by Kurt Caswell
The dog food was safe inside its sack from the rain, but even if it had gotten wet, we couldn’t afford to leave it. The dogs needed this food, as hard as they worked. They were so footsore, so beaten down by the mountains, that when we hit camp at dusk, they ate hurriedly, then crawled up into some quiet shelter alone to sleep off their fatigue like the dead. I hefted the bag onto the back of Hector’s horse, tied it down, and we went on.
We trailed the rear of the band now, Hector mounted and me on foot, and we followed behind a little lamb, limping, its left front leg spattered with brown ooze. It dragged that little leg helplessly with each step. I recognized it then, the same lamb that Hector responded to so tenderly the day before. The rain came down harder, and my Gore-Tex raincoat was shiny and slick with the rain. Lightning flashed all around us, and Hector’s eyes were wild and afraid.
“Stupid bitch!” Hector yelled at the lamb and the storm and his fear.
The little lamb just could not do it today, could not, after all these days, push on so smartly as before with its useless leg. It stopped. Hector rode up on it with the horse, and frightened it. It bolted forward, moving along a little farther over the mountaintop. Soon it slowed and sputtered and stopped again. Hector rode up on it with his horse, which pushed it on a bit farther. This went on for half a mile or so, until Hector dismounted, shoved the reins of his horse into my hands, took off his coat and used it to whip the little lamb to make it go. It woke from its stupor once again and ran, a burst of surprising speed, before it realized the leg didn’t work, and it stumbled and fell, as tired as it was. It rose again with all its might, got up, wanted to move on with the great band flowing out in front of it, the ewes and lambs baaing and bawling, a tremendous force of sheep in a fluid grace pouring over the mountain. But the lamb could go no more. Its front legs buckled and down it went onto its knees, its nose just touching a bit of soft moss to hold it up. Hector took up his coat again like a mace and beat the little lamb. It started and ran. He whipped it, yelling “Stupid bitch!” as the lightning flashed and the rain wetted us.
But that whipping, that rage, that ferocious abuse was not enough, was not more frightening than the fatigue and pain and destitution the lamb must have felt, for it stopped again. It was done, this lamb, finished with dragging its broken body over this great hump of Idaho. If we did nothing more, surely it would die. It would lie down and wait to die, wait for the coyote that would surely come, or the wolf, for we were now in wolf country. But what more could we do? I doubted we could bring the lamb in to safety. How could we carry it all the distance we had yet to go? And why not let it go? What’s one lamb in a band of two thousand? Let it go, I thought. I can’t stand watching this poor thing struggle against death anymore. The rest of the sheep are hitting the crest of the mountain and are maybe even headed down the other side. We’re getting soaked to the skin. It’s cold. The lightning is close, and these great tall pines surrounding us are sure to attract that fatal flash from heaven you fear so much. Let it go. Let it die. Let’s go on.
“No good,” Hector said, calmer now. “No good, this little lambs.” The lightning didn’t seem to bother him now. The lamb needed him, and I think, somehow, he needed the lamb.
Hector moved the dog food bag forward onto the saddle, picked the lamb up, and laid it gently over the horse just behind the cantle. He took hold of the front feet, set them side by side, and tied them down with the leather saddle strings. He came around the rear of the horse, set the lamb’s back legs side by side, and tied them off tight with the saddle strings. He moved the dog food bag, all fifty pounds of it, up behind the lamb now, pressed it in over the lamb to keep it in place, and tied it off with the horse’s lead rope.
“You go the horse,” Hector said. “I push the sheep.” Then he left me, vanishing down the trail.
I stood awhile in the downpour, the reins in my hand, the horse standing with one hind leg bent, the little lamb laid over its body. I looked down the watery surface of the path through the rain, which ran out before me and then angled sharply down. I coveted a dry shelter and the simple indoor life that came in reading and studying books. I no longer desired to be a lone shepherd on a distant promontory, staring into this wet and boundless forest. Yet I had only one choice, and that was to lead the horse and lamb on and to embrace the lonely roads, which in his optimism Wordsworth claims are an “open [school] in which [he] daily read / with most delight the passions of mankind.”
