On Trails (18 page)

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.”

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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 me, 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.”

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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.

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.