Doug Peacock
Editors’ note: Doug Peacock is an author, Vietnam veteran, filmmaker, and naturalist who has written extensively on wilderness and wilderness issues, from grizzly bears to buffalo, from the Sierra Madre of the Sonoran Desert to the fjords of British Columbia, from the tigers of Siberia to the blue sheep of Nepal. Before becoming a writer, Doug was a Green Beret medic and the real-life model for Edward Abbey’s George Washington Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang. His books include Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness, In the Shadow of the Sabertooth, In the Presence of Grizzlies: The Ancient Bond Between Men and Bears, The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears, and Walking It Off: A Veteran’s Chronicle of War and Wilderness. Here, in “Counting Sheep,” he discusses his encounters with elusive desert bighorn in southern Arizona over several decades.
Insomnia has been the central dysfunction of my adult life and I go into the desert to sleep. I figure I have spent almost two years of my life sleeping under the stars among the cactus of the American southwest or on rare stormy nights in a tent off the desert coast of the Sea of Cortez. My favorite desert for sleeping, however, is the great expanse of country embracing the border of southwestern Arizona and Mexico, the uninhabited desert ranges and valleys of the Cabeza Prieta, one of the best places on earth to get a good night’s sleep.
The Cabeza Prieta is just the name of a block of mountainous hills within an area of the same name now designated as a National Wildlife Refuge. This refuge is surrounded by identical looking wastelands managed by the National Park Service, the BLM, or used as a bombing range by the Marines and Air Force. It’s all great country; the only road is Mexican Highway 2 just south of the border. I pay no attention whatsoever to these cultural, governmental, and otherwise artificial boundaries and have democratically thrown down my sleeping bag on about 220 different nights in washes on all sides of the fences.
The soporific device of counting sheep in order to fall asleep has never worked for me. Instead, I tend to log the constellations with a star chart or read by a tiny ironwood fire until drowsy. Some nights I just watch the celestial clock unfurl or think about a girl I used to know. Sheep never cross my mind until sometimes just at daybreak when the clatter of real desert bighorn sheep startles me fully awake.
This doesn’t happen very often of course: four times, my notebooks say, four mountain sheep on four mornings spread over two decades. Desert bighorn aren’t the kind of animal I see very often, although I run across their tracks nearly every time I visit the Cabeza Prieta. The sheep I see I invariably hear first. One of the best times to do this is in the morning from your sleeping bag though you can also hear them moving about on the scree and rocks towards evening.
The first desert bighorn I heard then saw from my sleeping bag was north of Buck Tank along a low spine of granitic hills running north into the bajada. It was daybreak on Christmas Day of 1979. I was still in the bag warming my fingers over the iron-wood ashes of the previous night’s fire. The sound of rock clattering on the ridge startled me. I reached for my field glasses and scanned the ridge for movement. The slope was bare with only a few creosote and Bursera trees dotting the hillside. I couldn’t see anything. Suddenly I heard more racket and caught movement coming over the saddle. I saw what looked like a ghostly grey grizzly coming towards me. The animal’s head had a curl of corrugated horn. The bear was a sheep, a ram with a full curl. I dropped the glasses and the bighorn caught the movement; the ram stopped and looked at me from twenty yards. As sunlight capped the tops of the highest peaks, the bighorn turned and ambled back across the crest of the ridge.
The reason I sleep well in the desert is probably because I walk so much out there. Travelling over the land on foot is absolutely the best way to see the country, scent its fragrance, feel its heat, and get to know its plants and animals; this simple activity is the great instructor of my life. I do my best thinking while walking—saving me countless thousands of dollars in occupational counseling, legal fees, and behavioral therapy—and the Cabeza Prieta is my favorite place in the world to walk.
I didn’t always do so much walking out on the Cabeza Prieta. My first trips out there, beginning in the late sixties, were made in the usual fashion, driving a pickup across the Devil’s Highway or easing a jeep up the sandy tracks of the spur roads.