Our species, mankind, evolved out of a nomadic economy. Agriculture does not appear in a meaningful way until about ten thousand years ago. Before that, all the way back to Homo habilis and Homo erectus (2.5 million years ago), we were nomads, foraging for plant foods and hunting the great beasts of the veldt. Most of our species’s past (more than 99 percent of it) has been spent living as nomads, in “small-scale, highly egalitarian groups who shared almost everything,” writes Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá in Sex at Dawn. And that economy, that way of life, encouraged a very different kind of social structure than the American way, which is based on the individual (the hero, even), based on consumption, based on the “every man for himself” principle. “Foragers divide and distribute meat equitably,” write Ryan and Jethá, “breastfeed one another’s babies, have little or no privacy from one another, and depend upon each other for survival. As much as our social world revolves around notions of private property and individual responsibility, theirs spins in the opposite direction, toward group welfare, group identity, profound interrelation, and mutual dependence.” Because sharing everything was at the heart of our ancestors’ lives for so long, the authors’ maintain, this practice “extended to sex as well.”
This is not New Age idealism, a hippie utopia, or even socialism, Ryan and Jethá assert, but rather the only system that made sense. In a nomadic economy, a reliance on the group, as opposed to the individual, made life possible. An early human would not have survived alone for very long. He faced far too many dangers: predators, injury, starvation. You are better off sharing what you have gathered or killed with others, who will in turn share what they have gathered or killed with you. In this system, everyone eats a little all the time, instead of eating a lot some of the time. Think of sharing in this system not as altruism, but rather as a means of distributing risk. In this light, such community-mindedness was not idealistic, but highly pragmatic.
The agricultural revolution that came later is generally regarded as a great leap forward, but according to the American scientist and writer Jared Diamond, it was the worst mistake in human history. While it does make civilization and all its wonders possible—especially beer—it is also the genesis of slavery, class divisions, large-scale warfare and genocide, the rapid spread of epidemic diseases, habitat destruction, species extinction, and the divorce of human beings from nature. In an article in the May 1987 issue of Discover, Diamond reports that the quality of life in early agricultural communities decreased dramatically from that of nomadic cultures. Early farmers faced increased malnutrition and anemia, infectious disease, and degeneration of the spine, probably due to heavy labor. By about 4,000 BCE, the average height of peoples adopting agriculture fell dramatically, along with average life expectancy: twenty-six years before agriculture, and nineteen years afterward. Most nomadic peoples were reluctant to adopt farming. In his book The Third Chimpanzee, Diamond writes, “Agriculture advanced across Europe at a snail’s pace: barely one thousand yards per year!” But advance it did: slowly, slowly, farmers outbred and overpowered nomadic groups, because, as Diamond writes, “ten malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter.” Even so, as Diamond asserts, agriculture brings with it a world of ills, and it has delivered us to our present state, here at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Growth of the world’s human population is out of control, and we are fast consuming the very planet on which we depend for life. Like a plague of locusts in a crop field, most of us will perish when the crop is gone.
I started down the watery
path over the rocky mountaintop, leading the horse with no name and the lamb. Down, down, down, picking my way among the boulders and rocks, I was “voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone,” to use Wordsworth’s words. There wasn’t much more to do, and there wasn’t much of a path either, just an open track of land where the sheep had traveled year after year, for the past one hundred years. The clouds were almost within reach, they were so low and we so high. The lamb lay there with its eyes open, blinking, helpless either way—walking or being walked, it had no will, no way to choose what would become of it. I put my hand on its little head. There, there, little lamb.
