been quietly tailing me all morning, having anticipated just this sort of debacle. As I approached, Bessie rolled down the passenger-side window. Her eyes were big behind her glasses, her mouth down-curled into a perfect omega. She said something complicated in Diné Bizaad, then, reg
istering my confusion, simply asked: “Where the sheep?” Her voice quavered. I attempted to pantomime what had happened, with poor results. She looked down and fished an old flip phone out of an embroidered pouch around her neck, poked at it a few times, then handed it to me. On the other end of the line was her daughter, Patty.

“Okay, what happened?” Patty asked.

I told the story: fission, drift, the frantic race between two widening poles, then . . .

I handed the phone back to Bessie. Patty translated. With a sigh, Bessie clapped the phone shut and gestured for me to get in the truck.

We slowly prowled the dirt roads. Once every few minutes Harry would stop the truck and they would get out to inspect the ground for fresh tracks. After one of these stops, I hopped up into the bed of the truck to gain a higher vantage (and to avoid Bessie's sightline). I was queasy with guilt. In the matrilineal and matrilocal Navajo society, a family's sheep traditionally belong to the women, and Bessie's deep attachment to her sheep was palpable. They represented not just a sizable chunk of her life savings—ten thousand dollars, more or less—but also decades of labor and centuries of tradition. The sheep I'd lost were a living inheritance from her ancestors, and future gifts to her grandchildren.

After an hour of searching, we gave up and drove home. Patty was waiting there with her two boisterous kids. They were sitting on the couches that lined three walls of the Begays' sunny living room. Patty paused from shushing her children to welcome me back.

“So, how many did you lose?” she asked.

I sighed painfully. “All of them.”

“Don't worry, happens all the time,” she said. “They show up eventually. Maybe we lose one to a coyote. That happens too. Wouldn't be the first time. Won't be the last.”

She had brought a plastic cooler full of raw skirt steak—a welcome treat for Harry and Bessie, since they lived almost an hour from
the nearest grocery store and had no refrigerator. She went outside to stoke the wood fire for the grill. I sat in the living room and stared at the walls, which were lined with old family photographs, calendars, and a large tapestry one of the Begay boys had brought back from his stint in the military, which depicted two colonial officers, astride elephants, hunting down a tiger. A bookshelf was stocked with yellow-­spined
National Geographic
magazines dating back decades. The couches were neatly covered with bedsheets. Flies circled the room in endless, spirographic patterns.

Some time later, Harry came riding into the yard on his horse, herding half the flock in front of him. Watching them funnel into the corral, I felt some relief, but not much. The other half was still out there with the coyotes.

After lunch, we got back into the truck. Rather than driving west, where I had lost the sheep, we drove due north, on a dirt road that ran up the middle of a grassy valley. At the northern end stood the chrome-bright windmill I had spotted earlier.

Patty pointed out her left window and told me to avoid taking the sheep over there, to the west—the precise place I had taken them. “They get all crazy up in those hills,” she said. Plus, she added, it was too easy for a new shepherd to lose sight of them among the trees and gullies. It was better to walk them in wide circles around the valley, a place I would later, in my endless perambulations of its grassy slopes, come to call “the salad bowl.” (I recalled Bessie's map, drawn in the dust, which suddenly made perfect sense. It was the salad bowl bisected by the road:
.)

We pulled up to the windmill, which revolved slowly, its innards pistoning, drawing water from the ground. On its tail vane, in red paint, was printed:
THE AERMOTOR CO/SAN ANGELO, TX/USA
. Beside it stood a trough and a ten-foot-tall holding tank of water.

In its shade stood the sheep.

We counted them: They were all there. None had been eaten by
the coyote. The dogs were all nearby. Something in my gut slowly unclenched, and I could breathe. (
Perhaps those dogs aren't so useless after all
, I thought.)

Patty told me to walk the sheep home.
“Slowly,”
she added.

I stepped out of the truck and walked around the sheep in a wide circle. They looked at me placidly, without a wrinkle of guilt. Even a dog would have had the courtesy to avert its eyes, but they were blameless as lumps of snow.

When they had finished drinking, we started off home. The sheep seemed to know the way, so I slung my walking stick over my shoulder and ambled behind them as they crossed the sun-washed valley. Once again, the shepherd's life seemed idyllic.