On Trails

by Robert Moor

  The elephants fortunate enough to have found their way to the sanctuary probably enjoy better lives than any other elephant in North America—roaming freely across many acres of open forest, well fed, free from predation, their every scab and sneeze worried over. Nevertheless, I imagine they must sometimes feel like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, comfortably trapped on an alien planet—probed, pampered, and constantly, if politely, surveilled. Despite the caregivers’ best efforts to simulate their natural environment, simply by virtue of being cut off from their families and their homeland, the elephants have been made strange to themselves.

  Elephants have been tamed countless times throughout history, but have never been domesticated. Nearly every trained elephant—from Hannibal’s war beasts to Barnum’s ballerinas—was wild born, and subsequently “broken,” as animal trainers used to say. This is what separates a tame animal from a domesticated one. A domesticated animal, like a sheep or a cow, never needs to be broken, because it has already been bred to live comfortably in a human environment. We have sculpted it, right down to its genes, to fit into our version of the world.

  In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond noted that the “Major Five” domesticated animals—sheep, goats, cows, pigs, and horses—share a rare set of just-so features: they are neither too large nor too small; neither too aggressive nor too fearful; they grow quickly; they can rest and reproduce in close quarters; and they abide by what Diamond has called a “follow-the-leader” social hierarchy. Channeling Tolstoy, he quipped: “Domesticable animals are all alike: every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way.”

  Elephants share some of these traits (a strict dominance hierarchy), but not others (they are too big, too restless, and grow too slowly). As almost-domesticates, they have been entered into a rather grisly lottery: each year, for the past four and a half millennia, an unlucky few are abducted, broken, and forced to work for humans, while the rest roam free.

  In his controversial 1992 book The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, the science journalist Stephen Budiansky argues that “virtually all of the important characteristics that set apart domesticated animals from their wild progenitors” can be accounted for by a single biological phenomenon called “neoteny”: the retention of juvenile traits in an adult animal or, as Budiansky playfully puts it, “perpetual adolescence.” These traits include notably cuter physical features and more flexible brains. In stark contrast to the behavior of adults, which tends to be rigid, neotenates explore, play, and solicit care just like the young. Notably—and crucially—they also tend to lack a defensive or fearful posture toward other species and new situations. These traits are most notable in dogs (which were, not coincidentally, the first animal to be domesticated), but are also evident, to varying degrees, in all of the Major Five domesticates.

  Yet more striking is Budiansky’s panoramic description of how humans and domesticated animals, having locked themselves into a symbiotic blood pact, proceeded to colonize the earth. What unites humans and our motley alliance of herd animals, he suggested, is that we are all “edge-dwellers,” opportunists who continually exploit new and shifting landscapes. Our flexibility is our chief weapon; we are “the scavenger or grazer that can eat a hundred different foods, not the panda exquisitely adapted to living off nothing but huge quantities of bamboo.” Far from having been enslaved, domesticates “chose” (read: evolved) to rely on humans and the changes we wrought on the landscape. The Major Five animals—along with chickens, guinea pigs, ducks, rabbits, camels, llamas, alpaca, donkeys, reindeer, exotic bovids like the yak, and a handful of other species—became domesticated for the same reason some people chose to give up the free-ranging life of a hunter-gatherer to toil as agriculturalists: because it allowed them to outbreed and outcompete their rivals. It was easier to follow the shepherd into the pen than to strike off alone into the wilderness.

  It is no coincidence that domestic dogs, sheep, goats, horses, and cattle all vastly outnumber their wild counterparts. Meanwhile, farming and raising animals has allowed one hundred times more people to live on the same area of land as hunting and gathering. While many animal rights activists argue that animal husbandry is unnatural and cruel, Budiansky vigorously defends the pastoral lifestyle. “In raising animals,” Budiansky writes, “we are reenacting something not as old, culturally speaking, as hunting, but in a way more profound, for the rise of animal agriculture is an example of evolution operating at its highest level—on systems of species, one of which is us.” Together, we agro-pastoralists, our livestock, and our crops reshaped ourselves to suit one another’s needs. In doing so, we evolved into an indomitable (if not infallible) ecological system that has reshaped the earth.

