On Trails

by Robert Moor

  According to the rancher William Herbert Guthrie-Smith, when domestic sheep are brought to a new area, they immediately begin to establish a habitat for themselves by creating trails. He watched this process firsthand after he purchased twenty-four thousand acres of rain-soaked New Zealand wilderness in 1882, which he patiently converted into a sheep ranch. The first action of sheep in a new land, he wrote, was to “map it out, to explore it . . . by lines radiating from established camps.” The sheep trails snaked outward, skirting around bogs, cliffs, pitfalls, and “blind oozy creeks.” Many sheep were reportedly “swallowed up” by the wet earth in this exploration process. But eventually, the trails that failed to reach adequate foraging grounds faded, while the useful ones improved. The radial pattern that Guthrie-Smith describes is common for sheep; sunken paths (called “hollow ways”) have been found radiating out from Bronze Age villages in Mesopotamia.

  Reading Guthrie-Smith, I began to formulate a two-part theory as to why the Begays’ sheep placed such blind trust in trails. In the absence of a shepherd, paths provide the basic guidance sheep need to find their way to food, water, and shelter. As they do for ants and elephants, trails function as a form of external memory. Just as the notion of building a road that leads nowhere seems absurd to us, it would never occur to sheep that one of their trails might not lead to something desirable. So they follow them, trusting that the destination will be worthwhile. At the same time, sheep trails also carve out new sunny spaces (what ecologists call “edge habitats”) where different species of grass take hold; in New Zealand, Guthrie-Smith noted that along sheep trails sprouted “succulent green stuff such as white clover, suckling, cape-weed, and sorrel.” I would not be surprised if something similar was happening in Arizona, because the sheep showed a preference for grazing along roads and trails (assuming the forage hadn’t already been picked clean by another flock). In this simple fashion, sheep use trails to begin bending the land to their needs.

 

  In the calmer moments that first morning, I was able to able to admire the desert. The soil was the mingled color of pencil shavings, in turns a pale yellow, a powdery pink, and a dry black. Out of it grew a stiff yellow grass. I recalled John Muir’s description of California’s Central Valley in late May: “Dead and dry and crisp, as if every plant had been roasted in an oven.” Actual tumbleweeds actually tumbled across my path. Things poked at my ankles as I walked: spiky tufts of grass, tiny bamboo groves of the green ephedra plant called “Mormon tea,” ankle-high cacti with spines the color of old toenails. The only shade came from the scattered juniper trees, which writhed against an ageless wind.

  Off to the northwest, I spotted a windmill, but it looked as tiny as a tin toy. While I was contemplating whether, and how, to turn the flock around, the sheep—as if hatching a whispered scheme—began to divide into two equal-sized groups. I watched the split slowly forming, but I couldn’t move quickly enough to prevent it.

  One group drifted downhill, off to the east, while the other nosed up the hill to the west. Placing my faith in the directional sense of the leaders—my biggest mistake yet—I focused my attention instead on the tailers, figuring that they would be less headstrong. I broke into a run and skirted wide around them. Then, shouting curses, I attempted to rush them up the hill. But now their gait—which all day had been brisk and light—was suddenly slow, their hooves leaden. They stopped often, glancing about, as if entering unfamiliar and dangerous territory. Growing increasingly panicked that I would lose half of the Begays’ sheep, I left the sluggards where they were and ran up the hill in the direction I’d last seen the other half of the flock.

  The land rose to a flat tabletop, runneled with narrow washes and forested with pinyon pine. I imagined that sheep were lurking behind every stand of trees, and I even heard the spectral gonging of their bells, but they were nowhere to be seen.

  As I reached the top of the mesa, something trotted across my path. It moved from my right to my left, low and quick. For a moment I thought it was one of the dogs.

  Then I recognized it: a coyote. Ears up, mouth open, it glided over the sand with the cool certainty of a missile.

  A sick feeling bloomed in my abdomen. I envisioned finding one of the lambs torn open, its red chest toothed with white ribs.

  Running in a circle, I shouted for the dogs, whose names I did not know. Then I ran back down the hill, where I’d left the other half of the flock, only to find that they, too, had disappeared. It seemed impossible, an elaborate practical joke. I turned in circles, feeling dazed. In my mouth had grown a cat’s dry tongue.

