Eating Stone Read Free

once vanished into thin air.
    Their kind had likely been in the southwestern deserts since the late Pleistocene. Over the millennia, in a land of heat, drought, and food plants that resemble pot scrubbers, they had become a different race from that of their ancestors. Their pelage had paled in color and their bones had lightened. They had learned how to reduce body-water loss. They had struck ironclad allegiances to particular watering holes. They were, in short, the locals.
    Barely a few decades into the twentieth century, we had the locals surrounded. Like every desert bighorn on the continent, the Blue Door Band lived on an isolated remnant of its former terrain. Intolerant of human activity, place-faithful to a fault, and with no other bighorns to naturally replenish them, they were, like many species on an island of habitat, vulnerable to catastrophe.
    An aggressive predator, for instance, could wreak havoc if the bighorns were in weak condition or if their numbers were few. Contact with domestic sheep could expose them to debilitating disease. Competition for food could push them off their safe places to no place. There were few other places for them to go.
    When the Blue Door Band declined in the early 1960s—toofew animals to keep the population viable—the word extinct was bandied about. Their passing garnered little notice from a public that barely knew the wild sheep existed in the first place.
    Elsewhere in the Southwest, attentive shepherds—wildlife managers and advocates—nudged desert bighorns along through recovery and protection programs. But this band, as remote and as isolated as if stuck on an atoll in the middle of the Pacific, slipped through the cracks, their numbers likely fallen to a point of no return. They slid into a spectacular crash. Year after year, the river cliffs held their absence, air empty of blood and breath. The sheep were gone.
    Then they came back.

TRIBE CAPRINI

    These late-fall mornings have a weight to them, air pressed down by steel gray clouds. Storms cross the desert, but no rain falls, only this heaviness of air. Then a curtain of wind moves in from the high mesas and pushes the weight east, stripping the cotton-woods bare of their leaves in a single gust. Behind the wind, silver trees rise from islands of their own, shed gold, and the crickets lose their voices.
    Migrating bluebirds, dozens of them, rest in the storms’ wake, scattering electric blue shards in blond strands of salt grass. A single Russian olive tree holds some of the birds among its dried gold-green leaves, a Persian miniature I shall paint as soon as I study Persian miniatures for about ten years. The chile crop my husband, Mark, and I planted is harvested and dries to bloodred under a weakening sun, the summer's fire saved. From the Great Basin to Mexico, a high-pressure system settles over us. For several weeks, all edges will stay sharp. There will be no haze.
    I try to spend most of my days with the sheep. November's thin light and ambient quiet make it easy to find them. They array themselves on a steep talus and stand at feed like perfect bighorns: heads down, all facing the same direction, shapely gray profiles against gray rock. Then they all turn to show white rumps atop graceful legs, more like glyphs than creatures.
    At times, I post myself on a canyon rim and see no sheep.
    Being with them spoils me for being without them. Then I hear a rock fall and clatter and, above the sound, I find a group clustered in a hanging arroyo, a vertical cleft in a cliff wall: tsétah dibé, in Navajo, sheep of the rock or mountain.
    On one watch, I see fifteen ewes and juveniles bolt from their feed and run at top speed along a narrow horizontal ledge, single file, as if chased by a pack of starving panthers. The leader stops so suddenly—a panic-braking ur-rrch—her hooves leave skid marks in the limestone. Each one behind her crashes into the butt of the sheep in front of it: a pileup.
    I spend an entire