Free Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy

sleek, smooth head. She is “bald.”
    For two long years, SAE 067 was alone on over 57,000 acres of wild New Mexico, the only survivor of a herd that died off, one by one, in a tragic crash. She is surrounded by more than two million acres of high-security military bombing range. Below her mountain sprawls one of the largest towns in southern New Mexico.
    In the photo, next to SAE 067 is half of a three-month-old lamb. The ewe is in full portrait. The lamb has partly disappeared from the frame, bounding into the photo's blank border. If you look again at the picture—one ewe, solo in a remote mountain range for two years, beside the lamb she gave birth to—you would think that this is the bighorn sheep–equivalent of immaculate conception.
    That wild animals have largely moved out of our view is of small note to many of us. We think, abstractly, that they live out there somewhere, browsing or flying or killing or doing whatever it is they do, and we think that we are keeping them among us bythe sheer force of our desire, even as we consume, insatiably, the places where they live.
    The most adaptable fauna use Homo sapiens to full advantage. Canada geese eating entire municipal golf courses, the ravens in the Dumpster, a bison-burger farm outside the van window during a South Dakota vacation—these images may ping a faint nerve somewhere within the daily terrors induced by talk radio or dental work or the imperialistic aggressions of one's government. But the static of artifice soon floods over us again, and any world beyond the human world seems as out of reach as the moon.
    The wildest, least tolerant animals edge ever farther away, running desperately out of “farther” itself. The locals, the most rigidly specialized and place-bound, head toward cracks where they will vanish like the Blue Door Band. Occasionally, they are caught in the half-light of glimpses, revealing another visible order, one no longer coexistent, but distant, and we are surprised to see that the abstract wild actually has flesh.
    One consequence of distance is acute separation anxiety. I refuse to succumb. Since the Blue Door Band disappeared, I have been desperate for heartbeats other than my own—big mammalian heartbeats. One journey can rescue me from this dire loneliness, from the silence of an empty room in the ark. I am off to visit a bald bighorn in New Mexico.
    I leave home after Venus rises above the river bluffs, so big and bright, it casts faint shadows, planet shadows, like a chip of unfinished moon. Thin layers of ice cover scattered pools of standing water left after a snow squall. Dawn washes away Venus, and the crisp winter air washes through my sore brain and cools the static. I feel like my normally abnormal self as I shift into a fifth-gear cruise through Navajo land.
    It takes the entire morning to cross the enormous reservation. On the road, pickup trucks and canary yellow school buses sport bright red plastic bows on their front grilles as Christmas approaches. Késhmish, the older Navajos call it. At the junction of highway and red-sand feeder roads that disappear into the empty horizon, handmade signs announce shoe game tonite.
    Navajo shoe games, played only in winter, originated as a contest for day and night, with all living creatures participating. Owl never wanted the night to end. Hawk needed the daylight. Gopher chewed a hole in the shoe—back then, a moccasin—so he could see where the stone was hidden and then guess correctly and win. The infamous gambler, Bear, played all day and night, then ran off in haste with his moccasins reversed. The sunlight turned his fur red, and Big Snake, Bear's helper, was given a piece of red stone to wear on his head.
    Each creature that crawled, walked, and flew had its own distinct shoe-game song, thus giving the rite its many songs. No one remembers them all, a friend told me. The contest has tipped in favor of night beings, he joked, because, after a marathon shoe game,