 

  A trail forms when a group of individuals unites to reach a common end. Many of the animal world’s most impressive trails therefore come from herds of big mammals—elephants, bison, a varied assortment of African ungulates—which are able to expertly band together.

  For all our lofty scientific studies, though, we still have only a vague sense of how herds operate. As I began to think more about the dynamics of a herd, it occurred to me that humans have been intimately studying one herd animal, up close, for millennia: the humble sheep. To observe how sheep collaborate to form trails—and, moreover, how humans and sheep collaborate to change landscapes—I resolved to try my hand at shepherding.

  At the heart of every sheep lies an inherent tension between obedience and disorder. Every child knows that sheep are archetypal herd animals; indeed, the word sheep is virtually synonymous with something that blindly follows those around it. This trait led Aristotle to deem sheep “the most silly and foolish animals in the world.” And yet, in the weeks I spent working as a shepherd in the spring of 2014, I learned that the better one gets to know sheep, the less sheep-like they appear. In fact, each individual sheep has its own personality and temperament. Some are stubborn and (relatively) solitary, while others are meek and clingy. Nevertheless, they manage to cooperate to such a degree that they sometimes appear to be moving as a single body.

  The naturalist Mary Austin—who spent almost two decades observing and talking with shepherds in California—wrote that flocks are invariably made up of “Leaders, Middlers, and Tailers.” The leaders head up the flock; the middlers keep to the middle; and the tailers chase up the rear. Individual sheep tend to stick to a single role, she wrote, and because leaders can be used to steer the flock, shepherds typically took special care of them, saving them from slaughter to “make wise” the next generation. Some even went so far as to name them after their girlfriends.III

  However, in my experience, the flock dynamic was not so simple as Austin describes. There were, rather, many leaders in a single flock, who would arise in different situations. Even more curiously, I began to notice that certain individuals seemed to feel the need to be perceived as leading the flock—when the flock abandoned their leadership and changed directions, they would hurry to its front, like a politician scrambling to keep ahead of a shifting electorate.

  The relationship between a shepherd and a flock, similarly, is not as clear-cut as it looks. The shepherd is not the master of the flock; instead, the flock and the shepherd are engaged in a continuous negotiation, in turns pushing against each other and pulling together, harmonious one moment and fractious the next. Some shepherds claim to be able to control their sheep with words or whistles, which may be true, but the only signaling mechanism my sheep and I needed was the language of space: if I moved too close to them, they would inch away. In this way, I was able to shape their movements, but only vaguely, like a cloud of smoke. The essence of herding is not domination, but dance.

 

  Shepherding, like any craft, is a skill acquired over a lifetime—or, ideally, passed down over many lifetimes. My time as a shepherd, by contrast, was a mere stint, a neophyte’s first foray. For three weeks in the airy lull of a late Arizona s
pring, I was stationed near the border of the Navajo and Hopi reservations, in a place called Black Mesa. It was a three-hour drive northeast of Flagstaff, along miles of rutted dirt roads. The area was wholly cut off from municipal electricity, running water, and phone lines. In exchange for herding the sheep, I was given one meal each day and a hut in which to sleep. I had learned about the opportunity from my friend Jake, who had in turn learned about it from an outfit called Black Mesa Indigenous Support, a volunteer organization that helps aging Navajo families remain living on their traditional lands. Jake, who had been shepherding for the past nine years, had regaled me with stories of life among the Navajo, who were among the only people left in North America still herding sheep in the old style, on foot.

  A shepherd’s life, I learned, is both repetitive and chaotic; like a water wheel, there are whorls within each slow turn. In the morning, just after sunrise, I released the sheep from their corral and worriedly chased them across the hills; in the afternoon, I followed as they galloped to the water trough; and in the early evening, I bullied them back into their corral. At night I slept on a mattress on the dirt floor of a low, octagonal, dome-roofed hut called a hogan. It was part of a homestead that included two hogans, two old stone houses, two new prefabricated trailers, two outhouses, a horse corral, a sheep corral, and the skeletal remains of other hogans long abandoned. There was no running water and no electricity, save a few rooftop solar panels in the main house, which did not appear to get much use.

