{"product_id":"eating-stone-isbn-9781400031771","title":"Eating Stone","description":"\u003cp\u003eLong believed to be disappearing and possibly even extinct, the Southwestern bighorn  sheep of Utah’s canyonlands have made a surprising comeback. Naturalist Ellen Meloy  tracks a band of these majestic creatures through backcountry hikes, downriver floats,  and travels across the Southwest. Alone in the wilderness, Meloy chronicles her communion  with the bighorns and laments the growing severance of man from nature, a severance  that she feels has left us spiritually hungry. Wry, quirky and perceptive, \u003ci\u003eEating  Stone\u003c\/i\u003e is a brillant and wholly original tribute to the natural world.\u003c\/p\u003e“Piercingly beautiful. . . . Its chapters map a vibrant, curious mind in love with the particulars of the Southwest landscape.” –\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e“One of our finest natural-history writers. . . . Her own knowledge of the natural world is deep, her prose breathtakingly beautiful and often startling.” –Annie Proulx, \u003ci\u003eGlobe \u0026amp; Mail\u003c\/i\u003e“A major contribution to an understanding of the land. . . . Meloy’s genius seems evident on every page of this thoughtful, impressionistic book.”–\u003ci\u003eDeseret News \u003c\/i\u003e “One of the American West's greatest contemporary naturalists. . . . More than a mere adventure, \u003ci\u003eEating Stone\u003c\/i\u003e concludes Meloy's love affair with the western desert and the wildlife it nourishes.”–\u003ci\u003eOutside Magazine\u003c\/i\u003eBeautiful. . . . Not since Peter Matthiessen’s \u003ci\u003eThe Snow Leopard\u003c\/i\u003e has an author transported us so completely into the wilderness.”–\u003ci\u003eThe Plain Dealer\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eELLEN MELOY,\u003c\/b\u003e a recipient of a Whit-ing Foundation Award in 1997, was a native of the West and lived in California, Montana, and Utah. Her previous book, The Anthropology of Turquoise, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Utah Book Award and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Award in the adventure and travel category. She is also the author of Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River and The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest. Meloy spent most of her life in wild, remote places; at the time of her sudden death in November 2004 (three months after completing Eating Stone), she and her husband were living in southern Utah.\u003c\/p\u003eChapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e THE BLUE DOOR BAND\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHomo sapiens have left themselves few places and scant ways to witness  other species in their own world, an estrangement that leaves us hungry  and lonely. In this famished state, it is no wonder that when we do  finally encounter wild animals, we are quite surprised by the sheer  truth of them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNothing speaks the truth quite like a 220-pound desert bighorn ram  mounted atop a standing female, thrusting his heavy pelvis back and  forth like there was no tomorrow.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was the rut. Males, usually solo or in bachelor bands, had joined  the females, which for the rest of the year lived separately with  random groups of juveniles. The rams were glossy, fat, spirited. Their  thick, curled horns and heavy testicles carried a few million years of  evolutionary momentum. Here in the canyon, not much else mattered but  the bone and muscle needed to transport these body parts. On four  hooves rode massive sperm factories.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI had put the river between myself and the rutting grounds, not that I  was much more than wallpaper as the sheep copulated. I shared guilt  over trespass with other voyeurs: the few subdominant rams, unlucky in  love; six nearby ewes; a pair of lecherous ravens perched on a boulder.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe mating unfolded quickly but with a ritualized certainty. Among a  species with a complex repertoire of social behaviors, the penalty of  ambiguity is reproductive failure.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs the ram dropped off the mount, the other males brawled in rushes,  kicks, and threat displays. One lunged toward the ewe, only to have his  butt smashed by her guardian, a ram of spent force but fixed vigilance.  The ewe ran off and disappeared from view, pursued by the younger  suitors. The snoopy ravens left their perch and followed. The remaining  ewes, already inseminated or not yet in estrus and therefore not ready  to breed, moved about restlessly, then settled down to feed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Colorado Plateau canyon country is one of several “wilderness”  holdouts of this subspecies of a North American bovid family, genus  Ovis, commonly known as mountain sheep. Strict regulations prohibit the  hunting of desert bighorns except by special permit. Compared to their  sport-celebrity hulky northern cousin, the Rocky Mountain bighorn (Ovis  canadensis canadensis) of the intermountain West and Canadian Rockies,  desert bighorns are smaller, paler, and longer in ear. They are more  isolated and fewer in number. In some places, they face extinction on  their native range.