We don’t know how many pronghorn inhabited North America before their slaughter began in earnest during the mid-nineteenth century. An educated guess is that a hundred and fifty years ago there were around forty million pronghorn in North America, ranging from the oxbows of the Mississippi west almost to the breakers of the Pacific, and they flourished in numbers comparable to those of the iconic American bison. Then came White Guy with Fire Stick, and pronghorn were shot for meat, for pelts, and often just for fun. To cite a particularly egregious example, in 1859 a single pelt hunter killed five thousand pronghorn at one watering hole without using a pound of the resulting hundred tons of meat. After a venerable twenty-million-year evolutionary history, it took only a century for pronghorn numbers to be reduced from forty million or so to fewer than fifteen thousand by the early twentieth century. Not only was the species in imminent danger of extinction; many conservation biologists felt that the numbers had already fallen too low—that the prairie ghost was doomed, regardless of any efforts that might be made to prevent the curtain of time from being drawn on it forever.
Fortunately, this grim forecast didn’t stop some people from trying anyway, and their ultimately successful efforts are the reason pronghorn are still being born on our prairies and in our deserts today. The odd combination of realistic pessimism and idealistic optimism necessary to take up the gauntlet of pronghorn conservation was expressed by Charles Sheldon, after whom the Sheldon National Wildlife Refuge in northern Nevada is named: “I think that the antelope are doomed, yet every attempt should be made to save them.” Thanks to Sheldon and many others, most western states imposed moratoriums on hunting pronghorn—prohibitions that here in Nevada gave complete protection to the species from 1917 through 1943. Refuges were created, management guidelines instituted, and trap-and-relocate programs initiated to return pronghorn to parts of the range from which they had been extirpated. In the half century between 1925 and 1975, pronghorn increased from what may have been as few as thirteen thousand animals to a half million, and the population now stands at around one million.
Despite this inspiring conservation success story, the future of the species remains uncertain. It is now development rather than wanton slaughter that impinges on ancient pronghorn migration routes, deprives the animals of winter range, and covers their calving grounds with asphalt or drilling pads. Most of the valley just south of where Hannah saw her first pronghorn was recently proposed for transformation into “Evans Ranch.” If you live in the West, you already know that “ranch” is the going euphemism for “massive subdevelopment,” and so Evans Ranch will be no ranch at all but rather a dense concentration of more than five thousand houses and apartments in a valley where pronghorn now forage, water, and calve. This valley has remained mostly wild because of our federally protected aquifer: we have so little water here—about seven inches of precipitation each year (most of it snow) and almost no surface water—that anything more than a rural scattering of homes is plainly unsustainable. But that was before trans-basin water importation, the latest in a long line of get-rich-quick schemes to force the intermountain West to bloom and fructify. The plan for Evans Ranch is to drain a desert aquifer someplace else—most likely in the Honey Lake basin, where Paiutes have honored the pronghorn for millennia—and pipe the liquid gold to this valley.
When Evans Ranch was proposed to city government, it was described in a planning document more than a thousand pages in length. That document never mentioned pronghorn. The property to be developed borders public land on two-thirds of its huge perimeter; despite this, the BLM, which represents the public interest, was never even consulted about the negative effects the development would have on public lands. When the project came before the city’s planning commission, one commissioner was forced to recuse herself because she is the wife of the developer’s lead PR man; another insisted that people who care about wildlife shouldn’t try to stop progress but should instead pick up trash in the desert. Then the commissioners voted unanimously to approve the development. When Evans Ranch subsequently went before the Reno City Council, letters opposing the development arrived in a landslide, while statements of support came in a feeble trickle; testimony ran about five to one against the development, with nearly all of those who spoke in favor of the project being the developer’s own employees. In advance of the hearing, the developer told the media that in twenty years he had never seen pronghorn in the valley; in response, many citizens who testified showed photographs of pronghorn grazing on or near their properties.
