Because the intense emotional feelings we often experience with one another or while we are immersed in a remarkable landscape—like this high desert—are accompanied by very real chemical changes in our bodies, it is a tricky business to say where the nature of our body ends and the nature outside it begins. Derived from the Greek soma, which means “body,” the somatic in psychosomatic reminds us that even imagined pleasure and pain register in our bodies. The word compassion, after all, means “to suffer together with another,” and sympathy has at its etymological root the experience by which our own state of being mirrors that of another with whom we feel a deep connection. And isn’t this sympathetic mirroring at the heart of our deepest connections to one another and to the natural world? Perhaps I should not have been surprised to discover that, much like my journeys through this wild landscape, the growth of my unborn daughter was altering my body as well as my mind. In the inner and outer landscapes of nature, something invisible is always being born.
We later named our little daughter Hannah Virginia. Hannah, an ancient name meaning “grace,” and a name that makes sense both forward and backward, as she races into the unknown future and then returns in her own growing memories of the past. Virginia, the name of the homeland I carried with me so long ago when I came west, as I hope she too will have a homeland within her always. The body that nurtured and shaped Hannah was Eryn’s, but that home body was embodied within the larger, visceral body of this open desert. Who can know whether some unique quality of Hannah’s body or spirit will be the product of high-elevation sunlight or intense aridity, of this desert that shapes us suddenly, like a flash flood cutting an arroyo, and also incrementally, like wind sculpting sandstone?
Both before and after her birth, Hannah helped connect me to my own body, to Eryn, to this desert place, and to the future. When Hannah hurts, I hurt with her. When she laughs, so do I. When we watch the big moon rise together, we feel something rising within us also, calibrating our small, vulnerable bodies to the body of this vast landscape. For me, couvade was not a disease but rather a cure: a preparation for the remarkable changes that becoming a father would bring. There is no wall but only a permeable membrane between physical and emotional experience—between nature and self, body and mind, ourselves and those we love. The strange mystery of my couvade experience taught me that nature is not only the machine but also its resident ghosts. Look hard at the strange beauty of a child, the lines and curves of her little body repeated in the ridgelines and hilltops of the cold, bright desert that surrounds us. It’s a fool’s game to try to name the place where nature isn’t.
Chapter 3
3. Tracking Stories
Little Hannah Virginia witnessed her first pronghorn antelope the week before her second birthday. It was early April, and the wind swept light snow around the sage and rabbitbrush as I shoved her three-wheeled stroller up a sandy wash a few miles from our house. Although I was going overland through the high desert, I had customized the stroller for off-road travel, complete with knobby tires, slimed to protect against puncture by desert peach thorns. The sky was cloudless, that shimmering azure that distinguishes winter days in the high desert, and we were surrounded by the dry rattling of last season’s balsamroot finning stiffly in the wind. As I dug the toes of my boots into the snow to get traction enough to push Hannah uphill through a thick stand of desert peach, she suddenly took the pacifier out of her mouth with her left hand, pointed to the southern horizon with her right, and said, “Moon.” At that age she loved to find the moon, and she often spotted the thinnest crescent even in the brightest sky.
“Good job, honey,” I said routinely, keeping my eyes on the terrain ahead and pushing hard.
“Daddy, moon!” Her tone was so urgent that I stopped pushing, knelt next to the stroller, and looked with her into the southern sky, where I saw nothing but blue depth and distant snowcapped mountains. Then I noticed that beneath the sky, where no moon hung, two pronghorn does stood on a ridgeline several hundred yards away, staring directly at us. Hannah was not saying “moon” but rather “moo,” a sound whose association with cows had made it her shorthand for “big, nonhuman mammal.”