  The whole of it belonged to an elderly Navajo couple named Harry and Bessie Begay. They were both in their late seventies. Harry was a gray-haired man with a talon nose, thumb-punched cheeks, skeptical eyes, and perfect posture, who wore a baseball cap when he rode his horse and a cowboy hat when he went to town. He was missing two fingers on his right hand—lost, I would learn, to the slip of a chainsaw. Bessie, his wife, was a sweet, tough woman who stood no more than five feet tall. She wore velveteen blouses clasped at the neck with a turquoise-and-silver brooch and a black scarf knotted around her tight bun of steely hair. Her mouth rested in a soft frown, except when she found something amusing, and then it lifted to form a smile the exact size and shape of an upturned cashew.

  Harry and Bessie may well be the last generation of sheepherders in their bloodline; none of their six living children had plans to return to their ancestral land and scrape out a living raising sheep. The steady decline of shepherding is a source of great concern for many Navajo people, since the practice has long been integral to their cultural identity. Archaeological and documentary evidence suggests that Navajos first acquired sheep around 1598, when the conquistador Don Juan de Oñate brought roughly three thousand Churra sheep to the American Southwest. However, the Navajo oral tradition maintains that shepherding stretches back much further, to the dawn of their existence as a people. “With our sheep we were created,” proclaimed a local hataałii, or ceremonial singer, named Mr. Yellow Water. According to one particularly vivid version of the Navajo creation story, when the celestial being known as Changing Woman gave birth to sheep and goats, her amniotic fluid soaked into the earth, and from it sprouted the plants that sheep now eat. Next, she created human beings—Diné, as the Navajo call themselvesIV—and sent them to live within the four sacred mountains that still demarcate Navajo country. As a parting gift, she gave them sheep.

  For centuries, that gift has shaped Navajo culture, just as water sculpts a canyon. Navajos’ internal clocks were set to the daily schedule of herding, and their calendars were structured by the seasonal migration. The introduction of wool radically altered their material culture, by providing the means to weave lightweight clothing, warm blankets, and intricate rugs. Their architecture was fortified by the need to protect sheep from raiders. Pastoralism altered their diet, their relationship to the landscape, and perhaps even their metaphysics. One Navajo woman told the author Christopher Phillips that herding sheep informed her understanding of the sacred Navajo principle of hozho, or harmony. “The sheep care for us, provide for us, and we do the same for them. This contributes to hozho. Before I tend my sheep each day, I pray to the Holy People, and give thanks to them for the sheep and how they help make my life more harmonious.” When a baby is born, Navajo parents often bury its umbilical cord in their sheep corral, in order to symbolically tie the child to the sheep and to the land. Indeed, as the anthropologist Ruth Murray Underhill suggested, in some sense the Navajo people as we know them—or more importantly, as they know themselves—arrived in this world alongside sheep.

 

  On my first morning of shepherding, I sat on a metal folding chair in front of my hogan, waiting for someone to tell me what to do. This was my first mistake: as a rule, older Navajos do not relish the opportunity to explain things to naive, inquisitive white people. They would typically prefer the pupil learn through silent observation. Moreover, Harry and Bessie only spoke Diné Bizaad, the traditional language of the Navajo people. Their English was extremely limited, as was my grasp of Diné Bizaad. Unless one of her children was visiting, the only person who could translate for us was Bessie’s brother, a rascally character whose name was either Johnny, Kee, Keith, or all three. (Navajos are known to accumulate multiple names over their lifetimes.) When he was around, J/K/K acted as the translator between me and the Begays, but he had left that morning in a pickup truck with his friend Norman, saying he wouldn’t be back for five days. I was on my own, the only English speaker for miles.

