Eating Stone (6 page)

Some species are solitary. Others protect themselves from predators by a group, rather than a loner, life. Multiple senses—many eyes, ears, noses—detect danger. Snorts, grunts, alarm postures, and other signals transmit the alert instantly. As a communal defense against wolves, burly musk oxen stand shoulder-to-shoulder, looking like a cinder-block wall that overdosed on hair-growth stimulants.

In North America, the thinhorn sheep took the northernmost kingdom—Alaska, the Yukon, northwest Canada—and, by the insularity of climate and distance, experienced the least human impact. Dall's sheep are golden-horned and snow-white, as one might expect for a subarctic world. The other thinhorn species, Stone's sheep, are nearly black.

In the Canadian and American West and in Mexico, the bighorns fell within reach of greater human activity. By the end
of the nineteenth century, their numbers had plummeted and their range had diminished to scattered fragments.

Bound to the vulnerable geography of the plains, to the broken badlands and river breaks on the Upper Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, the Audubon's bighorn quickly walked into the crosshairs of American settlement. By the late 1800s, the subspecies was extinct. The California bighorn, Rocky Mountain bighorn, and the four desert bighorn races are still among us, but they have been extirpated on much of their former range. They have gone from ice to islands.

November slides toward December, tilting the balance of light further toward night. When I find a group of bighorns, I more often watch them in shadow than in sunlight. The canyon air turns frigid inside its chamber of stone. Cleared of much of its silt, the river flows verdigris against banks of salmon-colored sand, edged with the white lace of ice.

Bighorn sheep do not unfurl their breeding dramas in serene meadows or on the easy terrain of open flats. Imagine, instead, a six-hundred-foot-high wall of loose boulders, crumbling rock, and narrow, tiered wedding-cake ledges, you racing about in full-lust sprints, courting an evasive female while fending off rivals with your head.

Valerius Geist's studies of the rut suggest that older rams have a more refined courting technique than younger ones, with the effect of conserved energy, less stress for both ram and ewe, and, ultimately, more reproductive success. I do not see the archetypical full-curl, “Stay calm, then nail her,” chocolate ram again. In most of the groups, the rams appear close in age and muster, the dominant-subordinate hierarchy more fluid, the fighting increasingly vigorous. There is more coursing than courtship. In short, the band is exhausting itself with aggression.

From a post high across the river one day, I watch five rams cut a young ewe away from a group and chase her up and down the cliff. In her attempt to shake them, she runs nearly half a mile upriver. On a terrace, she zigzags and barrel-races, all five rams at her rump. From the terrace, she jumps up a wall and perches on a foothold so narrow, it holds only her, a panting ewe with all four hooves on a footing the size of a teacup. The rams huddle below, breathing hard.

She jumps off her teacup and dashes away again. Whenever a ram closes in and tries to mount her, she wheels around and faces him. The other four circle her. The ewe lies down and tries to tuck in her rump. Divest yourself of all romantic notions. Sheep love is rough.

At one point, the ewe backs into a sumac bush so that none of the rams can reach her backside. Brief fights break out among the rams—kicks, shoulder heaves, horns slammed into flanks. Two rams face each other, tilt heads, and rise. They roar toward each other in a head-cracking clash that is so loud, I feel it in my teeth.

The rut is not without concussions, broken horns, broken legs, puncture wounds, bruised gonies, and other injuries. More often, aggression is literally absorbed by ritual, by behavior that appeases, by responses that quickly sort out status, and by the unequivocal language of head armor used like blocks of concrete. Today's rape chase is brutal. But no blood is shed; no necks are broken.

The rams pursue the ewe as she races toward a freestanding boulder with a narrow crack at its base. She drops to the ground on all fours and crawls into the crack to hide. All I can see is her face. Amber eyes peer out from this small cave: a ewe in a rock cubby. Five rams form a semicircle around the opening. They wait.

In a clumsy daydream, I am crashing my way through evolution at warp speed, as if all of time could fit inside a peanut. I go from slime to squid in a breath. The dinosaurs fall into a well. Dead ends and extinctions fly off like pits spit from olives. I zip over arboreal simians, crash through chimps, ignore the fruit-muncher hominid who peers through the leaves, blinks, and aims a hairy foot toward a pig carcass to grab a bite to eat.