What happened next was as memorable as an encounter with wildlife could be. Hannah again said, “Moo!” and one of the does responded with a breathy snort, “Cha-oo.” Hannah’s extended arm shot down into her lap, and she whipped her head toward me with eyes as big as a fawn’s. This was the look of alarmed joy that she shot me every time we saw a strange miracle in the desert, which was often. When I smiled, Hannah turned back toward the pronghorn, leaned forward in her stroller, and yelled, “Moo!” again into the wind. The second doe replied: “Cha-oo!” Now Hannah was thrilled, and she began flapping her arms like a magpie, shouting “Moo! Moo! Moo!” at the pronghorn as they stood frozen against the moonless sky. Then she stopped and held absolutely still, listening intently. The sound of the wind seemed more textured than before, surging and lilting like invisible surf. The desiccated balsamroot leaves scraped as if we were hearing them through a stethoscope. Again: “Cha-oo. Cha. Cha-oo.” Hannah grinned, wide-eyed. And then the two does eased a few steps back and were out of sight on the other side of the ridge. In another five weeks they would each give birth to twin fawns, somewhere out there.
We live on a wind-ripped hilltop on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains, in the broken sagebrush steppe hills and high valleys on the northern Nevada-California borderlands. It is a land of lizards and eagles, pack rats and ravens, jackrabbits and mountain bluebirds. Our home mountain, which is three miles to our west and looms 2,000 feet above us, has California on its summit crest. Much of the country around us is managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). And while the BLM is so politicized and underfunded that its ability to manage much of anything remains ever in question, these public lands have made it possible for big mammals to live here too. We’re fortunate that our valley and mountain remain wild enough to support not only Old Man Coyote but also mule deer, bobcat, mountain lion, and pronghorn.
Although I am admittedly lococentric and thus strongly biased in favor of my own neighbors, to my mind the pronghorn is the most charismatic of megafauna. It is very unlike any other species on earth, and that is because it is—among the many antelope-like ungulates that once inhabited the prairies of prehistoric North America—the sole survivor of the Pleistocene extinctions that erased three-quarters of this continent’s large mammals around eleven thousand years ago. Antilocapra americana is alone in its genus because it is a living relic of the late Cenozoic savannah and in fact has no kinship with present-day antelope—nor is it related to goats, despite the capra in its name. The pronghorn is a true North American native, having evolved here over the past twenty million years. Sometimes called the “prairie ghost” for its elusiveness and speed, the pronghorn is also the ghost of evolution itself. It is all that remains of at least twelve distinct pronghorn-like genera of animals that once inhabited the ancient North American prairies—some species with two horns, some with four, some with six, some with branching horns, others with horns that spiraled fantastically to a point. Of what were probably dozens of species of antilocaprids, only the pronghorn has survived the crucible of evolution. Survived may be too grim a word for so beautiful a product of so beautiful a process. Say instead that pronghorn have been turned on the lathe of evolution for twenty million years, sculpted by predator and place, fired in evolution’s prairie and desert furnace. Seen in the light of its evolutionary history, pronghorn is not a thing but rather an outcome—one as inevitable as it was unlikely.
The evolutionary adaptations of these living Paleolithic ghosts to prairie and desert environments are many and remarkable. Their coloration is tawny as dust, and their tan necks are garlanded at the throat with a white shield and higher up with a crescent ring, creating a broken tan-white pattern of camouflaging so effective that when a pronghorn turns to look at you it often seems to magically disappear. Bucks have elegan
t black patches from the ears downward to beneath the chin, and older, stronger males have intimidating black masks that sometimes cover their eyes. Pronghorn hair, whatever color it may be, is adapted to allow the animal to endure almost inconceivable extremes of heat and cold, from 50 below zero in winter on the northern part of its range, on the windswept Canadian prairies, to summer temperatures of 120 degrees or more on its southern range, in the scorching deserts of the Southwest and Mexico. Each hair is perfectly insulated, spongy and air filled, and can be flattened to create a waterproof and windproof shield in winter or lifted up to allow heat dissipation in summer. The bright white hairs on the rump are controlled by an extreme version of the same process of piloerection that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up when you’re hiking in grizzly country. These three-inch-long hairs, when flared, make the rump appear larger and brighter than usual and so function as a warning signal to other pronghorn, especially in flight. Illuminated in the brittle glare of the high desert sun, these distinctive white patches are often visible from miles away, and I have seen them glide across a distant hillside even when the rest of the animal had vanished into the sage-dotted land.
