Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild

About this book

An inspired reflection on the bond between wild creatures and the human imagination told as a chronicle of four seasons with a band of rare desert bighorn sheep. Among the steep cliffs of Utahs canyonlands a band of rare desert bighorn sheep simply vanished. Although the word extinct was bandied about their passing seemed to fit the downward spiral of native wildlife in the Southwest that began in the early twentieth century. Remote isolated and elusive this band slipped through the cracks. The bighorns were gone. Then they came back. We have allowed ourselves few places and scant ways to witness other species in their own world Ellen Meloy writes an estrangement that has left us lonely and spiritually hungry. Now with generous empathy and wry humor the award-winning author of The Anthropology of Turquoise describes the mystery of the bighorns self-rescue. In the role of an amiable nosy neighbor Meloy matches her seasonal geography to theirs observing cycles of breeding and birth predators and death the exquisite match of animal to place of blood and bone to a magnificent redrock canyon. On backcountry hikes downriver floats and travels to Mexico the Great Basin and the Chihuahuan Desert Meloy roams the rugged habitat of these intriguing and precarious natives. Throughout we revel with her in the air light and dazzling colors of the high desert. Most of all we come to understand why she finds that watching wild animals intensely is very much like prayer.