In my crash through time, rock persuades itself into mountains, rivers carve through their heart, and closed basins hold immense lakes of silvery blue. A continent swarms with creatures, many of them overtly large, many of them horned and hooved, some of them headed toward oblivion: giant bears, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats; an American cheetah, a shrub ox, a species called yesterday's camel; mountain goats that eat the bark of Douglas firs, giant sloths foraging near the Grand Canyon.

Behind retreating ice, a wave of Siberian Homos spreads southward, jabbing Pleistocene megafauna with their little spears, dragging bloody mammoth haunches off to shelters of rock and laying them at the feet of their enamorada.

For 99 percent of our existence as humans, we lived as nomadic hunters and foragers. That leaves barely a blip for sedentary agriculture, written language, armies, and serious biological amnesia. Yet a river of creatures lives inside our cranium—reptiles in our brain stem, ocean life in our olfactory nerves, the whole of primate evolution in our sexuality, boldness, and self-awareness.

Paul Shepard calls the Pleistocene “the era of our becoming,” a formative period for slow-breeding, bipedal, hunting omnivores. He uses this Cenozoic moment to underscore a central tenet of his work: The structure of the human brain, the very evolution of intelligence, depends on animals.

Although some of his arguments have been shown to be flawed, Shepard's words illuminate the context, if not the biology. “Animals are among the first inhabitants of the mind's eye,” he wrote in Thinking Animals. “They are basic to the development
of speech and thought. Because of their part in the growth of consciousness, they are inseparable from a series of events in each human life, indispensable to our becoming human in the fullest sense.”

In the daydream, I am looking through the wrong end of the binoculars. I see the pale retreating rumps of the Blue Door Band. They are the size of dissolving pollen grains. What if you scan the land for these wild sheep, and for the other descendants of the ice mammals, but find none? What happens when, as the experts tell us, at the end of the current millennium most of the plant, animal, and bird species we know today are gone? Will this leave us brain-damaged?

In between sheep visits, I was under the impression that my life was every bit as ordinary as other people's lives, typical lives, with a Mercedes in one's field, Zen-trained coyotes in the river bottom, and ice-age mammals in the canyons, eating cactus.

Part of my life was the typical middle-aged gut-churning panic of riding a globe through space, a globe that spins through time with utter indifference to one's being. All over America, millions of fellow baby boomers were standing in front of the mirror in their jammies, utterly astonished to discover that dissipation and disintegration—of mind, of body, of matter—are essential elements of existence, and that the slide toward them is ever quickening and inevitable.

Watching wild animals intensely, like prayer, somewhat tempered the panic. At home, however, I paid far too much attention to my own cerebral senescence. I noticed peculiar episodes in brain activity.

It began one day in the post office. I stood at the counter, wearing an old teal-colored Eddie Bean barn coat over my jammies, a letter in hand. Suddenly, a meteor struck my head and erased 40 percent of my vocabulary. The D words slid down
the Formica counter and headed toward the stamp drawer. The B's formed snowdrifts against the postmaster's government-issue steel gray desk. My numb tongue flung participles at the most wanted posters. Nouns fled in great chunks.

For three panicked minutes, eyes wide in horror, I was unable to pluck the word certified from the cosmos. The postmaster politely rumbled a barrage of questions at me: “Stamps? Parcel post? Delivery confirmation?” Speechwise, the tip of a peninsula broke off from my mainland brain and the sea flooded into the breach behind it.

In the days that followed, a kind of sonic language began to spill all over my paragraphs and conversations. I was a walking factory of messy homonyms, wacky neologisms, and absurd errors. “Ceiling wax” for sealing wax. “Plankton” for parking lot. The living room became “the basilica,” Mark's circular saw “the cyclical saw.” I said the human body had “Olympic nodes,” then “lint nodes;” the navel harbored “an admiral's fleet.” This was not the cleverness of puns or wordplay. The words that flew from mouth and pen were simply a train wreck.

Lamanites. I could not wrap my tongue around the Lamanites. According to my local duo of puppy-faced Mormon missionaries, the Lamanites were the sons of Laman, a lost tribe of Israelites who, in biblical times, had been cursed with dark skin for their sinful wickedness.