While pronghorn females sometimes grow short horns, males carry the distinctive pronged horns, which may grow to twenty inches in length and are used as weapons against competing bucks during the autumn rut. These cranial meat hooks are so powerful and sharp that the mortality rate in buck fights sometimes runs to 10 percent or even higher. The horn of the pronghorn is not an antler; while antlers are shed each year and are made of bone, horns are kept for life and consist of keratin—the same material used to build hair and hooves. Yet even here the pronghorn is anomalous. Not only is it the only animal in the world with horns that branch, but it is also the only animal that sheds its horns annually—or, to be more precise, sheds the keratinous sheath that covers the horn’s bony core. Although this odd combination of antler and horn qualities has resulted in the pronghorn’s notoriously imprecise genus name, Antilocapra, which means “antelope goat,” the pronghorn is neither antelope nor goat. Most of the several hundred recorded Native American names for pronghorn are more elegant and accurate. Many, including those of the Indian peoples who have long inhabited this region, mimic the pronghorn’s breathy snorts. The Northern Paiute of nearby Honey Lake and Surprise Valley call the pronghorn dü’ná; to the Western Shoshone of central Nevada, Antilocapra americana is wahn’-ze; it is called á-yĭs by the Washoe people of the eastern Sierra.
Considering that pronghorn are fairly small bodied, with adults typically weighing not much more than a hundred pounds, their eyes are unusually large, almost as large as an elephant’s—an adaptation that allows them to see great distances across open landscapes. While they have good hearing and a decent sense of smell, it is their superb vision that they depend upon most, a fact that became clear to me the first time I spooked pronghorn from more than a mile away. The animal’s large black eyes are set unusually high in the head and far apart, socketed in bony turrets that allow for nearly panoramic vision. Because pronghorn are native to shortgrass prairie and desert, where cover is low, the high placement of their eyes allows them to scan for cruising predators even as they forage.
Pronghorn are such choosy and itinerant browsers that you can approach an area where they have just been grazing and yet search in vain for any sign of cropped plants. Far from being the rototillers or Weedwackers so common among their fellow ungulates, pronghorn snip individual leaves and stems so selectively that their presence on the range is barely discernible. This discriminating browsing for vascular forbs is also related to their ability to survive with so little water, even in conditions that immediately threaten dehydration for other desert mammals. While pronghorn prefer to drink some free water during most times of the year, they can manage to derive most—or, under extreme conditions, all—of their water from the plants they so carefully select. Pronghorn have a four-chambered stomach, the second chamber of which is loaded with bacteria, protozoa, and fungi that digest cellulose and other plant material the standard-issue mammalian gastric system can’t handle. They have coevolved with the microorganisms in their gut, creating an ecosystem-within-an-ecosystem without which they would starve. All of these formidable adaptations to the often fatal extremes of their home environments have been crafted by twenty million years of trial and error in which error soundly dominated. Nevertheless, only a few successes are necessary if you have twenty million years to perfect them. The pronghorn we see today are what remain after twenty million years of errors have been culled from the gene pool, each weakness chipped away until the sculpted form of this evolutionary ghost emerged from the unhewn rock of ages.
Over the past thirty million years, hoofed mammals have evolved to become faster, an acceleration driven by an evolutionary increase in the speed of their predators. That said, pronghorn speed remains in a class of its own. Pronghorn can run thirty miles per hour almost indefinitely, in an effortless trot that barely resembles running. They can run for many miles at forty-five miles per hour, and even their incredible top speed of around sixty miles per hour is sustainable for surprisingly long distances. While their bodies appear much like sausages, an improbable form for a speedster, their stilt-like legs are unusually strong and fast, and their stride, almost inconceivably long. It is this unique combination of stride turnover rate and stride length that propels pronghorn forward at such unbelievable speeds. They complete a full stride in a third of a second, a motion so fast that John James Audubon aptly described running pronghorn as appearing to float above the spokes of a wheel turning so quickly that he could see only a gauzy blur where the legs should be. The stride of a pronghorn running at full speed is about twenty-nine feet, which is almost identical to the world record long jump—only a pronghorn does it stride after stride for mile after mile, and never foot faults, wears goofy shorts, or falls on its ass in the sand. I’ve watched pronghorn glide effortlessly across our nearby high desert basin in what looked like a relaxed canter, only to find their track sets separated by eighteen or twenty feet. When tracking them I can’t help doubling back on the assumption that I’ve missed a set of hoof prints, as the tracks seem impossibly far apart. No wonder that Meriwether Lewis, when he first saw pronghorn on the western plains, wrote that their running “appeared rather the rapid flight of birds than the motion of quadrupeds.”
