Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy

everyone.
    I manage to drive through without a lockdown, a roadblock, or screeching overhead rockets. Before I head into Las Cruces, I pull over on a side road to walk and stretch. The road deadends at a grim steel gate marked restricted area—do not enter . I wonder if the soap-tree yuccas hold surveillance cameras. I face one of the yuccas—green spikes atop a pedestal of brown spikes, a sort of electrocuted palmetto—and I wave, assuring the generals that I am just another harmless patriotic dissident. I take a look at the mountains.
    The San Andres fault block rises even as it wears down, filling the surrounding basins with the debris of its past, in alkali flats, malpais, beds of quartz sand, and playas of snow-white gypsum. Every mountain range has its own personality. It tells you aboutitself when you feel its firm terrain under your feet and ask a thousand questions. This one, I must explore largely with my own imagination. I see it as a sky-raking sierra with one of the world's most social creatures, all by herself. I am not yet sure what matters here.
    Spokes of sunlight stream down from holes in the heavens, illuminating bands of malachite on flanks of Prussian blue. The green drifts across the shadowed blue in a net of light, marine in its motion, as if the mountains were not under a storm, but under the sea.
    A stratum of cloud rings the shoulders of the highest peaks. Above it, the crests float clear. The escarpment draws rain and starves the valleys. It rises abruptly from pale green bajadas to ragged precipices, from creosote to bare rock and a bald ewe, all in a single breath.
    She is not a Nelson's bighorn like the sheep in the Blue Door Band. Her race, Ovis canadensis mexicana, is deeply southern, found in the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts of the Mexico-Arizona–New Mexico borderlands. It is believed that New Mexico, western Texas, and Coahuila may have once marked the eastern limits of its range. In southern New Mexico, sheep habitat, even without human influences, may have always been sparse, scattered, marginal. Historically, some of the best of this habitat lay in the San Andres Mountains.
    She is not the only desert bighorn in New Mexico. Small populations of “questionable viability” hang on by a hoof in other mountain ranges. Some of those herds include stock that was transplanted from other places in efforts to keep the species in its historic range.
    Ewe 067 lives on the San Andres's southern end in a federal wildlife refuge that predates the military reserve. The bears and wolves are long gone. The top predator, not counting the B-52s, is the mountain lion. When the refuge was established in 1941, itheld thirty-three bighorns. Protection favored recovery, and the herd began to grow.
    In the 1960s a San Andres National Wildlife Refuge publication noted, “These shy and majestic mountain bounders are well adapted to their rough mountain habitat. Continued studies are being conducted to better insure that this rare species may never cease to be a part of our North American fauna.”
    In gross understatement, it has not been easy.
    The desert bighorns of New Mexico are cat food. Several hundred pounds of them have passed through the digestive tracts of opportunistic Puma concolor. Such a relationship may sound as obvious as roadkills on a Nevada highway.
    Mountain lions are exquisitely designed to kill ungulate prey. If lucky in the hunt, they can eat ten pounds of meat at a sitting. Cryptic stalkers, they shape-shift the colors of desert rock and shrub. They travel widely and show up in places where they weren't.
    Mountain lions favor mule deer but will take a bighorn incidentally if they encounter sheep while hunting their preferred prey. Mountain lions may run low on deer and hunt more intensively, moving through a broad territory in search of food.
    If the bighorns are weakened by disease and drought, if they are isolated remnants with low numbers, or if they are transplants from elsewhere