Eating Stone (43 page)

“We're not sure how she died,” Mara said. “What we do know is that the loss of this ewe marked the end of the original San Andres Mountains desert bighorn sheep herd.”

Inseminated by one of the sentinel rams put on the refuge after her years of solitude, SAE 067 had given birth to a ram lamb, the leaping half a lamb in the photograph that Mara had given me. The following year, she bore a ewe lamb. These two sheep still climbed the cloud-raking rock of the San Andres Mountains. Fortunately, Mara said, they would pass on some of the old ewe's wisdom and genes. Perhaps they, too, knew the native routes and ledges, the rocks and the escape moves that would allow them to survive for a long time.

Because Kevin and Mara could make no clear assumptions about the ewe's death, they had to take the ewe off the mountain for further evaluation.

And what can be reported of the sheep I'd named the Blue Door Band, the source herd for the translocation project and my companions over the year?

They were sheep who bred like rabbits.

By late spring, twenty lambs were added to the population, leaving little question—this year at least—that the band had replenished itself after a couple dozen herd mates disappeared on the end of a rope attached to a helicopter.

Although it is not common to breed so young, a number of the band's yearling ewes bore lambs. Also in the lamb crop were two sets of twins, although only one set survived. Dave and Nike marveled at how their bovid wards contradicted the statistical rarity of twinning by desert bighorns.

The mystery of the Blue Door Band's disappearance and return, its genetic profile, inbreeding, and hard-bound fidelity to the river canyon—to this was added still another seasonal cycle and, for Dave and Nike, a rich thicket of study material.

Nike sorted through diet, weather, herd density, age of females, and other factors that might have influenced the robust size of the lamb crop. She continued to study the band's somewhat unusual maternal behavior, the signs of allomothering, of females who nursed lambs other than their own. Each seemingly minute response to environment, each extraordinary efficiency of instinct, added up to a prodigious ice-age will.

Sometimes the sheep in this band acted like the textbook mountain sheep in the mounds of scientific literature about their species. Sometimes they surprised us. Always they instilled a tense hope, a hope that there never would be a return to the years of near extinction, a desire to be assured that when we went down the river or to a remote watching post on the rim, the wild sheep would always be there, living inside their redrock gorge.

On a summer morning of bright, piercing sun, I threw together gear for a day with the Blue Door Band. I packed spotting scope and binoculars, water and a book, Nelson and lunch.

I tucked two sketches into the pages of my book. One was a
drawing of an Anasazi petroglyph on a red sandstone wall, an image of a bighorn sheep with a wavy line emerging from its mouth—its conversation with the universe, its trail of breath. For her survival and tenacity, for her wild, complete world, I had made this image, in my mind, the San Andres ewe.

The other sketch, a bighorn with backward horns, came from the Cosos, from a brown-black basalt ravine amid the blue layers of basin and range, drawing rain from the Sierra Nevada with the power of dreams.

Within that basalt canyon lay confirmation of our species's instinctive love of metaphor, one that, ironically, seemed prereli-gious, an innate human need to express the inexpressible, the something more. This, I thought, was not unlike the more that Mara felt as she carried on her back, across the bajada, the animal that had been the last, yet which had kept the mountains from being so empty.

As I loaded my daypack, it struck me that these forays into sheep country were futile and delusional. The end of the wild world, the emptiness, will come—indeed, has arrived. The absence may not be one of actual bodies, a physical loss of this bird or that mammal, a river of native fish or a band of homeland ungulates. Rather, it is a reduction of diverse nature into a simplified biota that is entirely managed and dependent. It is a loss of autonomous beings, the self-willed fauna that gave us metaphor, that shaped human minds capable of identity with all existence.

Sometimes I picture this moment in history, a moment with which my own lifetime chances to coincide, as a gate that we have been closing for some time. On the other side of the gate, deep landscape falls farther and farther away, always at the point of loss. The spellbound threshold between humanity and the rest of nature is very nearly pulled shut to the latching point. Soon we shall turn our backs and walk away entirely, place-blind and terribly lonely.

I remember going to Mexico to not find and not see any desert bighorns but to be in the place where they live and to try to learn something. And so now there was no better journey than to the outward, to the edge of things.

This is a good day, I thought, to take Nelson to lunch.

The animal-longing sector of my brain remains indefatigable. I set the shreds of my imagination to go the distance with all of nature's creation. I hunger for the quiet rapture of observation, the measure of time by the clock of blood, the exaltation that comes with the intimacy of beings so unlike ourselves in homelands so unlike our own.

Humans are creatures in search of exaltation. We crave, someone once said, the occasions when jolts from the universe fly open. This jolt, in this desert with these animals, is a belonging so overwhelming, it can put deep cracks in your heart.

The sun climbed. I was losing the cool of the morning. It will be hot out there, I thought. The heat will rise from the canyon and break the air into shimmering liquid waves. Across the stone, in gaits and patterns older than time, the fine-limbed, amber-eyed animals will move.