Eating Stone (7 page)

The brain salad—verbal paralysis, counting, straightening— came in spells, like a tic. I blamed solar flares, bulges in the magne-tosphere, drops in barometric pressure, nuclear testing in Pakistan. More likely, nothing was wrong. Quit whining, I told myself. Take a deep breath. Embrace senility. The flaky neurotrans-missions were normal for my aging organ, which actually, now that you ask, may have contained just a teensy-weensy bit of the obsessive-compulsive since my birth.

“One of the major hidden manifestations of aging,” writes neu-robiologist William H. Calvin, “is a decline in many of the neuro-transmitter substances used by one nerve cell to signal an adjacent one.” My cells were not speaking to one another. Still, most of the brain's parts remain plastic; plasticity, rather than rigidity, leaves nerve cells open to change and learning. As it ages, the brain loses some of its capacity to memorize—its “fluid intelligence”—but compensates with an increase in “crystallized intelligence,” the ability to conceptualize and place things in perspective.

They only say this to make us feel better, I told myself after an exhausting binge of lightbulb measuring. I longed for concepts. I craved perspective. All I got were eighty-five rabbitbrush shrubs between the house and the potato patch.

Verbally, I was stuck. Other functions plunged into mental
overdrive, a deluge of completely useless and irrelevant information. One hemisphere had cannibals and fizzling circuitry. In the other hemisphere, darkness swallowed creativity and intuition. “I fear I am not in my perfect mind,” Lear cries.

I had a chat with my doctor about neurological disorders. He knew that I was always the complete opposite of a hypochondriac, that I would endure nearly anything before letting out even the most timid peep, something like “Oh, by the way, do you suppose that this severed, blood-spurting arm might be reattached?” Or “Might this entire paralysis of my body from my left temple to my little toe, uh, be a stroke?”

This time, he knew that I was serious, but he was not worried. My age was right there on the chart. Age explained a lot. Age was tilting me toward what a friend called “precocious senility.”

I described the symptoms. The postal moment, the Laminates and cannibals, the forebrain hurricanes.

“No matter what, you can't give me a biochemical correction,” I insisted vehemently. “I need an edge. I'm an artist. My imagination is my life, my income, the way I make friends. To be creative, I must have many deep-seated pathologies, abysmally low self-esteem.” “Selfish steam,” my husband calls it. “I must… I must suffer.”

“You mean you don't want zombie drugs?” the doctor said with a smile, his look suggesting he might have tried a few himself.

I pictured myself in a diagnostic lab, wearing white mummy wrap and head bandages, disappearing into the maw of a gleaming white culvert that would magnetically resonate every last organ underneath my skin. As I rolled out the other end, a sweet nurse would tell me, “Your brain looks just like a toaster.”

I liked my doctor. He was neither a pharmacological zealot nor the type to advocate immediate surgery. He didn't drive a BMW. No matter how much I wanted to see a picture of my brain—the
busy little neuron serfs running around in their huaraches, plugging in wires, forgetting to plug in quite a few—he discouraged, for the time being, a recreational MRI. We decided that I should have more patience with my unruly mind—try, perhaps, to discern wisdom within the chaos. He thought it might be a good idea if I took up sea kayaking.

Then, as November ended, the brain fevers subsided.

My brain fevers always calm when I go out to look for the sheep. I fill my days with copulating ungulates. Cold, sunny afternoons yield animated maternal bands—ewes and juveniles—each with a guardian ram in full curl and several younger crazed rams. Often, I find animals quite close to the same location from day to day. At other times, they are in one place one day, then far away the next, as if they have flown there.

Canyon, wide-open desert, distant mesas—the bighorn homeland feels infinite and invulnerable. Is it winter's stillness, where the loudest sound is silence, that makes it so?

So immense is our space on these winter days, I forget that the sheep live in a boxed-in fragment of imperiled terrain. Even in this remote canyon, semiferal dogs once chased a ewe until she climbed to a safe ledge, where she perched and quivered until the dogs lost patience and left. There have been sightings of bobcats, rumors of mountain lions, and a rare but inevitable poacher. The moat around the band is thin.

