Eating Stone (40 page)

Mark and Dondi, one of the young Navajo men, are the team's strongest, so they have knelt down on the tarp with the big ram. With a hand on each horn like a calf roper, Mark holds the ram's head. The blindfold hides his eyes. Suddenly, the muscular neck pulses. It could wield a head blow strong enough to break Mark's thigh. With Dondi's help, the ram settles down again.

Epochs pass. We poke and prod them, vampire their veins. My hands are full of glass vials of blood. Bristles of sheep hair cover the front of my shirt. My hands shake. Bill's hands are trembling. We look at each other as if we were the world's most inept and pathetic wildlife handlers. Then we look at Scott's hands. His hands are shaking, too.

The two ewes have been moved into crates. Five people carry the ram to a truck and lift him onto the tailgate, lined up with the crate door. The opening is less than half a sheep high; you do not want the animal to stand and escape as it is moved inside. Once inside, he can stand up. Already there is a ewe in there. Older rams cannot be crated together.

The handlers must remove all restraints as the sheep goes in, a difficult and dangerous maneuver. They compose themselves,
look at one another to communicate readiness, then go. Mark detaches the blindfold with one hand as the ram slips through the door. The hobble is off in a blink. Ram in, door shut, no ewe flying out. How they did this all at once—box a few hundred pounds of Ovis into a cube of aluminum—no one seems to know.

Along the side of the crates, narrow windows provide ventilation. Jeff covers the windows that face the work site so the sheep cannot see us. They still need that calming. He makes certain they are in the shade.

Scott turns to the crew. We stand before him like limp sock monkey puppets. Silently, Bill mouths to me, That took an hour.

“That took five minutes a sheep. Great job,” Scott says.

The ram crashes against the crate with one colossal butt. The chopper flies in with four sheep on the end of its tether.

Between sheep deliveries, we move the canopy as the sun's angle changes, keeping the pool of shade as large as possible. October's sun can be fierce at day's peak. Everyone eats dust. Hands no longer shake. Our dance of tagging and treatment becomes nearly flawless, even when Gary brings in four sheep at a time. Mostly, he carries doubles. Scott guides Bill and me with gentle directions. We stay at or under six minutes.

A ram is on watch. One of the muggers told us he fell during the chase and bonked his nose. Scott examines the ram's nose, head, and body twice, then two times more. Once the ram is in a crate, he watches it for a limp, imbalance, or listlessness. Everyone fears injuries during the chase, though the pilot will back off if sheep panic is too frantic. So far, he has brought them in and lowered them to the landing without mishap.

When a ewe struggles on the tarp, Mark talks to her softly. He uses his talking-to-horses voice. I concentrate on refining my hastily acquired art of venipuncture. I hold all four glass tubes
between the fingers of my left hand and fill them with the needle in my right hand. The genetic signature in this drawn blood could reveal the lineage of the Blue Door Band, unravel secrets of their bottleneck and missing years.

So far: one bruised ram nose and blood shed only into the vials. When Bill drenches the mouth of a ewe, she spits the water back out. No one blames her. During handling, the rams seem more docile than the ewes. We move some feisty young ewes that try to levitate themselves into freedom during the four seconds between hobble removal and a crate door shut behind them. The haunches that might launch them out of this ordeal are the muscular haunches that propel them up sheer cliffs. I see rumps of steel.

Gary brings in three ewes. I kneel down with one of them as Mark holds her horns. Her pale brown fleece feels coarse and brittle, not curly, a pelage suited to the desert. The undercoat is lighter in color and densely soft. On her face, the hairs are short and glossy. Her black tail is slightly longer than a thumb. She has a scar on her flank, chipped horns, and a torn ear. In my mind I see her eyes beneath the blindfold, for without them she seems incomplete. Her heart beats against my fingertips.

John Muir heaped cottony puffs of praise on the appearance of wild sheep in the Sierra, ever deploring their domestic cousins. “The tame is timid; the wild is bold,” he wrote. “The tame is always more or less ruffled and dirty; while the wild is as smooth and clean as the flowers of his mountain pastures.”

Less sleek than a deer, this young ewe shows where she lives: in rock and sand and difficult places. She is sturdy, strong, and scruffy. She smells like dust and fear.

