GlobeandMail.com / Saturday, September 17, 2005

Elegy for a vanishing world

By ANNIE PROULX

When I finished reading Ellen Meloy's Eating Stone, I hurriedly bought every other book she had written before her sudden and unexpected death in November, 2004. An artist and writer, her books had won several literary awards (The Anthropology of Turquoise was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) and I think time will show her to have been one of our finest natural-history writers.

Her style indicates an irreverent, sensitive, cheerful, witty person, able to love the animate and inanimate, most deeply her husband Mark (who, as a child, was sent home from Sunday School for colouring Jesus's face purple), but extending her natural affections to kin, friends, researchers, landmarks, rocks, places and all creatures except for an aggressive northern flicker she named "Stalin." She can be as sharp as a whiplash (what she calls her "shrieky sarcasm"), scornfully describing such television nature pundits of yesteryear as David Attenborough "wheezing around some camel-infested wadi looking for pupfish," or Marlin Perkins "on safe ground beside a miserably fetid swamp." She deplores bighorn sheep art, which focuses on movie-star rams and head-crash fighting at the expense of real knowledge of how a social sheep band functions.

Her own knowledge of the natural world is deep, her prose breathtakingly beautiful and often startling, from the memory of algebra problems on the blackboard that "looked like the claw marks of unhappy squirrels," a ram's scrotum "the size of a ripe cantaloupea cantaloupe from Texas," vandals' bullet holes among rock images as "bubba glyphs," a rock formation like "melting red elephants," the territorial maps that bighorn sheep follow as "animal songlines," the colours of sandstone including "a glossy purple-black . . . like the skin of an eggplant," and the trenchant aside that the human brain is about the size of a pot roast.

She sums things up by saying, "Who would not trade their left kidney for time in spectacular country with intriguing animals?" She did spend much of her life in various spectacular landscapes with intriguing animals.

Meloy arranges her material in the shape of a calendar drawn from years of tracking and tracing all manner of sheep through the U.S. Southwest's canyons and plateaus, interspersed with essays on Hopi rituals, painted and engraved rock images, the desert tortoise who lives with her neighbour, her own childhood. Her years of sheep observation coincided with a decade of severe drought. During their annual rut, she introduces us to the Blue Door band, Nelson's bighorns, one of four races of desert bighorns. This band disappeared from their usual haunts on the Colorado Plateau in the 1960s, then suddenly reappeared from nowhere 40 years later.

As she leads us through the history of desert sheep from the Pleistocene onward, their predators, behaviour, the points where their lives intersect with those of humans evidenced in prehistoric petroglyphs and tribal myths, she makes the compelling case that humans define themselves against a reference point of animals, remarking that for "99 per cent 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."

And when all the animals and birds of today are extinct in the not-so-distant future, "Will this leave us brain-damaged?" The dangers the bighorns face include mountain lions, diseases transmitted from domestic sheep invading their range, poachers, shoot-'em-up ranchers possessive of the grass they claim for their stock, highway hits and habitat loss from clueless million-dollar home-owners who complain they are being invaded by sheep. Still, a few small bands of sheep persist in patches of rough country.

People today make much of encouraging children's imaginations, but the most potent source of developing imagination surely lies in our own deep past when humans, whether toddlers creeping up on poised grasshoppers or hunters watching a nervous herd of high-rock sheep, had to imagine what animals in their particular environments would do in the next moment, the next season. "Shall we be honest about this? The mind needs wild animals."

One of the most interesting facets of this book is Meloy's account of her travels with bighorn sheep-management people, what they do, how they do it and why, the looming peril of too much handling that could blunt the animals' wildness. Many places in the desert Southwest where sheep once lived are now empty of these extraordinary animals. In 1990, half of all surviving desert bighorns were living in traditional habitat by virtue of translocation, the process of catching sheep from a healthy wild band and bringing them to emptied country to repopulate a section of ancient range.

In Eating Stone, Nike and Dave Stevens, two biologists who work with the desert bighorns, decide that the Blue Door band is at carrying capacity, large enough and healthy enough to be split. Some of the herd will be transported downriver to historic range long empty of sheep. This arduous job and Meloy's anxiety about the sheep's adaptation to their new surroundings are passages of tension. Later, as Meloy packs up for a day watching the Blue Band, "it struck me that these forays into sheep country were futile and delusional. The end of the wild world, the emptiness, will come -- indeed, has arrived . . . the spellbound threshold between humanity and the rest of nature is very nearly pulled shut to the latching point." And she goes out to watch sheep.

Annie Proulx is the author of The Shipping News and other books. The film version of her short story Brokeback Mountain is about to be released.

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