  The word panic, fittingly enough, refers back to Pan, the mischievous goat-legged god whose bellowing used to terrify shepherds and their flocks. Suddenly I felt its true meaning—a blinding electricity that floods the mind, prompting action without premeditation. I ran back up the hill. I found nothing. I ran back down to the valley: more nothing. Then, losing hope but unsure of what else to do, I ran back up the hill.

  It was not yet ten in the morning on my first day of herding, and I had lost every last sheep.

 

  It is perhaps no accident that the idyllic stereotype of the happy, lazy shepherd—as popularized by poets like Theocritus, Milton, Goethe, Blake, and Leopardi—began to crumble as soon as it reached the wide expanses of the American continent. John Muir, a self-described “poetico-tramp-geologist-bot. and ornith-natural, etc.!!!,” spent the summer of 1869 with a sheep outfit in the Sierra mountains as a young man. Most of the time he left the shepherds to mind the sheep while he traipsed around making sketches of glaciers and pines. He hated the sheep (deeming them “hoofed locusts”) and had scarcely more respect for shepherds, whom he found to be filthy, intellectually dull, and mentally unstable. “Seeing nobody for weeks or months,” he claimed, the sheepherder “finally becomes semi-insane or wholly so.” Archer Gilfillan, a herder of nearly twenty years, agreed. “Considering all the things that can and do happen to a herder in the course of his work,” he wrote, “the wonder is not that some of them are supposed to go crazy, but that any of them stay sane.”

  I was beginning to see what he meant.

  Looking to the south, I spotted the Begay’s blue pickup truck inching along a dirt road. I wondered if they had been quietly tailing me all morning, having anticipated just this sort of debacle. As I approached, Bessie rolled down the passenger-side window. Her eyes were big behind her glasses, her mouth down-curled into a perfect omega. She said something complicated in Diné Bizaad, then, registering my confusion, simply asked: “Where the sheep?” Her voice quavered. I attempted to pantomime what had happened, with poor results. She looked down and fished an old flip phone out of an embroidered pouch around her neck, poked at it a few times, then handed it to me. On the other end of the line was her daughter, Patty.

  “Okay, what happened?” Patty asked.

  I told the story: fission, drift, the frantic race between two widening poles, then . . .

  I handed the phone back to Bessie. Patty translated. With a sigh, Bessie clapped the phone shut and gestured for me to get in the truck.

  We slowly prowled the dirt roads. Once every few minutes Harry would stop the truck and they would get out to inspect the ground for fresh tracks. After one of these stops, I hopped up into the bed of the truck to gain a higher vantage (and to avoid Bessie’s sightline). I was queasy with guilt. In the matrilineal and matrilocal Navajo society, a family’s sheep traditionally belong to the women, and Bessie’s deep attachment to her sheep was palpable. They represented not just a sizable chunk of her life savings—ten thousand dollars, more or less—but also decades of labor and centuries of tradition. The sheep I’d lost were a living inheritance from her ancestors, and future gifts to her grandchildren.

  After an hour of searching, we gave up and drove home. Patty was waiting there with her two boisterous kids. They were sitting on the couches that lined three walls of the Begays’ s
unny living room. Patty paused from shushing her children to welcome me back.

  “So, how many did you lose?” she asked.

  I sighed painfully. “All of them.”

  “Don’t worry, happens all the time,” she said. “They show up eventually. Maybe we lose one to a coyote. That happens too. Wouldn’t be the first time. Won’t be the last.”

  She had brought a plastic cooler full of raw skirt steak—a welcome treat for Harry and Bessie, since they lived almost an hour from the nearest grocery store and had no refrigerator. She went outside to stoke the wood fire for the grill. I sat in the living room and stared at the walls, which were lined with old family photographs, calendars, and a large tapestry one of the Begay boys had brought back from his stint in the military, which depicted two colonial officers, astride elephants, hunting down a tiger. A bookshelf was stocked with yellow-­spined National Geographic magazines dating back decades. The couches were neatly covered with bedsheets. Flies circled the room in endless, spirographic patterns.

