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buttresses of upwarped sandstone and a ceiling of cornflower blue streaked with mare's tails. Vermilion mesas form transept walls. Nearly a hundred miles beyond, scattered mountain ranges raise their iris flanks into snowy peaks the shape of heaven.
    Below my post, the river sings a robust hymn, flowing pale khaki with silt. Above the river, in a middle world partway up the canyon wall: eleven desert bighorns.
    The sheep are animated by the motions of everyday behavior— eating, walking, resting—mixed with the conspicuous postures of a breeding group. The ewes and juveniles, here on their home terrain, try the hardest to attend to the normal. However, three rams have left their own range and now move among them.
    A stocky ram lords it over the band with a sedate horniness. His headgear rolls from forehead to cheeks in a thick curl, heavy throughout the swoop and narrow at the broomed, or worn-off, tips. The round rump of his youth has taken a more angled slope and his withers are high.
    While most desert bighorns are tan to gray, this ram is a dark chocolate brown. He appears to be about ten years old and, with maturity, has lost the paler hair on his belly and legs. With sleek coat, toned muscles, weight put on by summer's abundant food, this ram is in prime condition. His scrotum is the size of a ripe cantaloupe—a cantaloupe from Texas.
    The sun rises to its midday height, slung low on its arc toward the winter solstice. Part of the canyon lies in shadow, but the bighorns keep to the light. In the sun, the ram's coat shines a burnished mahogany.
    Over several seasons, throughout the Blue Door Band's range, I have seen a few young bighorns darken to brown as they matured, the pelage of this ram's line. In a population so small, it is possible to recognize progeny. The chocolate ram himself may be the offspring of a ram that lived in the canyon years before, a ram with a distinctive mahogany coat. For mysterious reasons, he fell off a cliff.
    Today, his descendant pretends he is interested in bushes. Then he approaches a ewe in a low stretch and sniffs her hindquarters. The ewe squats and urinates. The ram nuzzles the urine and raiseshis head as if looking for passing aircraft. He peels back his upper lip and drops his lower lip, revealing a set of even leaf-grinding teeth. He moves his head from side to side.
    The lip curl is both social gesture and chemistry test, likely related to a ewe's readiness for mating. As he nuzzled, the ram passed some of her urine through a duct to his vomeronasal, or Jacobson's, organ for analysis. Then he casually moved off, since lip curling is usually associated with ewes that are near estrus but not ready to mate.
    Ewes in a desert bighorn population enter estrus at different times. This spreads the band's mating season over about eight to ten weeks, during which rams must keep up with ovarian activity and await, for each ewe, a receptive estrus period of only about forty-eight hours.
    Like most older, full-curl rams, the chocolate male lip-curls randomly and wastes few calories until the time is ripe. He exercises a rather regal nonchalance, smitten by his own very large horns. How, I wonder, can he move with that pendulous cantaloupe between his legs?
    The other adult rams in the group are smaller, younger, and more frenzied. The younger of the two noses around the ewes as they feed. He stands by one of them, then suddenly tries to jump on her. He butts another. All of the ewes evade him as if he were a large mosquito.
    The third ram is between the mosquito ram and the chocolate ram in age. His substantial set of horns spreads out and away from his head as if a tight circular curl had somehow flared into a surprised sideways curl. The flared horns could level small trees each time he turns his head. But this is a desert, and the shrubs are sparse and low and hardscrabble. The only thing he is knocking over is air, and the females are not impressed. They want to eat. The younger rams