I was the citizen appellant to the Evans Ranch decision, which meant that while Eryn was hosting Hannah’s second birthday party I was in city council chambers speaking as best I could for public lands, for sustainable growth, for sparing the pronghorn. On one side was a row of experts on traffic flow, water importation, effluent disposal, and a number of other bleak arts. On the other side were a bunch of my heartbroken neighbors and I trying to explain why an ineffable mystery like the pronghorn might matter—and trying to explain it to people whose minds were already made up. When I rose to offer my rebuttal to the developer’s PR man, the mayor of Reno instructed me to sit down and be quiet—until his legal counsel reminded him of his statutory obligation to allow me to speak, at which point he acquiesced and permitted me two minutes to make the case for protecting a species that has lived here for twenty million years. In the end, the arguments made by those of us who value wildlife, open space, and public lands were compelling. One staunchly prodevelopment member of the growth-at-all-costs city council even complimented us on what he characterized as the most passionate and well-reasoned citizen appeal ever heard before council. Then he voted, along with every other council member, to approve the development. It was painfully apparent to everyone in those packed chambers that the vital process of citizen appeal and testimony had been reduced to a form of window dressing intended to superficially legitimate a deal long since struck between local power brokers.
I’ve seen pronghorn yearlings alone and in pairs, does alone and in groupings, males alone and in bachelor herds, huge bucks herding and hiding harems of as many as fourteen does; and I’ve witnessed the winter herd of scores of animals together flowing across the land in synchrony. That’s here, in our home valley, where the developer apparently hasn’t managed to spot a pronghorn in twenty years. Some may be mercenary enough to argue that we humans, developers and environmentalists alike, are just maximizing our opportunity to prosper, to make homes for our children, to ensure that our way of life—or, considered sociobiologically, our genetic heritage—will be borne into future generations. If we erase the astonishing evolutionary phenomenon that is the pronghorn in order to do so, that’s simply collateral damage.
But the counterargument comes from the depth of ages: it cannot be evolutionarily adaptive for us to proceed so recto-cranially, with our selfish heads so far up our asses that we can no longer see the beauty of this world. We don’t have nineteen and a half million years to come up with intelligent, sustainable practices of inhabitation that will allow the pronghorn miracle to live with us. If we do not evolve ethically, and do so quickly, we will suffer what the ecologist and writer Robert Michael Pyle calls “the extinction of experience.” We will deprive ourselves of rich contact with the physical world, which is something evolution has taught us to need. We will replace the textured earth that has literally made us human with an impoverished remnant earth in which our children will no longer have the chance to converse with pronghorn.
In an ancient cave not far from here there is an infant interred with a rattle made from the horn sheaths of the pronghorn. At another Paleo-Indian burial site, the body of an eight-year-old girl is found at repose; she has been laid to rest wearing a necklace made of the hooves of unborn pronghorn fawns, a sacred ornament possessing the power to help her travel swiftly across worlds. As a father, I cannot conceive the species of grief caused by the loss of a daughter—what terrifying ghosts this unspeakable loss might summon
. I do not know what kind of necklace I could make. I do know that when unchecked development has erased the unique evolutionary phenomenon that is the pronghorn from our home valley and mountain, something that animates this place will be extinguished. Its loss will ripple through the life of this fragile montane desert ecosystem and through the lives of anyone capable of appreciating what twenty million years of striving for perfection has wrought. There will be a new ghost here, and it will haunt us for a very long time to come.
Chapter 4
4. Ladder to the Pleiades
Hannah, who recently turned three years old, is teaching me about the stars. Far from being a liability to her, my own profound astronomical ignorance has turned out to be her boon and, through her, a boon to me as well. The most important thing the kid has taught me about the stars is the brilliant open secret that if you don’t go outside and look up, you won’t see anything. Every night before bedtime she takes my hand and insists that I get my bedraggled ass up and take her outside to look at the stars. If this sounds easy, ask yourself if you can match her record of going out every single night to observe the sky—something she has done without fail for more than a year now. It seems to me that Hannah has accomplished something impressive: she has perfect attendance at the one-room schoolhouse of night. That she has somehow brought her celestially illiterate father along is more amazing still.