Most of these trips and ninety percent of my several dozen non-solo visits to the Cabeza Prieta were taken with two close friends named Ed: Ed Gage and Ed Abbey. Later, when truck camping seemed tame and I needed a bit of adventure in my life, I decided to try to walk across the Cabeza Prieta alone, covering 120 to 165 miles, depending on the route I took. Taking it easy, I usually make the trip in about eleven days—ten nights free from insomnia, ten great nights of untroubled sleep.
In all, I’ve made seven of these trips, solo backpacking the area from Welton, Tacna, or the Tenaja Altas to Ajo, Organ Pipe, or Quitobaquito, sometimes vice versa, always by different routes, crossing all the big valleys, which, adding in the trips by vehicle, means I’ve spent over two hundred nights of my life sleeping out there.
On these desert treks, I average from about twelve to twenty miles per day. The mileage depends on the terrain, if I am fasting or low on food, and if I’m walking during daylight or by moonlight. Anything over twenty miles tends to rub raw spots into my aging body or bruise my feet, especially when I’m carrying my full load of water: three and one half gallons on the longer dry legs of the journey between the Sierra Pinta and Charlie Bell or Papago Well. My exact daily distance is whatever it takes to ensure the fatigue which banishes insomnia. Night walking is more exhausting because you need to brace yourself against injury; for instance, you have to lock your knee and ankle by tensing your quadriceps whenever you break through the honeycombed earth of rodent colonies under the creosote of the bajadas.
I keep crude journal notes of all this and tend to record such things as tracks and sightings of bighorn sheep—a very big deal to me. Actually, on my walks I saw few bighorn sheep but, as everyone knows, the best way to see sheep is to sit quietly, not walk with your nose at the level of the creosote. I did, however, see a lot of tracks.
What little I know of desert bighorn sheep has mostly been inferred from these tracks, although I’ve seen a few sheep too, counting almost three dozen bighorn sheep scattered throughout the desert ranges of the Cabeza Prieta during the past two decades. Ed Gage saw the first one just north of Cabeza Prieta tanks back in the winter of 1972, one of our first trips together. He had been sitting on a ridgetop reading Kazantzakis when he heard rock clattering on the slope above him. Gage looked up and saw a magnificent ram with a full curl amble down the ridge away from him, big scrotum swinging from side to side, he said, so he knew it was a ram as he had never seen a sheep before. The bighorn passed down the slope and disappeared below him.
My sheep count of thirty-four desert bighorns began in 1972 (I didn’t see any the first three years) and ended in March of 1992. Except for the ones I glimpsed from my sleeping bag, I saw all these sheep in precipitous terrain much like that of Gage’s ram. My biggest count was a mixed herd of seven ewes and younger sheep one mile east of Half Way Tank in the Cabeza Prieta Mountains.
Once I saw four rams bedded together and facing out in the four directions on a spur ridge running off the Sierra Pinta into the Tule Desert north of Sunday Pass. I’ve seen pairs of desert big-horn three times—in the Growlers, the Agua Dulce, and Cabeza Prieta Mountains—and once a group of three ewes I startled near an outlier hill south of the Agila Mountains. The rest of the time my sightings have all been single animals.
The tracks are a different story. My field notes indicate sheep behavior I have never witnessed; sheep crossing the big valleys and using the creosote bajadas. I found repeated crossing of the Tule Desert by sheep using the same route during three different years: from the mouth of Smoke Tree Wash east to Isla Pinta. One of these crossing was made by a mixed herd of four or five ewes and two bighorn young. Other odd crossings include a ram from just south of Bean Pass trekking nonstop west along the Devil Hills to the north end of the Cabeza Prieta, a single sheep from the Agua Dulce by way of O’Neill Hills into the Pinta Sands, and two sets of bighorns tracks starting from an old, man-made pile of rocks, perhaps marking a very large grave, on the mid-eastern flank of the Granite Mountains across the Growler Valley and disappearing in the basaltic cobbles of the Growlers just north of Charlie Bell.