These sheep are not flatlanders. Their feet give them away as bovids that no longer roam steppes or grassy plains. This ewe's feet read the stone, find footholds on ledges no wider than an inflated caterpillar. The edges of her pointed black hooves are
hard but surprisingly elastic. The divided toes are flexible. One toe can move up, the other down or laterally to meet the irregular contours of rock. The bottoms of the hooves are neither rigid nor flat; they bulge at the posterior in a rounded pad, a cushion of soft tissue for grip and shock absorption.

In their canyon, high on their rock, even under a camera lens, bighorns loom as large as elk, an illusion they seem to have perfected. Up close, they are smaller than you ever expect them to be. To see this optical difference is a shock. This ewe weighs just over a hundred pounds. Running beside a tall person like me, she—her shoulders—would reach my bottom rib.

“Which one is the hot ewe?” Scott asks as he walks over to us from his parked truck. He carries a pack of medical gear.

A ewe on the tarp is overheating. Her sides heave. Mara places an ice pack on her flanks while Coby rubs cool water into her fleece. Scott treats her first, before the other animals, as Bill and I hustle beside him and try to match our work to his skilled speed. Four minutes and we're done.

Nike lifts the radio from her pocket, ready to call pilot and chopper out of the canyon and back to the work site. She asks Scott, “Should we release her? Put her back?”

Scott takes the ewe's temperature and decides that the cool-down has worked. They move her to a shaded crate, where she butts the walls a few times, then settles down. On the radio, Nike and Gary determine that we have enough sheep for the day. It is time to caravan to the canyon rim and release site.

A handsome, slender man in his early twenties, Fernando has the polite reticence of a traditional Navajo. He barely spoke as he worked on his carry team, held heads, loaded animals. When he does speak, his words are soft and brief. One of his jobs is to check on the sheep in the crates. His vigilance seems to me to be quite profound. He moves with the shy, silken grace of a deer. Now, our work finished, he stands near a sheep crate.

The crate window is open because the sheep have settled down and Mara wants them to have ventilation during the truck ride. Most of them are lying down in their crates, choosing a stillness that likely combines self-preservation with the simple reality of confinement.

The largest ram, the one that needed five handlers, stands with his head against the narrow window slot, where he looks out into the arena of his captors. Fernando approaches the crate at an angle, rather than directly across from the crate window. From about six feet away, he watches, arms folded across his chest, body pond-still.

Suppressing the congenital Anglo tendency to babble and fidget, I stand motionless behind Fernando so that I, too, can look at the ram. We do this, I think, because our distance will not spook him. And because the ram has no blindfold and there is in us an uncontainable urge to see his eyes.

The eyes are the color of polished oak. Across them run black irises in that odd horizontal ellipse so distinctive of highly sociable ungulates. Something about that not-round iris implies mischief and teasing. Something about that iris makes goats and sheep look as if they would like to nibble your earlobes with their velvety lips.

The orbs are globe-round, an inch and a half across and slightly protruding. The ram can see behind himself. He can see—instantaneously, up or down a vertical face—where he steps. He moves his head slightly and now he can see us, Fernando and me. Our eyes lock. In my mind I reassure this trapped animal that this silent conversation is not about death.

From the high desert above the river canyon, I can see the entire world: the mesa of the Birdhead petroglyphs to the north, a fifteen-mile-long escarpment the color of blood to the west, buttes and spires of sandstone stranded clear south into Arizona, hazy
blue mountain ranges—four islands of them—afloat on the shimmering horizon. Bands of beige and rose slickrock dotted with dark green pinyons and junipers. Creases where the earth gives way to unsteady water and deep, sinuous canyons.

I slowly turn 360 degrees and all around me the views are unbroken, no distance less than sixty miles from me to the seam between land and sky. Distance is a desert rat's addiction.

I choose a direction—that canyon and that blue mountain over there—and take off. Mark grabs the back of my collar. “Stay here. We have work to do.”

One of the creases in the distance is the rim of the river canyon. Below it, on a debris fan, lies the release site. For the helicopter work, we must stay up on top, on the flats, wrapped in this dizzy, dreamy view.

Our caravan made its way down the highway, passing travelers who did not know that they were driving by twelve rare desert bighorns with needle marks in their butts. From the highway we took a dirt road. Scattered houses and corrals gave way to uninhabited desert.

