Eating Stone (38 page)

I save for next to last a close perusal of the basketry of local natives, an assemblage of winnowing trays, seed beaters, cradles, hats, and wide-rim wheat-colored baskets woven with designs of black lizards, turtles, butterflies, as well as with jagged geometric patterns. Some of the baskets are Paiute. Others were made by the Panamint Shoshone, the people of the Cosos, the people with the world's best rain doctors.

The last stop in the room is what I have come for. I feel like a squirmy kid. When all other treasures have been absorbed, I saunter casually over to a large white wooden box that sits on an old trunk, crowded between display cases. From the top of the box, a stuffed ferruginous hawk casts its raptor gaze at me.

The white box sprouts a fat orange extension cord that slithers cobralike into a hole in the ceiling. Two windows are cut in the face of the box, which is roughly the size of a washing machine. The smaller glass frames a scroll of yellowed canvas. A few lines at a time, the scroll unfurls a hand-lettered narrative. The California Department of Fish and Game, a note informs me, made the exhibit in the 1930s.

The larger second window reveals an intricate color diorama inside the box. A splendid painting of the Sierra crest rising above a deep valley—the landscape just outside the museum's walls— covers the back wall of the diorama. Impressionistic brushstrokes render silver-gray peaks flushed with a puffy delirium of pastels. Pink, rose, lavender, and a horizon the color of jonquils suggest atmosphere and distance. We are way up there on the alpine heights.

The one-dimensional mural flows seamlessly into a three-dimensional landscape, a sculpture of cliffs made from some sort of modeling compound spread over wire mesh. Plant bits and miniature cacti with spines dot the cliffs. Thick blobs of green and pink paint look like lichen on brown rocks.

At the foot of the cliffs are three bighorn sheep. Two of them drink from a pool of water made from a mirror. Partway up the slope, another sheep pokes its head in a shrub. It is hornless and looks tired.

Two more sheep bed down on the steep face of a cliff. A wire protruding from another oval bed indicates a missing sheep, perhaps unglued from its footing, then removed and lost. The sheep figures are about three inches tall, made of plaster or clay, painted yellowish brown. Broken limbs have been carefully repaired. The diorama is, after all, nearly seventy years old.

A flat-topped cliff dominates the center of the diorama. Standing on one side of the cliff, a noble toy ram skylines in an alert position, head raised, stare riveted partly to the viewer and partly to a distant object somewhere outside the frame.

I reach for a chrome toggle-style electric switch on the side of the box. I smile as if I would rather like to bite someone. I flip the switch.

A low-pitched grinding noise fills the room, awakening every last dead person memorialized in this carefully assembled repository of local history. The top window scrolls its story of bighorn sheep in the California mountains: “Even though occupying waste lands, mountain sheep disappeared. No thought was taken for the future of this valuable game animal.”

The diorama motor sounds as if it's grinding up fresh loads of zirconium monkeys. The script rolls. “A sufficient breeding stock was not left. Protection came too late. The future of game is in your hands! Are you a conservationist?”

Suddenly, a toy bighorn bursts out from the boulders on one
side of the diorama. Its gender is somewhat indeterminate with a half sweep of horns, but I call it a ram. He moves from right to left along the flat top of the cliff in a jerky mechanical gallop. Inches short of the skylining sheep, he dives headfirst behind the cliff. More monkey pulverizing, and then the ram reappears and leaps along the cliff again. Grind, clunk, leap, gallop, dive, gone. Grind, clunk, leap, gallop, dive, gone.

The toy ram rides his wheel, sprocket, and pulley track again and again until I flip the switch. The sheep-o-matic diorama comes to a rasping halt. Then I leave the museum and walk out into the bright California sun.

Ram iooo was a mature male, high in withers and muscular in rump, with sturdy legs and few battle scars. He was fond of the cliffs that formed the seam between the curvaceous rust-colored Triassic sandstone along the river and the tilted steel blue limestone of older seabeds, rock with crags and outcrops and a surface so abrasive, it could draw blood.

A life of clash and butt explains much about Ram iooo's skull: two layers of thick bone overlying the brain, forming a double roof of protection against concussion; struts of bone separated by hollow cavities between the bone layers; some of the skull bones spongy, the nasal bones dense and thick—in short, a head with the physics of one big shock absorber. It could take a collision so violent, the ram's entire body would telescope with the force of the blow.

In studied bands, ewes generally outnumber rams as wearers of radio collars and ear tags. Ram iooo was one of a few Blue Door rams to be marked. His collar was affixed during a capture years earlier, when Dave and Nike began their field research.

Even without a collar, he could easily be recognized. He was not particularly large. (The big ones tend to “burn out and die early,” Nike told me.) But he was agile and virile. His curl swooped and flared into tips with a rare lack of brooming. His walk was often a slow-motion prance. Dave and Nike had watched him grow into maturity, fight, and breed.

Dave spoke of this ram with the reverent voices of hunter and biologist. He truly liked this ram. “Number One Thousand was
one of our best rams,” he would say. “He had character.” Or, “I think One Thousand was my favorite ram.”

A piece of Dave's favorite ram is lying on my dinner plate, inside a corn tortilla. My fork is poised. I am about to eat him.

It is September now. Summer lingered for a while, still enduringly hot, but with a thin coolness held in the malachite pools of cottonwood shade. The washes flowed with blow sand and the peregrine falcons drifted above the river, eyeing morning doves with the intent to kill.

Hummingbirds whirred against Mark's shirt, trying to sip the hibiscus on the aloha print. Sluggish and slow, catfish rolled their pearly bellies in the overwarm shallows of the river, unfazed by the impishly wild Navajo boys on the cut bank, who quickly abandoned their fishing lines to swim.

