Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy

Author:Ellen Meloy [Meloy, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48414-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2005-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

BROOM RIDING

In the painting on the wall, the mountain sheep peered down from an alpine slope flooded in a golden syrup of Bierstadt light. Contemporary western wildlife art seems to require this luridly primeval pigment—arcadian, radiant, as if Eden were not in the Holy Lands but in the Brooks Range.

The animals in the painting were not bighorns. They were Dall's sheep, a thinhorn subspecies found in Alaska and northwestern Canada. Cold sheep. Farthest north sheep. Altitudes of heaven sheep. Ice sheep.

Dall's sheep like wind because it blows the snow off their forage so they can eat without pawing and wasting calories. Avalanches kill them. Wolves eat the weaker among them. A few sheep lose their footing on icy chutes and cliffs. In one account, a wolf chased a thinhorn into precipitous terrain, where they both fell off a cliff to their deaths.

The painting froze a moment into bovid nirvana: alpine summer, no snow, no lurking wolves, just a fraternal pod of sunlit rams. Wildlife artists seldom waste a gilt frame on anything without testicles and Boone and Crockett curls. Yet the animals appeared petit, more like divine subpolar meat than trophies. One ram lay on a day bed of tawny grass. The others gazed out of the canvas as if they had just caught glimpses of themselves in a mirror.

The painting hung in an art gallery in a sprawling town in Southern California's Coachella Valley, just a ripple of mountains away from Los Angeles. I was far from the red canyons of home. The Dall's sheep were nowhere near Alaska.

Dall's sheep are white and have gold-brown horns. If you stood one next to a dusty gray-brown desert bighorn, the Dall's would look like the desert animal's ghost. In the painting, the Dall's sheep bodies were lunar white, the horns as burnished as a gold-leaf halo on a Byzantine saint. On canvas, wild western ungulates live in perpetual alpenglow, and this artist remained true to style, bathing his slopes in acrylic radiance.

In the art gallery, my friend Nike and I stared at the snow-white creatures with the golden horns. I felt like a Bedouin who had emerged from a remote wadi of squabbling tribes and shabby camels to behold something improbable but familiar.

We studied the painting. “Sheep angels” Nike said. “These must be sheep angels.”

The year I went to an annual meeting of the Southwest's desert bighorn managers and advocates, it was held in Palm Springs, California. I left the redrock deserts of home as the river cotton-woods sprouted a green haze of spring leaves. The road slid me off the Colorado Plateau and into the Mojave and Colorado deserts, into warmer air and basins of creosote and sand.

I carved my road trip into what I called a Chemehuevi map.

In historic times, the Chemehuevi Indians lived in the deserts of the lower Colorado River, land that falls on both sides of the California-Arizona border. They were seminomadic people, known to be fast runners and ardent storytellers and singers. One of the best places to sing, they believed, was among the melons in their gardens.

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