  Some time later, Harry came riding into the yard on his horse, herding half the flock in front of him. Watching them funnel into the corral, I felt some relief, but not much. The other half was still out there with the coyotes.

  After lunch, we got back into the truck. Rather than driving west, where I had lost the sheep, we drove due north, on a dirt road that ran up the middle of a grassy valley. At the northern end stood the chrome-bright windmill I had spotted earlier.

  Patty pointed out her left window and told me to avoid taking the sheep over there, to the west—the precise place I had taken them. “They get all crazy up in those hills,” she said. Plus, she added, it was too easy for a new shepherd to lose sight of them among the trees and gullies. It was better to walk them in wide circles around the valley, a place I would later, in my endless perambulations of its grassy slopes, come to call “the salad bowl.” (I recalled Bessie’s map, drawn in the dust, which suddenly made perfect sense. It was the salad bowl bisected by the road: .)

  We pulled up to the windmill, which revolved slowly, its innards pistoning, drawing water from the ground. On its tail vane, in red paint, was printed: THE AERMOTOR CO/SAN ANGELO, TX/USA. Beside it stood a trough and a ten-foot-tall holding tank of water.

  In its shade stood the sheep.

  We counted them: They were all there. None had been eaten by the coyote. The dogs were all nearby. Something in my gut slowly unclenched, and I could breathe. (Perhaps those dogs aren’t so useless after all, I thought.)

  Patty told me to walk the sheep home. “Slowly,” she added.

  I stepped out of the truck and walked around the sheep in a wide circle. They looked at me placidly, without a wrinkle of guilt. Even a dog would have had the courtesy to avert its eyes, but they were blameless as lumps of snow.

  When they had finished drinking, we started off home. The sheep seemed to know the way, so I slung my walking stick over my shoulder and ambled behind them as they crossed the sun-washed valley. Once again, the shepherd’s life seemed idyllic.

  When we arrived back at the Begays’ property, I steered the sheep toward the corral, a shoulder-high enclosure made up of wooden boards, scrap metal, and mismatched plastic tarps. The other half of the flock was already waiting inside the corral, and upon hearing our approach they began bleating frantically. My half of the flock shouted in idiotic response. The moment I opened the corral door to let my sheep in, chaos broke loose: the trapped sheep attempted to escape as the other half attempted to invade. A white liquid roil ensued. Hungry lambs rushed out and swiveled their snouts between their mothers’ hind legs, latching onto their udders even as the ewes strode forward into the corral. Despite my best efforts, two hungry sheep escaped. I assumed they would obey their flocking instinct and follow the rest back into the corral, but instead, to my horror, the majority of the flock turned and rushed to follow the escapees before I could shut the unwieldy gate.

  The glitch, I realized, was that my half of the flock had already stuffed themselves with grass, whereas the other half, which Harry had rounded up earlier, had spent the afternoon growing hungry.

  The escapees slunk off, looking for grass. No matter what I tried, I could not coax them back; I could herd them as close as the corral, but as soon as I opened the gate, the leaders would rear their heads and gallop back out to pasture, trailing the rest behind them. Eventually the two rebellious sheep allowed me to herd them into the corral, but only once they had eaten their fill. This was my final lesson that day. In the words of Muir: “Sheep, like people, are ungovernable when hungry.”

 

  Over the course of many years, shepherds and their flocks mold to each other. They tailor each other’s behavior and shape each other’s bodies—the shepherd tries to keep the sheep fat, while the sheep endeavor to keep the shepherd thin. With time, humans weed out the sheep that refuse to follow (by butchering them), and the sheep weed out the humans who are unfit to lead (by driving them to a state of either insanity or depression).

  One morning, Bessie went off to run an errand, so she sent Harry off with the sheep and tasked me with preparing lunch. Leaving a pot of beans to simmer, I snuck out to observe Harry at work. I was struck to find that, under his care, the sheep were utterly calm, stopping for long periods of time to pick over the grass, whereas with me they had been as restless as fleas. Being too old and stiff to walk long distances, Harry sat tall atop his horse, a brown stallion with a white star on his forehead. He paced around the flock in graceful curves, slowing down the leaders, hurrying up the stragglers, gently molding the cloud. I never even saw him trot; the horse took slow, balletic steps. When a straggler failed (or refused) to catch up, Harry sometimes circled back for it. Other times, he appeared to leave it behind, confident it would eventually return to the fold.

