On Trails

by Robert Moor

  When you herd sheep, those living lawn mowers, this question becomes all the more urgent. A skillful herder with a willing flock can radically transform the ground they walk on, for better or worse. In Tutira, Guthrie-Smith describes how, over the course of forty years, he and his sheep converted a tract of land covered in bracken, bush, and flax into a bucolic, grassy sheep ranch. First, the sheep trampled trails through the bracken and manuka, which created canals to drain the bogs and allowed palatable native grasses, like weeping rice, to sprout along the trails’ edges. Areas of spongy, fern-choked turf were soon compressed into a soil fit for grass. The sheep’s manure fertilized the ground and re-sodded hills blown bare by the wind. The sheep even constructed “viaducts” between hilltops and “sleeping-shelves” on the hillsides. Year by year, they quite literally carved out a place for themselves to live.

  However, Guthrie-Smith warned that, if the shepherd isn’t careful, sheep can have the opposite effect. When they walk across a plot of land too often, their hooves can compact the soil to an “iron surface,” which hinders grass growth. More destructive still is the problem of overgrazing, which is described in alarming detail in Elinor G. K. Melville’s A Plague of Sheep. When allowed to breed unchecked, sheep sometimes enter a pattern of what ecologists call “irruptive oscillation” (boom-bust), which can permanently degrade the landscape. When too many sheep graze in the same area, they eventually begin chomping grass down to its roots. In warm, dry climates, this can eventually lead to what is known as “ovine desertification.” The process is deviously self-reinforcing: Grass normally serves to both shade the soil and retain rainfall, so when grass is cropped too low, the soil desiccates. Drier soil leads the existing plant species to die off, and new species—those which are better suited to drier climates and, not coincidentally, inedible to sheep—take their place. As this prickly new plant life spreads unchecked, the sheep hunt down the last of the good forage and a vicious circle forms: less forage leads to more cropping down to the roots, which then leads to even less forage. Eventually, the sheep die off in large numbers and the cycle is broken, but not before the soil and vegetation are irreparably changed.

  According to Melville, in the sixteenth century the introduction of Spanish sheep—against the strenuous objections of the indigenous population—into Mexico’s Valle del Mezquital converted a number of grasslands and oak forests to arid scrublands thick with thistles, mesquite, and other spiny plants. By the end of the century, Melville wrote, “the ‘good grazing lands’ of the 1570s had become scrub-covered badlands.”

  In the 1930s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs believed that this process was taking place in the Begays’ corner of the Navajo reservation. Between 1868 and 1930, the Navajo population grew fourfold. Their growth was fed by a roughly parallel explosion in the population of sheep and goats, which the Navajo herded along looping routes from the summer highlands to the winter lowlands. However, the soil had begun to dry out, and the good forage was giving way to (aptly named) toxic plants like snakeweed, sneezeweed, Russian thistle, and locoweed. Federal officials believed that if drastic reductions were not made in the Navajo livestock population, the bulk of the reservation might effectively degrade into a wasteland.

  At the time, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was headed by a well-­intentioned but ultimately tragic figure named John Collier. Raised in Atlanta and educated in New York and Paris, Collier romanticized the Navajo nation as “an island of aboriginal culture in the monotonous sea of machine civilization.” However, he also viewed their herding practices—based as they were on tradition, spirituality, and firsthand knowledge—as inferior to the burgeoning science of range management. While it was plain to Collier and his colleagues that the Navajo range was over-grazed, many Navajos believed that the poor forage was merely the result of an unusually dry spell of weather. (Indeed, the region was suffering from the same climatic shift that famously converted the prairies of Oklahoma into a dust bowl.) Some Navajo elders held that the drought was brought on by a breakdown of religious tradition, which, ironically, meant that Collier’s proposed plan—of slaughtering huge numbers of sheep—could further upset the Holy People and worsen the drought.

