On Trails (19 page)

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 gain 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 the 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.

Nevertheless, there is a kernel of truth to these theories: Hunting is an indisputably fundamental human tradition, which has shaped us in various ways. Long before we ever looked at other animals as pets or test subjects, we viewed them as either predators or prey. To understand the full role that trails play on Earth—to see how they can lead not just to a long life, but also to a quick death—I needed to see them through the eyes of a hunter.

+

Until I began researching it, the sum total of my lifelong hunting experience was limited to a few mornings spent in a deer blind on my grandfather's ranch as a child. (My memories consist of staring numbly into the cellarine dawn of a Texas autumn for hours—an exquisitely subtle kind of torture for a child.) So I began asking around in search of an expert hunter. An acquaintance pointed me to a man in Alabama named Rickey Butch Walker. When I emailed Walker, he replied with a concise list of his credentials: with his bow
and arrows, he had shot 114 white-tailed deer over his lifetime, and seven that season alone. He didn't use bait, he didn't use dogs, and he had never killed a deer with a gun, in part because he didn't like the noise a gun makes. (He had gotten his fill of guns as a rifle platoon leader in the National Guard, he wrote.) Most important—to me, at least—he only hunted for food, not trophies.

Walker graciously agreed to put me up in his spare bedroom for a weekend and take me out hunting, so I flew down to Huntsville. At the bottom of the escalator to the baggage claim, a big, bullish man was waiting for me. His head shone under the cold cathode lights. It was shaved slick, along with everything else above his collarbone, as if that morning, and every morning, he had placed a razor at the base of his nape and dragged it up over his crown and down the front of his face in one continuous motion. Where his eyebrows should have been were just two wrinkles of muscle. His bright blue eyes were pinched in behind a deep squint—eyes that could be either cheerful or circumspect without changing shape. We shook hands. He took one of my bags. The back of his T-shirt sported the slogan of a brand of hunting clothing called Mossy Oak: “It's not a Passion. It's an Obsession.”

Outside the airport it was dusky and warm. We threw my bags into the bed of a red Ford truck and climbed aboard. Walker turned onto a highway, which soon passed over the wide, slow Tennessee River. His cell phone lit up with a text message from his cousin, which I read aloud for him:
I got 1800 lbs of corn today. 36 sacks. My little trailer pulled it great.