Eating Stone Read Online Free Page A

ought not to hunt geese and waved the birds away before anyone could. White's ardent love for natural beauty, his friends remarked, peaked in wild enthusiasm, then crashed into melancholy at beauty's transience.
    The melancholy may have been clinical. In gloom, he sought air. In the late 1930s, he wrote:
I had two books on the training of the falconidae in one of which was a sentence which suddenly struck fire from my mind. The sentence was: “She reverted to a feral state.” A longingcame to my mind that I should be able to do this myself. The word “feral” has a kind of magical potency which allied itself to two other words, “ferocious” and “free.” To revert to a feral state! I took a farm-labourer's cottage and wrote to Germany for a goshawk.
    The Goshawk, published in 1951, chronicled White's seduction by a great and beautiful bird. He used his wits and books (one of them a treatise on hawking written in 1619) to train his goshawk, but mostly it was the bird itself who taught him. He had a way of looking, White noted. “It was an alert, concentrated, piercing look. My duty at present was not to return it.”
    Only several years after his time with the goshawk and other wild raptors—he called them his “assassins”—did White observe a professional falconer at work. With humility, he admitted his own errors and credited his instincts. “The thing about being associated with a hawk is that one cannot be slipshod about it. No hawk can be a pet. There is no sentimentality…. One desires no transference of affection, demands no ignoble homage or gratitude. It is a tonic for the less forthright savagery of the human heart.”
    Unlike White, I have few ambitions of the autodidact. I could never bobble under the sea in an iron mudhead suit. Yet something in the mind's structure, something physical, thrives on, depends on, the notice of other beings. Attention, fierce or dreamy, affixes my butt to sheep country, to long hours on bare limestone slabs in a chilly wind. Sometimes the sheep are completely boring. Sometimes their animation moves me beyond words. Our “companionship” closes the distance. I am here to learn something. I will need this knowledge. Time is running out.
    When you truly understand one thing—a hawk, a juniper tree, a rock—you will begin to understand everything. To understand everything, to know the nature of a single living thing, the factsof a life other than my own, I chose desert bighorn sheep. Lucky me. As part of this quest, I watch very large animals having really wild sex.
    Sheep sex is a fine place to go after crawling around a field with fat geese. For the goose “hunters,” I had asked the gods for simple redress: Shrivel their testicles. I am not against hunting, only slob hunting. There is, out there somewhere, a rare breed of dignified, low-tech, traditional hunters who actually care about their own souls, who believe, as Montana poet Paul Zarzyski wrote, “We owe our prey some grace, / some contemplation of their lives / here with us.”
    Rescuing birds from slobbery has unnerved me. It has made me late for church—so late, the sheep may have disappeared.
    At least once before, the bighorns had not simply walked over a ridge and out of sight; they had slipped away to a point of no return. They could do it again. I am accustomed to seeing them whenever I look, but is this experience trustworthy? These sheep, the Blue Door Band, are half flesh, half phantom. I witness them with astonishing calm and abject panic.
    I drive miles and miles, loop around mesas, cross saddles and passes, backtrack in reverse gear, follow a map drawn on clear glass in colorless ink. After this expedition, foot travel is necessary. Pack slung on my back, I keep a brisk pace on the long hike into bighorn territory, a remote expanse of roadless desert. I move from a flock of one of North America's most ubiquitous species, Canada geese, to one of its rarest.
    On this day, church has flying