On one of my forays far from my usual posts, I spot eight domestic sheep and goats on the flats behind the canyon rims, just a few miles from Ram Land, the home range of the Blue Door Band's males. The rams are not in residence at the moment. They are downriver, on ewe range, going at it hammer and tongs. Nevertheless, I become apprehensive.

Desert bighorn sheep are acutely susceptible to bronchial
pneumonia and can pick up the infecting bacteria from domestic sheep. As one wildlife biologist told me, one nose-to-nose contact and the bighorns are toast. A single animal, usually a ram, because rams tend to roam, can carry the disease back to the rest of the herd, where the crisis is known, rather bluntly, as a die-off

I pace the decks of sandstone along the canyon rim. I change from a mild-mannered voyeur to Bo Peep going berserk with worry. However, after that one day, I do not see the domestic sheep again.

Back with the Blue Door Band, I watch the conception of next year's crop of lambs. So far so good. There are no signs that the rut will be anything but successful—cyclical and certain, as rooted in deep time as the land that shaped them.

Horn clashes, lip curls, chases and courtship, the shiver of at-tentiveness, the silken grace of flight—the bighorn sheep can do all of this by themselves. I pray there will be no catastrophe, no interference. I watch the sheep for hours, for days. On their tenuous island, their survival means more than a wild animal among us. Their survival, I am convinced, guarantees the tangible truth of our imaginations.

The sheep are bedded down, exhausted from orgies. Their ears twitch and a few let their chins rest on the ground. Others chew and stare at the canyon walls, blinking their pale lashes. I pull from my pack the Book of Common Prayer, a new tack in the strategy to chill the fevers of an aging brain. First prayer, then acupuncture, I think, picturing a forest of tiny needles in my forehead.

The thick book, bound in dark navy cloth with gold letters on its spine, is small enough to fit across the palm of the hand when it is open. Its pages are as thin as tissue. The one I held was a 1945 edition of the 1789 version, an American adaptation of the origi-
nal text by the sixteenth-century British scholar Thomas Cran-mer. In 1979, Cranmer's lineage was replaced by a “simpler” text.

The 1945 edition of the Book of Common Prayer was the prayer book of my childhood, of Sundays in a pew, sitting in my stiff cotton dress and straw hat, reading this small tome not as a canon but as a storybook, a piece of literature, all the while ignoring the minister, a gray-haired Irishman whose name was, confusingly Lord—“The Reverend LORD,” one of my brothers boomed in a baritone-in-a-culvert God voice.

The Irish minister's name had a remarkable effect each time a prayer began with “O Lord.” “O Lord, we beseech thee, mercifully hear our prayers,” we implored over and over, as if he were deaf.

The men in the congregation seemed to need a great deal of help. O Lord was forever beseeching “brethren,” and since I wasn't one of them, I took this as a sign for me to tune out and read this exquisite little book, to wander over scourges and plagues, epistles and epiphanies, idols and bleating, bleeding goats.

Something called “alms,” a bill from my mother's wallet, went into a collection plate. Over time and remodeling, the church's windows went from clear glass and views of leaves and birds to stained-glass portraits of Saint Francis with pigeons. “The days of man are but as grass,” I read.

Today, under a boundless desert sky, I encounter in the prayer book a homeland not of faith but of images. I find movable feasts, holy days gauged by full moons, psalms grounded in an arcane physicality Pelicans and owls, lions and sheep. The “great and wild sea also; wherein are things creeping innumerable …” Rivers swollen with flow, valleys soft with rain, rain greening the hills. “Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy clouds drop fatness.”

Nothing fat drops here; no innumerables creep. The lean,
parched desert withers under ten years of drought. The ewes are off their beds, bunched up in a flock, eating sticks and brittle blond grasses. It is a miracle that they are fed.

A ram lifts his head from a bush, then charges the herd, scattering it across the talus. He isolates a ewe and approaches her in a low stretch. Three younger rams form a huddle, heads inside the circle, white rumps facing out. The huddle reminds them of rank without the risk of fights. They are figuring things out with their heads. Theirs is a world beyond me as I sit on my rock with a book of moons and liturgy resting on my palm.

