Eating Stone (28 page)

Tough women in charge of details. Women making a living and treating a traveler like a human being.

I drive on. The wind picks up a tumbleweed and blows it straight at me. It bounces off the wheel well and rolls over the hood, on its way to Las Vegas. This broad shelf of broken country from the Sierra to the Colorado Plateau: it feels like one piece. One piece of home.

In May, you fix the flat side of your feet to a patch of desert and rejoice in the revelation that nothing is under your control. The intensity of colors is hallucinatory and the weather can be trusted. The air feels like velvet but tastes of the coming summer heat. Arms want to be bare, hair left to the breeze. It is impossible to go indoors before dark. I feel the momentum of new life in the desert as a mass rather than time, something held in the rock itself, the way it takes the light.

May's ambitions yearn for pure motion. The river offers balance between the languid and the reckless, and I travel it often. Before the searing heat comes, there is time, too, to move about the canyon country on foot, looking for bighorns, looking for crowns of magenta blooms atop burly barrels of hedgehog cactus, looking for something within myself in a place too deep to identify. May is aáoranza, a longing, as in “to fill one's heart with.”

For what the sun does this time of year, words from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin come to mind: lucid intoxication. Light dazzles every surface, bends the heart. Red cliffs, khaki river, coral sand dunes. Celadon lichen on upsweeps of beige sandstone. Silver ganglia-rooted cottonwood trunks half-exposed in the river's cut banks. Blue-black junipers that lean out over the mesa, telling you the shape of the wind.

On a rise of sand and slickrock we call Wild Onion Mesa, I seek green-topped pearlescent bulbs with hints of pink. But there are no wild onions to be found this year. The drought leaves
them dormant. Instead, yellow flax, a variation of blue flax, is in flower amid the ephedra, bearing diminutive cups in Tibetan colors: orange, saffron, gold.

The lower elevations display a sweeping purple sea of scorpi-onweed flowers—acre after acre, growing as thick as a wheat field. By itself, scattered on the gravelly pediment it prefers, scor-pionweed, a phacelia named for flower heads that coil like a scorpion's tail, is relatively nondescript. In the billions this year, its explosion is a mystery. Not even the longtime locals remember anything like it. Where did all their seeds come from? How many years had they stayed dormant, banking their bloom until this one year, this one week in May, even as the drought still plagues us?

On a windy day, I walk a high rim above sheep country and find acres of mariposa lilies among the scorpionweed. Their goblet-shaped flowers range from the palest pink to shades of lavender. Milky green stems, as slender as twine, raise them to the sun. The strongest wind gusts flatten them to the ground. Why does the wind not shred them? What binding agent holds paper-thin petals to stem? When will they end their pollinator seduction and release a blizzard of pink?

As I hike, I cannot find a stepping place without scorpionweed or mariposa lilies underfoot, so thickly do they cover the ground. At my watching post, I carefully place my feet on two flat rocks and sit on a third rock so I do not crush any flowers.

Below the rims, along the river, the wind turns canopies of emerald cottonwood leaves inside out, revealing their silvery undersides. The wind sends clouds of sand so high into the air, a rosy haze blocks the sun. The hurricane of sand through the canyon nearly obscures the sheep. They turn away from it and nonchalantly chew the new greenery. Purple blooms stick out from the corners of their mouths.

At home, we fill the garden beds with seeds and seedlings, the promise of summer food. Stalin has disappeared, gone to some
flicker gulag, and the Say's phoebes rebuild their nest in the eaves and raise a brood in peace. A bull snake slithers through one of the flower beds, its body a racy pattern of brown and yellow beneath blue flax and golden California poppies. It sips water from the dripper hose, then coils up under the chili plants.

Down the road, my neighbor tries to cultivate a plot next to her house. The soil is good, but not even burdock, knapweed, or goatheads, everyone's favorite weeds by virtue of having no choice but to surrender to them, grow with their customary vehemence. The plot sprouts a motley scratch of choky-looking things. On this spot, the previous owner of the place penned the coyotes he caught as pups, after he killed the adults. The coyotes gnawed the wire and paced the dirt into shallow trenches. There were faint rumors of caged bobcats, too. Nothing will grow there now. My friend gives up on a garden bed and proclaims, “This will be the coyote sorrow place.”