Following the inexorable logic that makes a kid’s universe so astonishing, Hannah insists on looking for stars no matter the weather. At first I attempted the rational, grown-up answer: “It just isn’t clear enough to see anything tonight, honey.” But her response, which is always the same, is so emphatic that it is irresistible: “Dad, we can always check.” And so we check. And it is when we check that the rewards of lifting my head up and out of another long day come into focus. One cold and windy night we stepped out and discovered, through a momentary break in an impossibly thick mat of clouds, a stunning view of Sirius blazing low in the southeast. Another evening we stood in an unusual late winter fog and saw nothing—but then we heard the courtship hooting of a nearby great horned owl, followed immediately by the distant yelping of coyotes up in the hills. At Hannah’s insistence we even stand out in snowstorms to stargaze, and while we’ve never seen any stars on those wild, white nights, we’ve seen and felt and smelled the crisp shimmering that arrives only on the wings of a big January storm. Snow or no snow, she knows those stars are up there, and so she does easily what is somehow difficult for many of us grown-ups: she looks for them. Whether Hannah actually sees stars or not, in seeking them every evening she has forged an unbreakable relation with the world-within-a-world that is night.
Questions are the waypoints along which Hannah’s orbit around things can be plotted, and she has asked so many questions about stars for so many nights in a row that at last I’ve been compelled to learn enough to answer some of them. In doing so I’ve stumbled into placing myself, my family, my home on the cosmic map whose points of reference wheel across the sky. We’ve learned a surprising number of stars and constellations together, and we each have our favorites. Now that we’re in our second year of performing this unfailing nightly ritual, we’re also having the gratifying experience of seeing our favorite summer stars, long gone in the high desert winter, come round again on the dark face of the year’s towering clock of night.
The other evening after supper, Eryn asked Hannah to make a wish. Without hesitating she replied, “I wish I could have a ladder tall enough to reach the stars.” As usual, I didn’t know what to say. It is impossible to dismiss a three-year-old kid—who, among other things, discovered the cosmos without much help from me—when she articulates a hope that is at once so perfectly reasonable and so beautifully impossible. Before she goes to sleep, Hannah and I look at the six-dollar cardboard star wheel I bought to help us identify constellations. Too tired to make much of it, I toss the disk down on her bed in mild frustration. But she picks it up, holds it upright in front of her with both hands, stares earnestly out beyond the walls of her room, and begins to turn it left and right as if it were a steering wheel.
“Where you going?” I ask.
“Pleiades,” she replies. “Want to come?”
Despite its faintness relative to many other celestial objects, the Pleiades—which Hannah still pronounces Tweety Bird style, “Pwee-a-deez”—are Hannah’s favorite thing in the sky. If you’re in the northern hemisphere, this lovely cluster is relatively easy to locate: when looking south in summer, it appears above and to the right of Orion the hunter, the three bright stars of whose belt align to form an unmistakable field mark. To the naked eye, the Pleiades resemble the dipper shape that is better known in the northern sky, where the Big and Little Dippers of Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, the two bears, revolve endlessly around the axle of Polaris, the North Star. Known to myth as the Seven Sisters and to science as Messier object 45 (M45), the Pleiades are an open cluster of stars—not a random constellation but a close grouping of intimately related stars that were born together from a single nebula cradled in the arms of a spiral galaxy. Dominated by hot blue stars, the Pleiades cluster consists of at least five hundred members, which formed together as recently as 100 million years ago. It is a tightly woven nest of baby stars, a galactic brood perhaps only one-fiftieth the age of our own sun. The cluster is expected to survive only another 250 million years or so, after which its individual stars will flee the spiral arms of our home galaxy and its giant molecular clouds and will break their sisterly gravitational bonds, causing them to forget their common origin. They will light out for the territory, wayward, each on its own new path.