  Over the centuries shepherds have developed many clever ways of managing their flocks. In many countries, shepherds train a goat or a castrated ram, called a “wether,” to follow spoken commands. (To more easily locate it, shepherds tend to put a bell on this sheep, a practice that furnished us with the term bellwether.) The custom of bellwethering was noted as far back as Aristotle’s The History of Animals. In 1873, the British writer and magazine editor Thomas Bywater Smithies relayed an anecdote that, under other circumstances, would haunt the nightmares of anyone who has herded sheep: One day, he watched as thousands of sheep from many different flocks mixed together by the banks of the Jordan River. “It seemed a scene of inextricable confusion,” Smithies wrote. “But as each shepherd gave his own peculiar call, the sheep belonging to him, and knowing his voice, came out from the crowd, and followed their own leader.”

  In my three weeks of herding, I did not have time to train my sheep. I was instead relegated to the role of benevolent predator, chasing them to where I thought they should go. As the weeks passed, though, I did pick up a few tricks. I learned not to micromanage the sheep, because (as Moroni Smith, a Utah sheep rancher, once wrote) “an anxious herder makes a lean flock.” I learned to see the differences between each member of my flock; I gave each sheep a nickname and started to recognize their individual personalities, which allowed me to predict their movements. I learned that the tailers hung back for a reason—by slowly hunting up the dregs the hard-charging leaders left behind, they filled a niche. I learned that stray sheep are at the greatest risk of wandering off when they are in a large group and feel insulated from danger.V And I learned the importance of setting the sheep off in the correct direction as they left the corral in the morning, since the trajectory of their first hundred steps tended to dictate the following thousand, a phenomenon social scientists call “path dependence.”

  I also learned why certain sheep stray. Some of my sheep—most notably the one I called Burr Face, a gaunt, knock-kneed old ewe with a large burr permanently fastened to the wool on her left cheek—would routinely wander off. Initially, this just seemed like an error to m
e, but I came to realize that straying is a calculated gamble. The goal of every sheep is to spend as much time eating and as little time walking as possible (while, in turn, keeping themselves from being eaten). Most of the time, straying was an ill-advised decision, because I would chase the strays back to the herd, which meant they spent more time walking and less time eating. However, in the desert not all foods are considered equal. Grass is a staple for sheep, but what they prefer is pygmy sagebrush, wildflowers, or, especially, the fruit of the narrow-leaf yucca plant. (The very sight of yucca could send even the most indolent of sheep into a mad dash.) Every few escape attempts, the stragglers chanced upon one of these calorie-rich foods. On one occasion, Burr Face staged a small insurrection, leading six other sheep away from the herd toward a large patch of sagebrush. Seeing the wisdom of her discovery, I turned the herd around and led them all back to where she stood—and so, for thirty glorious minutes, a lifelong straggler was transformed into a far-sighted leader.

  Most important, I learned that whenever possible, a shepherd should attempt to bend the will of the sheep, rather than break it. By locating the nodes of desire that sheep naturally gravitate toward, I found I could steer the flock without unduly stressing it. Smith wrote that the object of skillful herding is not to bully the sheep, but rather to “create a desire with the sheep to do the things that the herder wants them to do,” which, he added, “is the secret of successful handling of all animals.”

 

  When I was younger I used to see the earth as a fundamentally stable and serene place, possessed of a delicate, nearly divine balance, which humans had somehow managed to upset. But as I studied trails more closely, this fantasy gradually evaporated. I now see the earth as the collaborative artwork of trillions of sculptors, large and small. Sheep, humans, elephants, ants: each of us alters the world in our passage. When we build hives or nests, mud huts or concrete towers, we re-sculpt the contours of the planet. When we eat, we convert living matter into waste. And when we walk, we create trails. The question we must ask ourselves is not whether we should shape the earth, but how.