With the advent of agriculture come property rights and the ability to amass wealth. When you have wealth, you need an army to protect it from those who don’t have wealth, and you need an heir to pass it on so the poor landless people (in some cases, nomads) remain poor and landless. Class systems, patriarchy, and monogamy are all products of agriculture, as men appropriated reproduction rights through marriage and essentially took ownership of women’s wombs.
Since sex was readily shared among early humans, so was parenting, according to Ryan and Jethá. Children were raised by the village, not solely by the biological parents, and one of the reasons is that men did not really know who had fathered which child. In a world without monogamy, it didn’t much matter. Everyone was a member of the community, and so each child was everyone’s child. There are in fact zero “monogamous primate species that live in large social groups,” and “adultery has been documented in every ostensibly monogamous human society ever studied,” write Ryan and Jethá. It’s nice to think we’re monogamous, but our behavior proves otherwise. Monogamy is not even present in human societies in which anything but monogamy is a crime, especially a crime for women. Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Hindus have all punished adulterous women with death, and even that threat is not enough to change our behavior. “Think about that,” Ryan and Jethá write:
No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied—including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. . . . It’s hard to see how monogamy comes “naturally” to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers—even presidential legacies—for something that runs against human nature? . . . No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.
Hector had melted into the band of sheep, somewhere below. I could hear them bawling a hundred yards ahead, and now and again, I caught sight of sheep emerging from beneath the pines. We fell farther and farther behind, me, the little lamb, the horse with no name. Where was camp tonight? Where were Freddy and the pack string? Where were Edwin and the other band? Where was Hector? I did not know. The rain fell steadily now as I led the horse on. There was only one way to go: down, down to the lake, which spread out before me as I caught glimpses of it between the trees. From there, I might hear the four thousand sheep in a meadow nearby, and find the welcome shelter of the tent.
The horse stepped down into the slick muddy steep, slid forward, and rode up on me. I leaped out of the way as the horse caught himself and stopped. It angered me to be frightened this way by that huge animal almost toppling over me. We walked on, and the horse fought to keep his feet in the rain-slickened mud as I struggled to keep out of his way. We made a quarter mile, maybe a bit more, when I looked back at the lamb. It had slid over the horse to one side, and hung from its four feet like a sacrifice, helpless, its head lolling dangerously up and down as if it might come off with the horse’s rhythm.
I stopped the horse, made him stand, and rescued the little lamb, lifted it up and back over the horse, repositioned the dog food sack to hold it there, and we went on. The trail steepened and the horse slid and arrested itself, slid and arrested itself, me walking alongside it now as it drew out the reins in front of me until I was walking near the rear of the saddle near the lamb that had slid down again into a little sling, slinging that way, its head lolling like it was barely attached. It looked unaffected, poor thing, blinking at me, helpless, hardly aware of its body, detached from any knowledge of having a will of its own, waiting for whatever cruelties would befall it. I set the lamb back up onto the horse, and it just lay there, that position as good as the hanging position, I suppose. It didn’t seem grateful at all. I felt awful, though, terrible in letting it suffer this way. I stood there in the rain a bit, listening for the band down the mountain.
I looked back at all my troubles, the little, innocent, helpless lamb. High up on the horse now, the lamb craned its neck back to browse the green leaves of a mountain alder where a branch came down over it. Christ, I thought, what was it doing browsing the leaves as if this were an ordinary day? Didn’t it know it couldn’t walk, that its leg and its body were broken? Didn’t it know that it was a lamb on its way to the slaughter? That its life wasn’t worth more than the going rate of a few pounds of meat on the supermarket shelf? Didn’t it know that it was a prisoner, not only on this horse’s back, but in this world, its being locked away in this lamb’s body, hardly a body of its own, a body owned by a world apart, like a carrot in the ground, an apple on a tree, a loaf of bread on a kitchen counter? Does it not desire to break free of its prison and run and bound through the boundless world, to face its life and death on its own terms, to face the coyote even, its jaws and teeth, so long as it were free? Still, it went on nibbling the leaves, impervious to my questions, my pains, the way I ached for it, the fucking lamb.
