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The echo is so clear, at first I think I am hearing two coyotes.
    The repeated song is purposeful; the coyote knows there is no other animal but herself. She is being a Zen coyote. She asks a question and receives the same question back as an answer.
    She sings to the red wall for a long time, with lengthy pauses between howl and echo. When she finishes and moves on, I walk to the river and find the singing place. The coyote has taught me which piece of the escarpment has the best echoing wall.
    “Rain,” I cry.
    Rain.
    “Snow?”
    Snow?
    A few days later, clouds move in and a fierce windstorm whips through the valley, mocking us with its rainless fury. Among Indians of Arizona's Sonoran Desert, violent winds came when you did not handle your bighorn kill properly, when you hunted but failed to put the horns in the place set apart for them. Each hunter had such a horn place. If he brought the horns home, he would insult the wind.
    One day, I walk along a stretch of river in the usual existentialist coma: Do rocks have souls? What is the meaning of life? A slow-moving glassy mirror of winter light, the river holds all of my attention. It carries everything I need to know. This kind of strolling reverie usually ends up with me walking face-first into a bush.
    Instead, I come across a bighorn ram, ewe, and ewe lamb on a rocky slope above the riverbank. They lie on their day beds. Were a swarm of fundamentalist Christians to stroll by, they would see a trio presenting portrait-perfect Ovis family values. Meanwhile, the rest of the canyon hides the depraved orgies of mixed rutting groups.
    I slowly move away from the riverbank and watch the threesome from a distance that will not disturb them. They are aware of me but not alarmed. The river flows between us as an agreed-upon boundary.
    The ram has a hefty set of flared horns, horns that have been described as a “cast-iron jester's cap.” From her distinctive gray-beige coloring and a radio collar and ear tag, I recognize the ewe from the summer. The lamb is likely her young of the year.
    The adults lie on bare ground in oven-fresh-bread position. The lamb rests atop a horizontal slab of sandstone like a hood ornament. She still has a sweet young face and a dark brown neck cape with what looks like electrocuted fuzz.
    When I first came to this canyon over twenty years ago, I saw thousands of desert bighorns. They ran single file across smooth faces of sandstone varnished by weather and minerals to a dark patina.
    Some were simple rectangles with stick legs and arching horns. Others lifted their tails, spread cloven hooves, flattened their ears, and opened their mouths as if to tell you something, an animation that barely seemed possible in the medium of stone pecked by stone tools. The style said a great deal about bighorn sheepanatomy and even more about stories, stories that were enigmatic or instructive of the things you must do if you are a hunter.
    Up a canyon crack so steep and difficult that you have to spider up the rocks to reach it and earn the honor with bloodied hands, two bighorn petroglyphs attached themselves to the universe. A spiral emerged from a raised tail. The other figure exhaled (or inhaled) a wavy line from its mouth. The animals were contiguous with these lines, as if they trailed air or sounds.
    The makers of the petroglyphs, pueblo dwellers who hunted and farmed the southwestern deserts a thousand years before, had left enough bighorn sheep to fill my dreams each night I slept in a canyon or on a mesa top. I never saw a real bighorn sheep. I never looked. The river blinded me with rapture. The river blinded me with rapture for twenty years.
    Back then, I knew nothing of sheep scat, beds, and other signs. I saw no tracks, I found no bones. I met only their absence from a place where bighorns had once been, a past marked by their portraits on the canyon walls. Like most people, I presumed that overhunting, habitat loss, and the presence of domestic