Mormon theology says that the Lamanites somehow found themselves nowhere near the Holy Land any longer. They ended up in North America as Indians, morally and geographically astray, running around wild and barbaric and godless in the New World until their unfallen (Latter-day Saint) brethren arrived to rejoin them to their lost faith. The puppies talked a lot about separation and rejoining.

“The Laminates?” I yelped to the missionaries, expressing the lunatic disbelief of one so obviously hell-bound that her undies
were incinerating. “Do you mean to say that the Apaches are Laminates?” As in: Don't laminate me to your church. I was one speech-impaired Episcopalian.

This outburst quickly deteriorated into an assortment of imperfectly remembered Bible stories and the compulsion to tell them that I had married a man who was once expelled from Presbyterian Sunday school for coloring the face of Jesus with a purple crayon. I let them in on a tiny secret. “My purple-Jesus husband,” I whispered, “thinks we live in this remote, isolated place because we're under a Jehovah's Witness protection program.”

This pathetic monologue drew pitying looks from the puppies. They looked at their Rolexes and wondered how long it would take to ride their bikes to the next batch of Laminates on the nearby Navajo reservation.

Then the ear worms arrived. Silently, I began to count everything. An involuntary static of numbers rolled across my cranium as I walked up the steps. Down the trail to the gardens on the lower end of our property, I counted each rabbitbrush along the way, left and right, returning to the top of the trail when I lost track. I counted the times I stuck the shovel into the frost-covered potato bed. I measured fence posts, the distance between light-bulbs in the living room.

In junior high school, I loathed math, and the feeling was mutual. Mathematics attacked me at every opportunity. My algebra teacher made it his mission to make a girl cry whenever he started the class hour. For him, it was a warm-up exercise and, by persistent humiliation, it worked. He disdainfully called his female students “amphibians,” neither girl nor woman, but in between. He told us we were innumerate by gender and always would be.

When he was lazy or anxious to get on with it, the math teacher would simply look at me, and I'd conveniently burst into tears. Then on we went to negative exponents. The math itself—
the numbers on the blackboard, the numbers inside my textbook, the scrawl beneath my pencil—threw me into hysteria. It all looked like the claw marks of unhappy squirrels.

In high school and college, I struggled on, doing well in all subjects except math, which, as Gabriel García Márquez wrote in his autobiography, “not even God could make me understand.” I resigned myself to a lifetime of baby math. And now, years later, numbers filled every nook of my skull like swelling marsh-mallows.

The oppression of detail, the repetition of household chores, grew horrifying. How many times in my life had I put forks, knives, and spoons in a drawer after I'd washed them? I actually tried to add up the total, then calculate the sum in individual utensils—hundreds of spoons, thousands of forks. Salad or dinner forks? I screamed silently. Mark hung out his wash to dry on the line and I raced out to count it, to align every T-shirt hem with the ground.

My language and counting problems soon slid into an optical problem, precipitated by my certainty that all surfaces on which I walked had tilted ever so slightly, too little to induce dizziness or loss of balance, but enough to make every inanimate object in my physical environment crooked. It became my duty to straighten them.

The human brain weighs slightly more than a pot roast. It lives inside a dark, silent shell of bone, the organizing genius of bursts of electric current in ioo billion neurons. The neuron jungle is densely packed and interconnected—i million billion possible connections in the cortex alone, estimates say. Several billion of mine were not working. My cortex had the wiring of a 1950s toaster.

Sometimes I felt like a shortwave radio with a rampaging antenna that picked up overlapping stations and a crackle of atmo-
spherics. Sometimes some sort of anorexic cannibal was chewing on my locus coeruleus. My head no longer produced thoughts, only data—not soft, squishy round clumps, but pointy stabs of noise.

The inherent crookedness of the world drove me to distraction. In the house, I madly straightened rugs, place mats, towels, and books. I whipped out a screwdriver to straighten the cover plates on the electric outlets. Outside, the hems of the sheets drying on the clothesline had to match up—precisely. Or the truck was not quite lined up with the walls of its shade house, so I backed it out and parked it straight. Whenever I fixed my stare on the askewness of Mark's bootlaces, he ran for his life.