Flight is an apt metaphor for pronghorn speed. It is difficult to describe how strangely beautiful these animals look simply drifting across the hills at forty or forty-five miles per hour. They don’t appear to be straining in the least, and their effortless gait combined with the ridiculous amount of ground they cover makes them seem, by the laws of physics, uncalibrated—magically unmoored from any sense of motion our eyes are equipped to register. Pronghorn are more than twice as fast as white-tailed deer, and even a five-week-old fawn can outrun any Kentucky Derby winner. And pronghorn do their speeding through sagebrush and bitterbrush, over sandy and rocky terrain, upslope and downslope, in conditions of extreme heat and cold. Not only can a pronghorn run the length of a football field in about three seconds, but if you could somehow lean that field up on the shoulder of a desert mountain, fill it with sage and boulders and ground squirrel holes and rattlesnakes, and then crank the temperature up to 100 degrees, a pronghorn would still go end zone to end zone in about three seconds—and would take fewer than a dozen strides to do it.
So how do pronghorn run so fast and so far under such inhospitable environmental circumstances? Practice. Twenty million years of practice. There is no evolutionary paradigm shift at work here, no genetic equivalent of a hydrogen fuel cell, no revolution but evolution. The pronghorn has simply refined traits that are common to most mammals, including ourselves. Where we have five fingers on our hands, pronghorn have fused the third and fourth digits into their perfectly engineered padded cloven hooves. Where we have a wrist with squarish bones a few inches long, the pronghorn has elongated its hand bones unt
il they are almost as long as your forearm. This marvelous cannon bone, nine inches in length but only as thick as your finger, is what allows pronghorn to achieve the stride length necessary for their remarkable speed. I once found one of these impossibly attenuated cannon bones beneath a bitter cherry bush out in the desert scrub, and I now keep it on my writing desk to remind me that even in this broken world, refinement and delicacy, rather than brute strength, can still translate into power.
The downside of this skeletal refinement is that pronghorn find jumping dangerous, as an unstable landing on these delicate, elongated wrist bones can shatter them and thus prove fatal. Pronghorn consider jumping so disconcerting that they rarely attempt to clear anything higher than a few feet, and as a result they often find their movement to winter range or calving grounds blocked by fencing, which proves no significant obstacle to woodland-evolved leapers like deer. Unlike deer, pronghorn have spent millions of years matching themselves to the demands of shortgrass prairie and sagebrush steppe, where running fast is much more important than jumping high. Taking advantage of this reluctance to jump, at one time some Native peoples drove pronghorn into improvised corrals, building immense V-shaped drift fences that were often several miles apart at the mouth but funneled to a chute where pronghorn were killed or captured. The long walls that kept the animals within the V were constructed of rocks, juniper snags, or, more often, sagebrush. If the barrier was even a few feet high, pronghorn would continue to run alongside it rather than jump over it to freedom. About fifteen miles north of where Hannah spotted the two pregnant does is a pronghorn funnel called the Fort Sage Drift Fence, a thousand-year-old Paleo-Indian rock structure, thirty inches high and more than a mile long on each side. In more recent times, the Paiute people of Honey Lake Valley—whose country is visible from the top of our home mountain—wove thick sagebrush-bark ropes more than a mile long, which they shook in order to keep spooked pronghorn running forward rather than attempting to escape by jumping laterally.
Raising Wild Page 6