Mark maneuvered the truck carefully over ruts and bumps, trying not to shake up the ewes and ram in the crate on the pickup bed. I looked back at the load often and gave myself a stiff neck. I remembered the last time I had hauled sheep, years ago: domestic Rambouillet wethers hog-tied in the back of an open pickup, bouncing over the rugged Montana prairie on a friend's ranch, Mozart playing as I drove them to a stock truck and their doom. It was but a blip in the ancient bargain of domestication, of animals husbanded and eaten.

These wild sheep are in our hands only briefly, once in their lifetime, and as far as I know, there are no plans to eat them. The protection of rare animals marks a new kind of bargain, one that runs contrary to the historical imperative to press everything alive, dead, inert, or otherwise into human service.

This ark business is still a rough jewel in the modern psyche. It
signifies an act of conscience, a fragile ascendance toward the notion of intrinsic worth, that wild creatures have value independent of human measure. Some of the people we passed on the highway would hardly know the difference between a gazelle and a leggy duck, yet this translocation, these desert creatures, would excite and move them beyond words.

Leaving the dirt road, we followed a barely discernible two-track path until it came to a dead end on the top of the mesa. Gary will now lift the crates off the parked trucks and fly them down to the river one at a time on the cable. Scott has checked each animal. They remain unharmed, but he feels their captivity—by now about five hours long—must come to an end. He wants them out on the rocks with food, water, space, and one another. When our backs are turned, the sheep stare out the window slots at us.

Nike ties hot-pink streamers to a truck's antenna so that Gary can see the wind direction on the ground. The midday thermals and a slight breeze have picked up, but he flies in smoothly, lands, and lets out the muggers.

The muggers escort Dave, Nike, Dondi, and Pam, a Navajo wildlife biologist, to the aircraft, guiding them safely beneath the whirling blades. Gary flies the foursome down to the river site, where they will receive the crates and release the sheep.

As we wait, Coby and Mara hand out a snack. From New Mexico they brought the meat of one of the animals hunted on the White Sands Missile Range: oryx jerky. We stand on the Colorado Plateau eating an African antelope.

The muggers join us, removing their bulbous white helmets and emptying sand from their boots. I ask the younger mugger, a lean, wiry nineteen-year-old, what he does in Wyoming when he isn't working wildlife contracts.

“Rodeo bull riding,” he replies.

As jobs go, mugging and bull riding make sense. Ride an acrobatic, highly inflammable helicopter, grapple frightened horned,
hooved animals on craggy walls and narrow ledges above rocky chasms. Shake your spine like a Slinky on the back of angry male beef.

In the hustle of work, I refrained from asking Mara about the old ewe in the San Andres Mountains. Months have passed since I visited the New Mexico refuge and, with Kevin Cobble, the refuge manager, listened to the ewe's radio-collar blip as she stood on her mountain. I fear that Mara will tell me that the ewe lost the odds against her—the predators, her advanced age, the generals deciding that she threatened national security.

Mara knows her sheep and her mountains. She knows about SAE 067. But I do not want her to tell me that the last native bighorn sheep in the Chihuahuan Desert has died. That passage would press on us a great weight.

I gnaw oryx. Then I ask, “Mara, how is the old ewe?”

A breeze flutters the pink streamers on the truck antenna. The far-flung mountains shiver atop heat waves.

“She is still alive,” Mara replies. “She had her lamb this year, a ewe lamb.”

“The transplants? The Kofa sheep and the others?”

“We lost a few to mountain lions, but not as many as we expected during the first few months. There's a new crop of lambs. We think the transplant will take.”

The crates await Gary's pickup. On their silver walls, petro-glyph-style bighorns in black paint leap around the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stickers. Inside, the real sheep lie quietly with their legs tucked under them. Air moves through the open vents. Without a sound, Fernando slips over and checks them.

Mara describes the crate design. “We tried to cover everything to the last bolt, all from a sheep's point of view.”

She and Kevin even sat inside the crates as truck and trailer hauled them down the highway on test runs. “We wanted to see how they rode, where the noise came from. We wrapped cables
and chains in tape so they wouldn't rattle and cause more stimulation than the sheep already experience.”