Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy Page A

that have yet to map their escape terrain, the big cats may have a profound effect on them. Mountain lions that become frequent killers of endangered bands of bighorn sheep may earn a tracking collar, the tag “habitual offender,” relocation to elsewhere, or, in some cases, a death sentence.
    Quite successfully, bighorn sheep elude mountain lions due to their acute vision and the pooled vigilance of a large herd. They flee to safe ground on pinnacles, ledges, and fissured cliffs, placesthat hide them or throw verticality into the path of their pursuer. More commonly, bighorns avoid mountain lion country, a sort of “Let them eat venison” tactic.
    In the mountains of southern New Mexico, none of this appears to be working very well. If the design of bighorn sheep aspires to starve mountain lions, here the sheep lost the odds.
    More clouds engulf the mountains, draping thin silver veils into the bajadas that skirt them. A squall approaches, christening me with wind gusts and the aroma of damp creosote. Using the truck tire as a wind shelter and backrest, I sit on the rough ground and await the rain.
    In the morning, I will visit the world of SAE 067 with the refuge manager and hear her radio signal as it blips from the heights. I understand that I may not be able to see her, but I feel sharp pierces of longing to do so. The desire is mine, wholly selfish. In the photograph, she has a helicopter in her face. Is that not enough disturbance?
    The camera freeze-frames a hornless gray-colored bighorn sheep against blue-black rock, a red dot of an ear tag, a radio collar around her neck. The lamb leaps beyond the frame, a coil of springing muscles. Considering the noisy steel locust that hovers above her, the ewe looks remarkably still and stoic. Yes, I had this lamb by immaculate sheep conception, she seems to say. The die-off of her herd mates, the aloneness. A broken leg, both horns knocked off. The chopper. And I haven't even begun to tell you about the mountain lions.
    The squall delivers weather with muscle, sending me inside the truck for cover. Behind sheets of sleet, the mountains dissolve. The pelting is furious for a while; then I slip over a pass between the San Andres and Organ mountains, underneath the sunlight that reveals itself behind the ice storm.
    Only sheep and lions fully understand sheep-lion dynamics. In the past decades, however, the stewards of the San Andres National Wildlife Refuge have had little choice but to try. The lions are intensely studied, as are the bighorns. The efforts to preserve the San Andres herd fall into the category of herculean tasks.
    This is how the indigenous Chihuahuan Desert bighorns came down to one ewe.
    From the thirty-three animals in residence at the refuge's creation in 1941, the San Andres population began a healthy trend of increase. With this chunk of New Mexican outback closed by the military, mining and grazing ceased, and range for wild sheep improved.
    The sheep survived the world's first atomic-bomb blast, less than a hundred miles beyond their mountaintop. They fed and bred beneath rocket tests, sonic booms, screaming jets, and missiles called Patriot and HAWK (Homing All the Way Killer). Their neighbors were a gaggle of accelerators, a fast burst reactor, something freaky called BAT (Brilliant Anti-armor Submunition), and who knows what else that has never emerged from the vaults of military secrecy. What the sheep could not cope with, thrown at them in the years to come, would be bug damage in their ears.
    After a setback in the fifties, largely due to drought, the population rose again. From 70 sheep in 1955, it grew in twelve years to 270 sheep. That fat herd of 1967 stands at a high in reliable records. (Some biologists set the number at a more conservative 200. There is speculation that, even in “pristine” times, 150 to 200 animals may be the San Andres's carrying capacity for the species.) On this mountain, the bighorn sheep show patterns of low