  The Navajo, who had lived on the land for centuries before Collier even arrived, were understandably upset by the notion of a white stranger from Georgia telling them how to manage their sheep. Some of Collier’s advisors, like the forester Bob Marshall, stressed to him the importance of crafting an approach that respected the Navajos’ metaphysical beliefs, complex family dynamics, and profound knowledge of the land.

  Collier did not heed this advice. Instead, he instituted a draconian system of stock reduction in which thousands of sheep, goats, and horses were shot en masse. Many corpses were either left to rot or doused in kerosene and burned. In the end, the total number of livestock was cut in half. Moreover, Collier sought to “modernize” the Navajo herding system by breaking the land into eighteen grazing “districts,” which disrupted the annual migrations that had long allowed the Navajo to adapt to a harsh and volatile climate. The Navajo Tribal Council frantically passed a number of resolutions in an effort to halt the regulations, but Collier exercised his congressionally mandated veto power. In frustration, many Navajos resisted violently, while others protested to Congress. Finally, by 1945, Collier was ousted, and his livestock reduction plan quietly scrapped. His bitter tenure is still remembered by many Navajos as a period of cultural genocide.

  In hindsight, it seems clear that the core problem of the 1930s was not that the Navajo had too many sheep, but that the land had too many people. As the historian Richard White has noted, as the Navajo population continued to grow, an exploding population of Anglo and Chicano ranchers were edging into Navajo-owned lands. Indeed, over the same time span that the Navajo population quadrupled, the total population in Arizona multiplied by a factor of sixty-seven. Throughout the 1930s, government officials repeatedly warned the Navajo that they were facing a Malthusian disaster. However, White noted, no one ever told the Anglos to slow their population growth, or cease encroaching on Navajo land. Collier and other federal officials, being unwilling to grant more grazing land to the Navajos, opted instead to cull the Navajo herds and disrupt their traditions. In the process of trying to preserve their land, Collier ended up embodying many of the worst aspects of imperialism—ignorance, racial supremacy, and brutality. Despite his efforts, or perhaps in part because of them, the rangeland’s vegetation has continued to wither ever since.

  In effect, Collier believed his job was to shepherd the shepherds: for his plan to work, he needed to convince a population of intelligent, independent-minded people to alter their traditions and sacrifice much of their wealth. It was a delicate task that would surely have been better handled by the Navajo themselves. Perhaps, as some have suggested, a Navajo leader could have forged a collective agreement around their core belief in hozho (harmony). What’s more, any Navajo who had grown up herding sheep would also have understood the most basic axiom of shepherding: though a wise shepherd can bend the flock’s trajectory, the shepherd must ultimately conform to the needs of the flock, not the other way around.

 

  Two weeks passed. May became June. The sky increasingly took on the blue hue of a butane torch. As the heat intensified, the sheep grew lazier, and the herding became easier. Around two P.M., the flock would gather in the shade of a large juniper tree for a siesta, panting rapidly through flared nostrils. The lambs—who had not yet been shorn—would occasionally become so oppressed by the heat that they would fall forward like drunks and eat while resting on their elbows. Here and there, I would find white balls of wool nested in the grass. When I startled them—and only then—they would sprout legs, spring up, and trot on. By three P.M., every last sheep was heat-stunned, and I would have to chase them from shade tree to shade tree all the way home.

  One morning near the end of my stay on the Begays’ property, just as I was beginning to g
ain some confidence in my abilities as a shepherd, Harry and his daughter Jane drove up in a pickup truck carrying five white Angora goats.

  After they had unloaded the goats into the corral, I walked over to take a closer look. I peered over the fence and was surprised to find only sheep. Then something uncanny caught my eye. Off to the side stood five strange beings, camouflaged among the sheep, but whiter, shinier. They had tilted eyes and thin limbs, and from their chins hung long white beards. Their nervousness was palpable. I imagined that, to them, the corral must have resembled a prison yard in a foreign land. The sheep’s blunt faces and muscled shoulders no doubt seemed brutish, whereas to the sheep, the goats must have looked, as they did to me, otherworldly and effete.