With desert bighorns, as with any other life-form, there is faith in time. From time emerges a more certain yet always elastic portrait of the hooved herbivore that, born in thin glacial air and ice caves, eventually took hold in vertical desert rock.

This is not an animal that eats you. It travels through but won't live in forests or on the flats. It binds its group by matrilineal threads and passes knowledge about home ground from generation to generation. Move a group of bighorns to a place from which their predecessors have been extirpated, and the new ones must draw a map, find the water.

Desert bighorns are gregarious herbivores with clear, predictable, edgy social rituals. Their loyalty to the group into which they were born, and to their natal home range, is extreme. There is even a word for this: philopatry.

They are followers. Hours after birth, lambs are followers. Because they are not usually alone or in dense cover, they need not deter predators by hiding or tiptoeing away or looking like a rock or the vegetation. Open terrain lets them see and flee.

By bunching up, herd animals exercise what is called “the selfish effect,” using one another as shields and diluting an individual's chances of being eaten. They flee together, as if of one mind.

Wild sheep are superb escape artists. Escape, in fact, can be more important than diet. Insecurity over a predator or other disagreeable surprises, for instance, can induce them to trade good forage for safety. The flight reaction might keep them on the less nutritious range for several seasons. They are habitat specialists. They are particular. This is their salvation and their doom.

While their relatives on flatter lands are lithe and speedy and have powerful lungs, mountain sheep are rock jumpers, muscular, and built to negotiate steep, rugged terrain. Falls, fights, parasites, and avalanches kill them. They can go blind. In homelands of precipices and broken cliffs, of minuscule footholds above hundred-foot drops, a blind sheep faces a serious challenge.

In Darwinian terms, the evolution of wild sheep has been shaped by the selection pressures of food and fear. They must eat. They must escape predators. In order to replicate themselves, they impress or challenge one another with how they look and what they do with their heads. To a mountain lion, they are meat. In a sheepcentric view, they are well designed for something: other sheep. And survival means doing their very best to starve a mountain lion.

Out in the far canyon, the air is dry and still. The bighorn rut winds down, an interlude, perhaps, before the mating season's final weeks. Most often, I see maternal bands feeding and resting in an atmosphere devoid of four-legged cantaloupes.

In groups with rams, the rams are frayed and haggard. After copulating, some are listless and vague. All of the rams are thinner, their body weight reduced from its robust prerut condition.

The sheep expend a great deal of energy in chase, courtship, and guarding, while not much time on eating or resting. The rams will enter deep winter with fewer fat reserves and the season's scant vegetation. In some cases, a drastic loss of vigor will
compromise survival. A few may return to their home grounds after the rut and die.

Still, there are ewes yet to come into heat. I spend another day at the post with the full view of the boulder cave, where the ewe hid from her five suitors. No sheep in sight. Did I expect to see them in the same place? Taking up where they left off? After so much sheep lust, I expect nothing less.

The boulder reveals nothing but the memory of the chase. I search for sheep upriver and downriver. I walk to other posts, take in broader views. It's sheep nap time, I tell myself. They look like rocks. They look like loaves of bread. I won't be able to spot them until they move or turn a white rump toward me.

A rock falls off the canyon wall with a hollow ka-chink, possibly dislodged by a hoof. I scan a broad swathe at the sound's source but see no sheep.

When the bighorns are not here, the canyon feels empty. The emptiness slips down the canyon wall and passes over the river. Thick and heavy, it rises out of the chasm. It spreads across the open desert, combing brittle twigs of saltbush, seeping into cracks in rocks, flowing through ragged arroyos. Emptiness drifts toward a horizon that stretches forever in air so clear, I can see the eroded fissures and ravines in the flanks of a mountain range fifty miles away.

I stay until the sky turns rose under bands of amethyst and Prussian blue. Their faces toward the sunset, the distant mesas flare to the color of embers.

The desert is a place of glimpses, of peripheral movement and not being quite sure whose brushy tail or russet wing you have seen. During the rut, the Blue Door Band has given me so much more than glimpses, and now I wonder if I have suddenly become blind to their world.

A hard wind picks up and sandblasts me from head to toe. I walk and walk and I never see a sheep. Everything looks like rocks.

A day like today would be like the day the wild sheep vanish from the Earth.