Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy Read Free Book Online

shadow—thin, reedy, fourteen feet long— across dirt the color of sandblasted bricks. Around me, the sheepare hairing up as they rut, and the ravens take perches on sandstone, warming their skinny toes.
    This is not cold, I remind myself. Once, near Montana's Glacier National Park, a snowstorm moved out of the night mountains. Beneath the cloud cover, the temperature had hovered in the low twenties. Mark and I put on our skis and slid cross-country under a clearing sky and a full polar moon. Behind the storm, the air suddenly dropped to fifteen degrees below zero. All moisture converted to ice crystals. The cryogenic plunge was tangible, a sharp sucking of air from the lungs. My hand and foot bones felt like X rays look.
    “That cold was an ice age,” I declare perhaps a bit defensively to the ravens, who know a doormat when they see one. This winter desert is an interglacial banana belt, made obvious by the fact that I am hatless and wearing gloves with fingerless tips. I put my notebook away and call it a day.
    I stop for lunch at a small café by the river. The place is nearly empty, the television tuned to the Weather Channel, which no one is watching, perhaps because the meteorologist is obsessively describing Chicago. The cook brings me a bowl of mutton stew and a piece of fry bread the size of an inflated sombrero. Powwow music plays in the kitchen. The stew is blow-on-the-spoon hot. Finally, I warm up.
    The next time you buff up the Hummer with an auto-detailing cloth that came from the skin of a petite rupicaprid, bond with the ungulates that share with us a molecular past.
    The ice millennia gave the world hooved animals that range in size from the thirty-one-pound female chamois, donor of the car polisher, to the burly 660-pound male musk ox. They come in brown, copper, black, gray, buff, and blond, sometimes two- or three-toned.
    The Himalayan blue sheep, or bharal, is neither blue nor a sheep, but slate gray and a perplexing combination of sheep and goat, at best an aberrant goat with sheeplike traits. The bharal is the favored prey of the snow leopard, a predator designed precisely to kill it.
    Horns of Caprinae are short, long, very long, very short; smooth, bumpy, corrugated; spiraled, curved, curled, corkscrewed. The horns on the now-rare Marco Polo sheep curl, flip, then zap outward toward the horizon in a sort of soft slash, Zorro's Z. Horns on the giants of the group tend to look like melting Viking helmets. The smallest species favor straight-out-of-the-skull sabers that stab wild dogs. Some sheep are experts at an operatic flare and curl.
    Bibs, beards, dorsal stripes, ruffs, manes; mantles of hair that drape over rumps and flanks; flicking tongues, stretched necks, and tense, stocky bodies that look like sneaky hay bales—such features convey rank and aggression in a realm where status gives access to mates. Appearance is language.
    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 endof 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