  I later learned that this type of goat, the Angora, is highly prized by many Navajo families. Originally from Tibet, the breed made its way to America by way of Turkey, passing through Ankara, where it picked up its name. It is an ancient breed, mentioned in the book of Exodus, but has only been raised by the Navajo in any significant numbers since the turn of the twentieth century, when the goats’ long silken hair, called mohair, began to fetch higher prices than sheep’s wool. Today, Angora mohair from Navajo country is considered some of the best in the world.

  The following morning, when Bessie let the goats out of the corral, I was apprehensive; Jane had told me that the family had tried raising goats before, but had quit because they were too much trouble to herd. As the gate swung open, the first few seconds passed normally. The goats fell in line with the sheep and filed out of the corral. Then the dogs, after an interval of suspicious sniffing, recognized that there were alien beings in their midst, and began barking viciously at the Angoras. The goats flew into a state of panic, skittering away from the dogs with wild eyes. Bessie and I shouted and swung our walking sticks ineffectually at the dogs, who paused from their righteous chase to look up at us with confused and hurt expressions.

  I was told by numerous people that goats usually walk ahead of the sheep, but these had the tendency to walk in the back—at times falling so far behind that I would have to circle around and hurry them along. Their hesitation seemed largely to be due to their (understandable) fear of the dogs, who, throughout the day, would periodically forget that morning’s lesson, sniff out the presence of these weird not-quite-sheep, and excitedly renew the attack.

  The skittishness of the goats threw off my rhythm. It was as if I had spent weeks learning to juggle three rubber balls, and then someone tossed a golf ball into the mix. As we passed through the canyon on our way to the grassy valley, they lingered in areas the sheep trotted past, rearing up on their hind legs to gnaw on flowering cliffrose bushes and low trees. The subtle differences in their behavior made me realize how much I had grown to rely on my ability to intuit the sheep’s intentions.

  This slight disconnect would lead to calamity. The following day, when the flock reached the far side of the valley, the sheep, as they always did, recognized the windmill, fell into a trail, and galloped for it. But the goats—either not knowing what the image of the windmill signified, or not smelling the water—balked. I decided to follow the sheep, which, if unchaperoned, tended to wander off onto the neighbor’s property. (That land was patrolled by a young Navajo man in a black pickup truck, who had angrily scolded me, on two separate occasions, for encroaching on his family’s grazing area.) The goats, I reckoned, would either follow behind us, or they would remain where they were.

  When the goats did not show up at the trough, I jogged up a hill and caught a glimpse of them in the distance, their wispy tails raised, burning white in the morning sun. Then I ran back, gathered the sheep, and circled around to where the goats had been—only to find that they had vanished. The sun grew hot, pressing the lambs to their knees. Many of the sheep gathered in the shade. I left them there and crisscrossed the valley searching for the lost goats. I looked for hours. Sick once again with shame, I brought the sheep back home and informed Bessie and Harry that the goats had disappeared.

  “Oh,” Bessie said. We all climbed into the truck.

  And so my time herding ended as it began: standing in the bed of a pickup, straining my eyes against the sere hillsides, seeing phantoms in every clump of yellow grass or gap in the trees. From time to time Harry got out of the truck and peered at faint signs printed in the dust, trying to track down what I had lost.

  PART III

  Hunting

  Days later, back in New York, I called to check on the whereabouts of the goats. I was relieved to learn that Harry had eventually tracked down all five, and they were unharmed.

  This skill of Harry’s amazed me. I had often tried to track down lost sheep or goats myself, but I was never successful. In the talc-fine desert soil, which preserved footprints with surprising clarity, it was impossible for me to differentiate between a track that had been made a few hours ago from one that had been made a few days ago; hoofprints ran in every direction like voices chattering over one another. Harry, however, could easily differentiate between the different tracks with a glance. Indeed, oftentimes he would release the sheep from the corral and allow them to roam free for hours while he attended to some other task. Then, in the late afternoon, he would saddle up his horse and patiently track them down.