  The hogan, like all hogans, was built facing the east, and the risen sun was on my face. Hearing bells, I turned to see a storm cloud of sheep pouring out of the corral. Bessie walked behind them, leaning on an old broomstick. I jogged over to her. With her stick, she drew a circle in the dust, and then bisected it with a straight line: . At the top of the circle she drew another, smaller circle.

  “Tó,” she said, using one of the only Diné Bizaad words I knew: “Water.”

  Using gestures and a few scattered English words, she made it clear that she wanted me to take the sheep to a nearby windmill, which pumped water from the ground into a trough, let them drink, graze them in a big circle, and then bring them home by nightfall. I had seen such a windmill on the drive in, and, while I didn’t know how to get back to it, I trusted that the sheep did. (This was my second mistake.)

  The sheep were already streaming loosely across the yard toward the shallow canyons to the northwest, so I ran to my hogan, threw some supplies into my backpack, and jogged after them.

  I found the sheep in the weeds just beyond the Begays’ yard. They went snuffling along the ground, plucking out tender green shoots of grass, their lips fluttering rapidly. Occasionally, I glimpsed the bright flash of a wildflower before it vanished.

  I noticed that this flock had recently been shorn; the khaki folds and fissures of their backs resembled an aerial view of the desert. The Navajo-Churro sheep, the oldest breed in North America, is known for its long, straight wool, which is much prized by Navajo weavers. The breed—which has declined greatly over the decades, due in part to the meddling of federal officials who ignorantly judged them “scrubby,” “inbred,” and “degenerate”—is also known as the American Four-Horn, because some rams grow four full horns. Though I had hoped to see one, this particular flock contained only castrated rams and, therefore, no such marvelous oddities.

  Orbiting the flock were five shaggy mutts. Four of them stuck close to the sheep. The fifth, a brown-furred, sweet-eyed little adventurer, quickly attached herself to me. She stayed on my heels from morning to night; when we sat down for a break, she would rest her chin on my knee. Harry had mentioned to his children that he was thinking of getting rid of her, because she followed humans instead of the sheep, making her useless as a sheepdog. But this habit endeared her to me, and I snuck her pieces of beef jerky when the other dogs weren’t looking.

  Dogs have been used to herd sheep and ward off predators since at least the Middle Ages. With prope
r training, sheepdogs can be trained to follow a system of whistles and hand signals to manage enormous herds. The Begays’ dogs, however, were not those dogs. They responded to no commands (save the one that indicated it was mealtime) and obeyed no master. Their role, so far as I could see, was to bark at anything that moved, be it a sprinting jackrabbit, a terrified horse, or a passing pickup truck.

  I had been warned that the Begays’ sheep had a reputation for being “a difficult flock,” but as we left the homesite and dipped down into a series of sandy stream beds, they seemed sane enough. (Admittedly, I had very little frame of reference.) After spending all night penned up, they walked with vigor, only stopping to nibble once every few steps. The lambs leaped into the air in fishy wriggles. From time to time the young males paused to buck heads, then jogged to catch up.

  When the flock encountered a trail, they sometimes jostled into single file—“stringing,” shepherds call this—and broke into a senseless run, their ears flapping up and down, until one of the leaders became distracted by a tasty piece of forage and broke up the race. The geometry of the flock varied according to its speed: As soon as they slowed down, the sheep would fan out into a triangular shape, with the widest part leading the way. When the forage was particularly good, they would slow to a crawl and form a roughly horizontal line, like protesters marching arm in arm. As soon as they sped back up, they resumed stringing. As I watched the sheep running in single file that morning, I quickly realized how and why sheep trails form: it was a matter of speed.

  But over time I came to notice that even when the sheep were walking slowly, they sometimes showed a strange, almost idiotic, fidelity to these trails. They liked to graze along the trail’s edge until it intersected with another trail, at which point, if I didn’t intervene, some or all of them would absentmindedly turn onto the new trail rather than follow their former trajectory. They were apparently happy to follow any trail, anywhere.