Along with the phacelia explosion, moths explode. They morph from larvae hidden in the vegetation to thousands of winged bits of dull gray flannel, bashing against every surface. They are noctuid moths, a large family of common nocturnal moths. They find their way into the house, live by day on bookshelves or up the sleeves of clothes hanging in the closet, so that when I put a shirt on in the morning, five moths fly out from the cuff. At night, the moths careen around the insides of lamp shades. When the house is pitch-dark—we live far from any artificial light—they strain against the skylight above the bed, pulled to the glass by the stars.

Our screen house fills with moths and the riddle of how they get in but cannot get out. Hundreds cover the screen walls. Bodies fall to the floor. It is both B movie and a bother. Before a guest sleeps there, I must sweep up dead moths and the film of powder they leave from their papery wings.

At the door, I flick on a camp flashlight. Like a magnet, the fat
beam lures the live ones away from the screens. I walk away into the night, followed by an undulating Pied Piper wave of flying noctuids. The guest sleeps in the screen house without moths in his face. By the next day, a hundred more moths are inside again. The phoebes feed them to their chicks. The chicks hulk up and spill out of the nest, moth-fattened, glowering down at us like tiny vultures.

On the river sandbars inside the canyon, Canada geese lead troops of olive-green goslings with robust bodies and wings so stubby, you wonder at the force that will, in a matter of weeks, extend them to nearly three feet across. When the goslings tire of their march, they plop down in little puddles of fluff.

Ravens stuff a mess of branches and twigs into a notch high in a cliff, filling it with their raucous charcoal offspring. The raven-itos glare at their parents, who cannot resist playing with a piece of windblown bubble wrap. They stab and pop the plastic. When they see that I am watching, they stop and try to look deeply mysterious. The sun crawls up the canyon rims, warming the walls, but the ravens’ nest remains shaded all day.

Mark returns from the river to report six bighorn rams across from one of his camps. They fed safely in the heart of Ram Land, a group of males aged four and older, with at least a hundred pounds of headgear among them.

They acted as if their horns itched, Mark said. One of the rams furiously rubbed his rack on a juniper. The other five rams sought bushes and swept their curls back and forth on sturdy branches. The contagious horn rubbing turned into lackluster posturing— extended necks, flared nostrils, bulging eyes—then a keen interest in filling their bellies.

Compared to the ewes, few of the Blue Door rams are marked, but one in this group wore an ear tag and radio collar: Ram 930. He limped badly and would not put weight on one of his front legs, Mark said. If most of your movement is vertical, as if you
must move up and down skyscrapers made of loose, hanging boulders, the loss of agility can be catastrophic. Time after time, the other rams butted him off his bed.

By the river, in camp, I sit in the shade of a willow, waiting for the heat to break. I feed my head with an Italian opera and as I listen to the tape, I catch myself making Pavarotti eyebrows. Whenever he hits a high note, I see those black brows slant in darts of winsome precision.

He inflates his barrel chest and sings until you think your heart will crack open like a hopeless coconut. Verdi, only Verdi, the tenor's native tongue. The river swirls by as if orchestrated to the same music. Tanagers migrate upriver through the willows. Claret cup cacti bloom in midlife-crisis red, and three bighorn sheep stand on the opposite side of the river, insanely jealous of my camp opera across from them.

Both ewes wear radio collars. One has a red ear tag. The third sheep, a yearling ram, still has a babyish face, but his horns are popping boldly out of his skull, growing from thick blue-gray bases. Horns and skull bones grow rapidly for the first three years; then serious butting begins. In the meantime, he takes the company of the older ewes and lurks in the willows, trying to spy on me.