  Information resides in trails, but it is encoded in a language that must be painstakingly learned. Aboriginal Australians, who are considered by many to be the finest trackers in the world, begin teaching their children to track almost from birth. According to Thomas Magarey, who moved to South Australia in the 1850s, Aboriginal mothers taught their babies to track by placing a small lizard in front of the infant; the lizard would scamper off, and then the child would crawl after it, meticulously tracking it to its hiding place. From lizards, the child would rise in proficiency “until beetles, spiders, ants, centipedes, scorpions, and such like fairy trackmakers are followed over the tell-tale ground.” For fun, men of the Pintupi tribe would create startlingly accurate reproductions of animal tracks with their knuckles and fingers in the desert sand, writing fluently in an alien script.

  Elsewhere, in the Kalahari Desert, young boys of the !Kung tribe are encouraged to set traps for small game in order to learn about animal spoor. In order to trap an animal, one must predict its future, and the first clue to an animal’s future movements is to locate its habitual trails. The simplest traps—crude deadfalls, pitfalls, and foot snares—are often placed along animal trails, a technique trappers call a “blind set.” Elaborating on this technique, the indigenous Ndorobo tribe of Kenya dig deep pits, which are sometimes lined with spikes, in the middle of elephant trails. It is an inspired innovation; they locate the elephants’ paths, read their futures, and then, like Theseus battling the Minotaur, use the beast’s chief asset—its immense bulk—against it.

  Following animal trails is the most basic form of what the evolutionary biologist Louis Liebenberg calls “simple tracking.” Liebenberg has spent years studying the !Kung people’s particular form of persistence hunting, which requires highly advanced tracking skills. As they gain expertise, !Kung hunters graduate to a more “refined” technique, called “systematic” tracking, where a pattern is found and followed among less distinct or discontinuous tracks. Finally, the most complex form of tracking, which Liebenberg calls “speculative tracking,” requires the tracker to piece together scanty and scattered evidence to create a hypothesis of where the animal might be headed, so he can expect where to find the next set of tracks.

  In his 1990 book The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science, Liebenberg argues that a close study of tracking techniques could resolve a seeming paradox of evolutionary history: How did the human brain evolve the ability to think scientifically—which, in turn, led to an explosion of technology and knowledge—if scientific reasoning was not required for hunter-gatherer subsistence? Plainly, humans did not evolve with the “aim” of one day diagramming the structure of an atom; evolution, as th
e saying goes, doesn’t plan ahead. But then why would humans have evolved the abilities necessary to practice science if we didn’t need them to survive?

  Liebenberg’s answer is simple: tracking is science. “The art of tracking,” he argues, “is a science that requires fundamentally the same intellectual abilities as modern physics and mathematics.” The famed astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who often wrote about the !Kung, agreed. “Scientific thinking almost certainly has been with us from the beginning,” he once wrote. “The development of tracking skills delivers a powerful evolutionary selective advantage. Those groups unable to figure it out get less protein and leave fewer offspring. Those with a scientific bent, those able to patiently observe, those with a penchant for figuring out acquiring more food, especially more protein, and live in more varied habitats; they and their hereditary lines prosper.”

  This theory is an offshoot of an older—and hotly contested—­theory in paleontology called the hunting hypothesis, which holds that the pursuit of big game led to much of the development of human language, culture, and technology. I have my doubts about both theories. Liebenberg in particular goes a bit too far in equating “science”—a specific, standardized system of inquiry—with the advanced analytical skills and imagination (what he calls “hypothetico-deductive reasoning”) that would eventually allow humans to develop that codified system. Tracking was hardly the only facet of prehistoric life that would have required this skill-set; if tracking is a prehistoric form of physics, then gathering plants is also an early form of botany, and cooking is a precursor to chemistry.