Not far from where humankind was born, the Tuareg, one of the great nomadic Berber tribes of North Africa, regard agriculture as “an occupation for slaves and the lower classes,” writes Michael Brett and Elizabeth Fentress in The Berbers. “Even today, no noble will willingly take up a hoe.” The basic property of a Tuareg family consists of a few mats and maybe one precious rug, as well as the tools of their work and a tent to live in. As in so many traditional cultures, women in such nomadic communities possessed a great many freedoms. The tent belongs to the woman, and a new husband would move into her tent for “as long as the marriage lasts.” Despite their “extremely simple material culture,” writes Brett and Fentress, “the Tuareg possess a social culture of great complexity.” And it includes, among other highly articulated and rigid rules of behavior, an enduring love for poetry.
Things went on this way with the lamb for some time, for a life-age. I went on, leading the horse as before, trying to stay out of its way as it struggled to keep its feet in the slick mud where the sheep had trammeled the ground between the rocks. The rain came down. The sky flashed and I waited for the thunder to shake the mountain. Wham! It was beautiful and terrible too. Wham! I hated it. I’d never leave home again. Wham! I loved it. I’d never go home again. Then the horse lurched forward and slid on all its feet, its back legs splayed out and then back under it. I leaped to the side to save myself. Soon we gentled out onto the next little flat into the taller grass. I had not yet looked back to see what I knew I would see: the lamb hung loosely again over the side of the horse.
I stopped and made the horse stand. I hefted the little lamb back up, pulled its front feet over, positioned it just so, and dropped the dog food into place against it. What an impossible situation. I walked alongside the horse now, the lead rope in my left hand, and my right hand on the lamb’s backside to keep it there from falling. We ambled on through the grassy swale and the rain. It worked, at least for now, to lead the horse and hold the lamb, and we made up a little ground because I could hear the sheep again out in front. Farther on I saw a ewe, its broad back exposed where its head was inside the branches of a pine. Hector must be somewhere nearby, I thought. Then I felt something warm and comforting, but I couldn’t place it. I didn’t know where or why I was having this sensation. I looked up at the sky and into the wet clouds hung low above me, and across the horse into the green treetops. And then at the lamb, which was pissing over the top of my hand and down the side of the horse.
/> Who knows what words issued forth in that moment, but I also felt for that little creature that had not even the dignity of its body’s functions. Of course it would need to piss. Of course it couldn’t help but piss. And where was it to piss? Right where it was, strapped down like a sack of dog food half under a sack of dog food, probably dog food made from lamb meal. I stopped then and stood beneath a great pine out of the rain. I shook my hand off and held it out to let the sky clean it. Where was Hector, anyway, and why, why, why had he left me with this lamb and his horse? Why didn’t he take the horse and let me push the sheep? There wasn’t anything to it. They knew where to go. He’s out there walking free, or sitting under a dry tree while the sheep mosey down the mountain to camp. I scanned the mountainside and the sheep scattered here and there, and back up behind me, all around, everywhere. No Hector.
I pushed back the dog food bag, untied the lamb’s feet on both sides, lifted it up and off the horse, and set it down. It crumpled into a little pile. Now not one of its legs worked. It couldn’t move at all. What a pitiful sight. I picked up the lamb and walked with it up to the base of that great pine. There I set it, positioning its legs so as to make it comfortable. What was I doing? I couldn’t abandon the lamb this way. I couldn’t leave it here to the coyotes and the turkey vultures. Would this terrible sin hang on my soul? Would guilt consume me and nightmares trouble my sleep in the coming days, in the long cold nights? Would beasts appear from the darkness to mete out reparations? If I walked away now, the lamb’s fate would no longer be tied to mine. I would be free. I wondered again what I was doing. I could not abandon the lamb this way.