In the garden, I remembered that the Chemehuevi Indians loved to sing in their melon fields. We harvested cantaloupes so fat, they were worthy of an opera. The tomatoes rarely made it from the garden bed to the house. I plucked and ate the plump red globes in situ with a crushed basil leaf, savoring the sun in them.

Everyone in town said that a monsoon would break the heat. In one day, in one rainstorm, we would be an entire season away from the day before.

And so it came: sky heavier than earth, migraine lightning, thunder you felt between your shoulder blades. The azure sky turned the color of granite. A sudden wall of wind preceded not showers but torrents. Sheets of rain drenched the desert, swelled the river to an astounding volume, then moved on to New Mexico. Behind the storm, school opened and the kids no longer went fishing. The pace of life shifted.

Our friend Jackie collected rainwater and began to soak her desert tortoise, mimicking his natural hydration before hiberna-
tion. She minded what he ate so that he would not enter metabolic limbo with a belly full of undigested plant matter. He could not go into his burrow dry and stuffed. He had to be a moisturized, empty tortoise.

During the big storm, runoff roared down one of the washes and fanned into the ranch bottom below our house. The junked Mercedes in the field stood its ground, doors flung open. The flash flood entered the north door, then flowed out the south door, filling the cab with sand clear over the seat bottoms. The driver's seat now sprouted a wild sunflower, a tall stem of green behind the ivory steering wheel. The windshield was a spidery web of aqua and silver cracks. Under the fierce summer sun, the blue paint turned to the color of tinfoil.

After three months of living on scorched earth, of plots to escape and inert desperation for relief, the pools of cottonwood shade finally yielded their balm to the rest of the air. We remembered how hot it was, but not for long. In “Coolness,” the Japanese poet Shiki wrote:

After the heat broke, I went to Ram Land for a visit. The bachelor bands, yet to be drawn into ewe range by unabashed lust, would still display a nonchalant caution, I thought. They would treat me as if I were just another yucca plant with binoculars. In a few weeks, the rut would begin and they would become more aggressive.

I took up a post and with a sorry impatience soon gave up glassing the cliffs. No sheep. I lounged against a rock, read my book, yawned. A pesky nip of guilt told me that such laziness would not likely earn a sighting. I sat and sat and I never saw a sheep.

In walked a single ram. He dropped down a steep boulder-
choked draw to drink from the river. He was handsome and sleek and held up the most elegant curl I had ever seen on any Blue Door ram, a flared helix so pure and breathtaking, his head was a work of art.

I saw this attribute as neither trophy nor score sheet in a record book. What I saw was a lightning image of the world without this animal, of the loss not only of flesh and bone but of ritual and mystery imperfectly known to us, a loss of time older than we are and of all of the evolutionary reasons behind head design.

Think of this: no S-necked heron, no crimson throat of a cactus blossom or cinnamon bark on a foxtail pine, no feel of the weight of a falcon's eyes on your skin. Think of the last set of curled keratin atop the head of a rare desert herbivore beside a khaki river. Think of your final glimpse of pale rumps in silent recession toward some distant horizon. Think of losing the exquisite details of a second world. To contemplate this emptiness is the cruelest, loneliest course of the imagination.

The perfect ram saw me across the river's serene flow. He stared at me as if trying to figure me out and report back to his group with his observations. When two more rams joined him, he hardly turned his head.

As John Wehausen had told me in California, rams know themselves by looking at one another. This ram looked and knew who he was: older, beefier, bigger headgear, bigger cajones. The enormous testicles on one end and the massive horns on the other were, in fact, a kind of counterweight system. You cannot have uneven rams that tip over and smash their noses. It is far too embarrassing.

All three bighorns pulled leaves from shrubs and chewed. Mr. Perfect leaned against a rough limestone ledge and rubbed against it, moving back and forth like an itchy horse at a scratching post.

Rams were very much on Dave's and Nike's minds as summer
came to a close. Indirectly, the Blue Door rams appeared to be kicking up the winds of change in the band of wild sheep that hung from the stone above the river.

Once the band stepped out from its long years of vanishing, when (if) the last remaining individuals constituted a breeding pair instead of the doom of a single gender, there was the chance of natural recovery. Indeed, the band grew from their fragile remnant. Although accurate counts began long after that turning point, the numbers now told Dave and Nike that, in the past several years at least, the flock had doubled. Individuals were healthy. Recruitment—sheep of reproductive age added each year— remained high.

The ewes stuck to the homeland as if no other sheep paradise existed. The drought sent them to fringes for better food, but few hooves stepped off the map. The rams, however, seemed restless.

Nike had watched a young ram race back and forth along the riverbank, obviously agitated. He jumped into the river, crossed it, and joined a second ram on the opposite bank. So rarely did sheep cross this boundary, we almost never bothered to look for them on that side of the river. Were these two drawn to food unexploited by wild sheep? Had they crossed because other rams had picked on them? Were the reasons important enough to break the bad juju of staying away from that side of the canyon?

Ferdinand the pacifist, the one-horned ram that went across the river and hung out there solo, had not been seen again. (The pair that Nike saw cross the river would return for the rut.) Over the year, on the homeland side, a few rams had roamed perilously close to a flock of domestic sheep. Thus far, they had come back before contact.

Dave and Nike's meticulous observations hinted at a trend. When rams expand beyond their range, they explained, it might be a sign that the herd is reaching carrying capacity. Having rebounded from nearly nothing, the population was leveling off.

The sightings of walkabout rams above the canyon rims, on flatter ground occupied by humans and livestock, disturbed Dave and Nike. Everyone involved with this herd was reminded of the possibility that a single ram could step off the island, nose around a domestic flock, then return, a vector of disease, to infect the band and send it into oblivion. The natives would be gone— again—perhaps, this time, forever.