Early May marks the peak of lambing season for the Blue Door Band. Those born earliest are now a month old. The last of the lambs will come by mid-June. Boulders and willow thickets hide the ewes’ rear ends, so I cannot see if their bags are swollen, a sign of one of three possibilities: imminent birth, a lamb born and suckling (current whereabouts unknown), a lamb lost so recently the mother's milk has yet to dry up. The absence of a lamb on each ewe is worrisome. To keep the band going, it should have healthy lamb recruitment: productive ewes and a high rate of survival among the year's crop.

Lactating ewes need water and nutritious green food for their milk supply. As long as food and water—potholes, springs—are available in the cliffs above us, the ewes tend to keep their new-borns near the secluded lambing grounds. As the spring annuals and perennials dry up, summer temperatures rise, and the lambs grow stronger, lambs and ewes move to slopes where more food and other sheep are found. Then, for much of the summer, the ewe bands and nurseries stay closer to the river. Perhaps these ewes lost their lambs and came off the canyon walls.

Their curiosity is their own doing. They have wandered into view, unfazed by a human and her raft, whereas I fret into hysteria about disturbing the band during lambing season. Slowly, I raise my binoculars to my eyes. They bat their long lashes. The river between us, slow and tawny, crisscrossed with orange drag-onflies, says everything about their sense of security. The river is a firm boundary. The ewes won't cross it. They hate to get their feet wet.

The sun's ferocity peaks and we grow sleepy on this riverbank. I unfurl my Thermarest pad under the willows. Four moths fly out from the rolled nylon. The bighorns amble along the talus, dropping their noses to sniff the ground, scraping here and there with a hoof, ready to bed down. The yearling ram and one ewe drop to their bellies, stare at me, and strain to hear Luciano's boundless canto.

The ewe with the red ear tag walks up the slope to the seam between talus and cliff face. The high, narrow ledge holds a crescent of shade, a blue-violet lens in the ambient red-gold sun. For a moment, she stands in a posture of caution. She burps a froggy-sounding bleat, then finishes her climb to the ledge. Up from the rock pops a lamb, a spindly fur-ball lamb.

The lamb is less than two weeks old, a leggy nine-pound mouse-colored package of hope. She has a small hornless head, concave face, big ears, huge dark eyes, and animated ears. Her hind legs seem disproportionately husky for the rest of her body,
an exaggeration, perhaps, of the haunch muscle that will be needed to push her up and down cliffs.

Since birth, her pointed hooves have darkened and hardened. Their tips came out soft and white through the tender birth canal, then held her in a wobbly upright stance within minutes. The hours after birth coalesce all instinct of sheep as a follower species: The lambs will go where their dams go—anywhere.

The ewe has parked her lamb within hearing distance, possibly within sight as well, while she grazes along the talus slope. The arrangement accommodates the lamb's rest and the ewe's need to eat, as all the while both stay near escape routes. Freezing in position, hiding, and camouflage protect the fawns of deer and antelope. The adaptive strategy for bighorns is to be born well developed, agile, and speedy in precipitous terrain. This female lamb can jump, bolt, and judge distances, making instantaneous decisions about running around a crevice that its larger mother would leap over. The lamb reads the rock with her genes.

The lamb stops the ewe in a frontal block, then sidles up to her flank, her stubby dark tail quivering and twirling against her pale rump like a propeller. She drops her head under the mother's belly, whomps her snout against the udder a few times, then suckles eagerly. The ewe stands briefly, looking indifferent, then drifts off and beds down on the ledge.

The lamb tucks herself against her mother's uphill flank, away from the sheer drop. When they are very young, it seems that the lambs rest and move on the uphill side of adults. Older and in nurseries, they run with a particularly fast ewe or bunch up with other lambs, scattering, then gathering in ebbs and flows of energy.

The second ewe is off her bed and showing me her hindquarters. Her bag is shrunken and dry. Either she is barren or she lost her lamb some time ago. In this rugged country, lamb remains cannot be easily found. Causes of death—predation, poor
mother-lamb bonds, respiratory illness, overall puniness—remain uncertain.