Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy Read Free Book Online Page A

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