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFour races of desert bighorn sheep live in the arid wilds of the  American Southwest and Mexico. Of these races, my momentarily  sex-crazed sheep are Nelson’s bighorns (Ovis canadensis nelsoni),  occupants of the Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, and Mojave Desert.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe ewes that fed quietly on the talus of a river canyon had slender,  upright horns that escaped notice, while the horns of males dominated  one’s gaze. Ram horns flare and curl. Aboriginal southwesterners took  their form and gave them to their gods. For modern humans, this  headgear is an icon of blood sport. To other sheep, ram horns are  social organs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDesert bighorns are blocky, long-necked ungulates, grayish brown in  color, sometimes more gray than brown, or pale beige, or with a russet  cast. Their noses are moist and their rumps are white. They eat dry,  abrasive plants, digesting them with four-chambered stomachs and the  help of protozoa and bacteria.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe five gaits of bighorn sheep reflect their mental state, from a  pompous, show-offy walk to an exuberant trot down a near-vertical rock  face or a twenty-five-mile-per-hour escape run. Their hearts pump at a  rate of eighty beats per minute. The life of a bighorn sheep is a life  spent on cliffs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe rut marked the beginning of my year among desert bighorns, a  calendar in which I matched my seasonal geography to theirs.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI made up a name of my own and gave it to the herd that lived in the  river canyon: the Blue Door Band. Over the four seasons that I would  spend with them, I would be their amiable, nosy neighbor. I peered at  them through binoculars, spotting scope, and with naked eye. I watched  them stare into space, fall asleep on their own feet, curl up in a  tight sheep ball and nap with their chins on the ground. I watched them  yawn, chew, stretch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey scratched their backs on rocks. They hated brushy densities of  trees. Their tongues hung out when they were thirsty. A few dropped  dead. A few went swimming. The ewes raised a new generation. The rams  roamed about alone or in ram bands, then came together and bashed  heads, curled lips, and engaged in wildly testicular behavior.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTrue to their species, these animals loved bleak, hair-ball country.  They were nervous, gregarious, hilarious. Agile, gorgeous, faithful to  place to the point of disaster. They came with personalities: the  bullies, the head bangers, the celibate pacifist ram, the barren ewes,  the lambs perched atop sheer pinnacles of rock, leaping straight up in  the air like toast popping out of a toaster. They were often elusive  and spectral. To see them was a blessing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs they entered the rut, the Blue Door Band numbered about eighty  sheep. Out of this population, and depending on the season, I would  sometimes see loners, trios, or groups that ranged from five to twenty  individuals. I gave the sheep full, held-breath attention, sometimes  lifting my binoculars to my eyes at midday, unaware of the passing  hours until I dropped them, only then noticing that the sun had nearly  set.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr I would ignore the group completely and stick my head in a book, T. H. White’s \u003ci\u003eThe Goshawk\u003c\/i\u003e, trading ungulates for\u003cbr\u003ethe arts of falconry. The wind whipped the pages. The sheep  bleat-growled at my betrayal.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI gazed at distant mesas. Took naps. One minute, I swore eternal  devotion to my little bovid band; the next minute, I entertained a  feckless urge to hop in a boat and float down the river and disappear  around the bend, ditching the sheep.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSometimes I ditched the sheep. I left them for the seductive river or  for other bighorns scattered in the far-flung deserts. I sent them  postcards from New Mexico, California, Mexico.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor most of the year, though, I was loyal to the Blue Door Band,  preternaturally attentive—how could anyone not be?—and shamelessly  anthropomorphic. I wanted the bighorns to adopt me, a kind of reverse  Bo Peep arrangement. Me, their lost human. Their pet. The primate among  herbivores. The bovids’ equivalent of a wolf boy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBeing with these wild animals was like prayer, a meditation that ranged  from dopey to dreamy to absorption so profound, it stopped my blood.  Their habits and motions formed a liturgy that mapped the prayer,  liturgy as “the sanctification of time,” a place where I was willing to  wait in stillness, to count on nature’s rhythms to calm my messy ones.