Among the nearest to the earth of all open clusters, the Pleiades cluster is 12 light-years in diameter and a mere skip of 440 light-years away from Hannah’s upturned face. Despite the tranquillity of their huddled glow, some Pleiades stars are actually spinning at up to three hundred kilometers per second at their surfaces. The Pleiades are also celebrated for their remarkable nebulosity, which was revealed by the first astrophotographs, taken during the 1880s. Otherworldly pictures capture spectacular blue reflection nebulae, illuminated clouds of interstellar dust attenuated into ghostly, cirrus-shaped wings by the intense stellar radiation emanating from Pleiades stars. The lyricism of Tennyson’s 1835 poem “Locksley Hall” reflects this wonderful nebulosity: “Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade, / Glitter like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver braid.”
I still don’t know why Hannah loves the Pleiades so much, and I wonder if I’ll ever fully understand. She gives different answers on different nights, and though she’s patient with me, mostly she seems to think I’m asking the wrong question. What fascinates me most about the Pleiades is not any arcana of astrogeekery but rather the simple fact that they are beautiful yet barely visible. The nine brightest stars in the cluster all have magnitudes hovering just around the limit of sharp human vision under excellent viewing conditions. But how many you actually see depends not only upon your eyesight and the weather and the position and phase of the moon, but also upon altitude, humidity, dust, pollution, and the most critical factor: light levels in the night sky.
“Let there be light” may have sounded good at first, but for there to be Pleiadian light there must first be earthly darkness. Although even the dimmest of the major Pleiades stars is forty times brighter than our own sun would appear at a similar distance (the brightest, Alcyone, is a thousand times brighter than our sun), only six stars are usually visible to the unaided eye. Although some people can see the seventh sister as well, I myself have witnessed it only three nights in thirty years of admiring this cluster—a once-in-a-decade pace that I find perfectly satisfying. Under ideal viewing conditions it is occasionally possible for extremely sharp-sighted people to see nine stars. In 1579, before the invention of the telescope, the astronomer Michael Maestlin accurately drew the positions of eleven of the cluster’s stars. In Egyptian tombs archaeologists have found, buried along
with mummies, ancient calendars ornamented with a dozen Pleiades stars, and aboriginal cultures in remote desert regions of Australia produced art depicting thirteen Pleiades. There is even some evidence that in the rarefied air of the high Andes some Incan people may once have been able to see fourteen member stars. It was common among Native American peoples in North America—just as it was among stargazers in ancient Greece—to measure the acuity of one’s vision by the number of Pleiades stars they could see. Simply by being there, the Pleiades test the limits of our vision. These stars are easy to find but also easy to lose. Like most things that are precious, they are there but barely, and how well we see them—or if we see them at all—matters enormously.
In Greek mythology, the Pleiades are the celebrated Seven Sisters, celestial daughters of the sea nymph Pleione and the Titan Atlas, whose punishment from Zeus was to bear the weight of the heavens upon his shoulders. The Seven Sisters—Alcyone, Celaeno, Electra, Maia, Merope, Sterope, and Taygete—were nymphs in the train of Artemis, and I owe them a deep debt of gratitude because they served as nursemaids to baby Bacchus, the feisty little god of booze. The Pleiades sisters must have been easy on the eyes, as many well-heeled Olympian gods, including Poseidon, Ares, and even Zeus himself, had affairs with ladies from this fine retinue of astral maidens. Only Merope, whose name means “mortal,” resisted seduction by the gods, a mistake for which she took a lot of grief. Or perhaps the problem was that the mortal she chose to marry, that old coyote Sisyphus, was a fast-talking con man whose infamous boulder-rolling punishment made Atlas’s bad day at the office seem like a moonlight stroll.
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