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livestock in the vicinity of this canyon had doomed its free-living native bighorns. I presumed “local extinction.”
    Beyond my notice, in those early years of river time, the Blue

    Door Band would emerge, out of folds of sheer stone, from decades of absence. There would be wild sheep, like the three on the riverbank, in the flesh again, living on the cliffs that bore the images of their ancestors.
    Now, the day is lazy and mild. The river sings a quiet song over submerged rocks. The bighorns stare into space, or at me. I am quite entertaining, but not entertaining enough for them to lift their butts off the ground.

NOVEMBER

    The desert bighorn is an animal shaped by ice.
    A creature that can break open and eat a spiky-bodied barrel cactus, that can go without water for days, then drink like a camel, that wears a fur coat in summer heat soaring beyond a hundred degrees—these are not images of an ice animal. Yet the design of wild sheep is very much an expression of arctic cold.
    The route from ice to desert began in the early Pleistocene, in Asia, the ancestral grounds of ruminant mammals. About two million years ago, on the border between Pliocene and Pleistocene, a cooling climate and buckling mountain ranges saw an extraordinary expansion of mammal fauna from south of the Himalayas into Asia and central Europe. Among them were hoofed cud chewers, whose story you will know if you read the story of grass.
    Ice ages, major episodes of advancing and retreating glaciers, marked the Pleistocene epoch, and mammals were the Pleistocene's art. At one time scrawny little beasts that scuttled under the palmettos, mammals had responded to changes in environment and climate with traits like flexible spines, young that nurse, jaws that chew sideways rather than chop, necks that move without turning the whole body. Four-chambered hearts pumped warm blood. Internally regulated body temperatures allowed survival from mountaintop to swamp, from the equator to the Arctic.
    In the mammalian array came claws, hooves, toes, toed hooves. Aquatic rhinos, pigs of disturbing sizes, runt horses, rabbit-size camels, toothy grazers that ate whole nations of grasslands like huge lawn mowers. Efficient motion favored dispersal into newterrain; mobile creatures could spread until they reached a barrier of land or climate, ice or food supply. The migrating vegetarians took the meat-eaters with them.
    The subfamily Caprinae, classified into tribes that include the Caprini (sheep, goats, sheep-goats), grew massive head ornaments and the skulls to carry them. By the late Pleistocene, caprid stock had arrived in North America by crossing the Bering land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. From there, they dispersed during interglacial, or warming, periods. Some of their descendants now occupy a range from Alaska to the tip of the Baja California peninsula.
    Life in the Pleistocene's flux favored the biological complexity of herd life, translated not only as behavior but also in their very bodies—as color, coat patterns, manes, rump patches, and scent glands in the skin. The visuals, postures, and olfactory signs carried meaning within a close society of companions and competitors.
    And in no other epoch but this one, in ice, cold, and oscillating climate, was there anything quite like the evolution of horns as elaborate social organs. While the tribe Caprini may show a variety of physical characteristics among members, its members all possess a solid common trait: social behavior that is overtly frontal—that is, concentrated on their heads.
    Out on the rims, a hardening cold seeps into every surface. Already stripped by its very nature, the desert now seems skeletal. Brittle stems on the blackbrush snap against my pant legs as I walk. The rough dirt skates underfoot like stones inside a dry gourd. On the limestone slabs where I sit, the cold rises up from the rock into my spine. When I stand with my back to the sun, I cast a Giacometti