Description
Product Description
Long believed to be disappearing and possibly even extinct, the Southwestern bighorn sheep of Utah’s canyonlands have made a surprising comeback. Naturalist Ellen Meloy tracks a band of these majestic creatures through backcountry hikes, downriver floats, and travels across the Southwest. Alone in the wilderness, Meloy chronicles her communion with the bighorns and laments the growing severance of man from nature, a severance that she feels has left us spiritually hungry. Wry, quirky and perceptive, Eating Stone is a brillant and wholly original tribute to the natural world.
Review
“Piercingly beautiful. . . . Its chapters map a vibrant, curious mind in love with the particulars of the Southwest landscape.” –
The New York Times Book Review“One of our finest natural-history writers. . . . Her own knowledge of the natural world is deep, her prose breathtakingly beautiful and often startling.” –Annie Proulx,
Globe & Mail“A major contribution to an understanding of the land. . . . Meloy’s genius seems evident on every page of this thoughtful, impressionistic book.”–
Deseret News “One of the American West's greatest contemporary naturalists. . . . More than a mere adventure,
Eating Stone concludes Meloy's love affair with the western desert and the wildlife it nourishes.”–
Outside MagazineBeautiful. . . . Not since Peter Matthiessen’s
The Snow Leopard has an author transported us so completely into the wilderness.”–
The Plain Dealer
About the Author
ELLEN MELOY, a recipient of a Whit-ing Foundation Award in 1997, was a native of the West and lived in California, Montana, and Utah. Her previous book, The Anthropology of Turquoise, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Utah Book Award and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Award in the adventure and travel category. She is also the author of Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River and The Last Cheater’s Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest. Meloy spent most of her life in wild, remote places; at the time of her sudden death in November 2004 (three months after completing Eating Stone), she and her husband were living in southern Utah.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
THE BLUE DOOR BAND
Homo sapiens have left themselves few places and scant ways to witness other species in their own world, an estrangement that leaves us hungry and lonely. In this famished state, it is no wonder that when we do finally encounter wild animals, we are quite surprised by the sheer truth of them.
Nothing speaks the truth quite like a 220-pound desert bighorn ram mounted atop a standing female, thrusting his heavy pelvis back and forth like there was no tomorrow.
It was the rut. Males, usually solo or in bachelor bands, had joined the females, which for the rest of the year lived separately with random groups of juveniles. The rams were glossy, fat, spirited. Their thick, curled horns and heavy testicles carried a few million years of evolutionary momentum. Here in the canyon, not much else mattered but the bone and muscle needed to transport these body parts. On four hooves rode massive sperm factories.
I had put the river between myself and the rutting grounds, not that I was much more than wallpaper as the sheep copulated. I shared guilt over trespass with other voyeurs: the few subdominant rams, unlucky in love; six nearby ewes; a pair of lecherous ravens perched on a boulder.
The mating unfolded quickly but with a ritualized certainty. Among a species with a complex repertoire of social behaviors, the penalty of ambiguity is reproductive failure.
As the ram dropped off the mount, the other males brawled in rushes, kicks, and threat displays. One lunged toward the ewe, only to have his butt smashed by her guardian, a ram of spent force but fixed vigilance. The ewe ran off and disappeared from view, pursued by the younger suitors. The snoopy ravens left their perch and followed. The remaining ewes, a