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMore often, it was the singular company of mammals I delighted in, just  the sheep being sheep while I perched on a boulder or rock ledge, my  feet falling asleep from sitting too long.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the warm seasons, I could enter sheep company along the river.  Winter conditions often kept me at a greater distance. I had to make  long overland treks on foot to watching posts above a deep redrock  canyon. The posts gave an unobstructed view of the Blue Door Band’s  range.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA remote fold of their canyon held a pile of stones that marked the  remains of a hand-built shelter. Twenty years earlier, I had studied  the shelter before it collapsed into an indeterminate pile of rubble.  Then the shelter had a domed roof, a flat stone hearth, and a door  frame that faced the sunrise. The door’s milled boards were painted  blue, the deep blue of the sky where it meets the canyon’s redrock  rims. This place gave me the idea for the sheep band’s name.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn my watching days, I often found sheep all over the place, Velcro’d  to the steep, rocky cliffs. Other times, I saw no sheep at all. I  glassed the walls for hours. Both the day and the canyon felt empty.  This was when sloppy meditation moved to true prayer, to words said  against fear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhile you are among wild sheep, they can move out of sight the moment  you bow your head to notice that the zipper on your jeans is open. Then  you look up, look where they were or might be, and behold only rock and  sky. When they disappeared for an entire day, or if I was at a post for  several days and could not find them, I was alarmed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCertain days, with sheep flesh present, were gifts set against a worrisome history, a past that might too easily repeat itself. Smack  in the middle of the red-boned desert, these creatures lived an island  life. They occupied a small enclave of wild country, surrounded by  perils that could (and not for the first time) nearly decimate them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe story of their precarious, marginal existence—the story of the  continent’s native fauna on their unstoppable trajectory from bounty to  scarcity and even demise—was a familiar one, repeated over and over  like a six-hundred-pound mantra lodged between the ears. How had this  tribe of bighorns escaped the slide toward oblivion? No one could  promise me that they would continue to survive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs I sat contemplating this, the air had an edge of glass to it, the  trees no burden of leaves. The light was thin and brittle. Scattered  brush dressed the rust-colored canyon in brown, silver, and pale olive.  For now, on this bright winter day on the Colorado Plateau, the river  glistened in the sun and the sheep browsed nearby without fear. Several  ewes interrupted their feeding and stared across the gorge. Their gaze  gave notice of the direction they would soon take.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen a pale turn of light, a shift of tectonic plate, some glimmer of a  sheep idea, set them in motion. The animals glided down a precipice of  jumbled boulders as if it were a wave of silk. I was not invited to go  along. When the sheep disappeared from sight up a rocky arroyo, faith,  more than sanctuary, affixed them to the canyon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the tensely vertical terrain of Utah’s canyonlands, this band of  desert bighorn sheep, creatures of considerable weight and evolutionary  investment, had once vanished into thin air.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTheir 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBarely 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen the Blue Door Band declined in the early 1960s—too few 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eElsewhere 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen they came back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTRIBE CAPRINI\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese 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 cottonwoods 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMigrating 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI spend an entire afternoon listening to horns clash, but I see no  rams. The folds of the canyon hide them. I am so far from roads and  humans, the only sounds are the river and the echoing impact of sheep  skulls.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnother time, a thousand acres yields one bighorn. He is “skylining,”  standing atop an outcrop in ram supermodel profile. Head slightly  raised, muscles tense, he does not move. Ten minutes pass without a  twitch. The ram is frozen in place. I follow the direction of his  stare. A half mile away, high above him on the canyon wall, one ewe  feeds. He knows she is there.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304201081061,"sku":"NP9781400031771","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400031771.jpg?v=1767725841","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/eating-stone-isbn-9781400031771","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}