You would think bighorn sheep would be nervous out in these flats and open areas where they are vulnerable to predators. I’ve only seen circumstantial sign of sheep predation twice and both times it involved mountain lions. Lions are not common in this low desert where deer are not frequently found. The first time I saw the sign of a lion was on a trip with Ed Gage back in 1973 near one of the higher tanks of Tinajas Alta; this consisted only of a recent lion track near a much older disarticulated skeleton of a bighorn. The other, made while visiting Ed Abbey in 1990, was a dismembered carcass of a young sheep; there was indirect evidence the bighorn had been cached and lion scat and scrapings were found nearby.
The only times I’ve run into—actually I heard them—desert bighorn at night has been when the moon was big. Twice I was sitting quietly, and the other time I was backpacking by the light of the nearly full moon. I like to walk at night in the desert, especially when I’m having trouble sleeping. One such night, at the southern tip of the Copper Mountains, I heard the sound of clatter and rolling rocks, the dull clank of hooves coming from high on the slope. This racket had to be sheep moving on the hillside. What else could it be?
Sometimes I wonder how anybody ever manages to study desert sheep; I seem to have enough trouble just seeing them. When I’m up north, in Montana, British Columbia, or Alaska, I see big-horn sheep all the time. I see them in the spring down low in the valleys when snow still clogs the passes and slopes. Later, I watch them feeding and bedding on grassy ridges and avalanche chutes above timberline. Twice, I’ve found sheep carcasses buried by grizzlies and, though I have never seen a grizzly bear successfully chase and kill a bighorn, I once followed a big male grizzly in Glacier National Park who charged a herd of rams scattering them up the scree on up the cliffs behind Haystack Butte where the bear turned back. Even as late as November, I sometimes linger in grizzly country and watch the big rams clash, the clank of their hollow horns resounding into absorbent air of the snow-filled basins and gathering dusk of the Rocky Mountain Front near Many Glacier.
I’ve never seen any of that sort of thing in the desert. One March, from a great distance, I watched a three-quarter-curl ram south of Growler Peak probably browsing on lupine brush. At any rate, he was feeding, I couldn’t be sure on what. During the spring of 1973, Ed Abbey and I found agave inflorescences in the Agua Dulce chewed off by sheep and the remains of smashed barrel cactus near Sunday Pass with sheep tracks all around. But what desert bighorn eat from day to day has always been a mystery to me.
All this sheep lore doesn’t add up to much spread over thirty years. To me, the sudden appearance of desert bighorn sheep has always been a mystery, a blessing, sometimes a specter bearing just the edge of fear. Despite my cryptic field notes, my memory of sheep in the past twenty years is shriveled to those who roused me from my sleeping bag and startled me on the brilliant nights of the full moon. Those sheep, it seems, I had to earn.
Even sheep sign can be a gift. Twenty years ago Ed Gage and I found a sheep track outside a mine shaft southeast of Papago Well. Inside the fifty-year-old hole was an old case of dynamite, the nitroglycerin all sweated out and dangerously unstable. Nearby, at Bassarisc Tank, we found more sheep tracks and the paw print of a lion; suddenly, the entire desert was imbued with unseen power and danger.
During December of 1974, Ed Abbey and I drove my pickup into the Cabeza Prieta. Ed and I were unattached and without families at the time. We had spent a sniffling, lonely Christmas Eve at a topless bar in Tucson drinking whiskey. Thinking we could improve on that, we packed up and drove 150 miles west over Charlie Bell Pass into the Cabeza Prieta. We sipped beer all the way from Three Forks and were a tad plastered by the time we hit Charlie Bell Pass. We got my 1966 Ford truck stuck several times creeping down the dark treacherous road to the well, hanging up the ass end of the truck, jacking it up in the dark, rocking it free, and then dropping down into the Growler Valley. We continued on for one more six-pack around the north end of the Granite Mountains where we got stuck in the sand one last time, finally crawling into our sleeping bags shortly after midnight. At six in the morning, a sheriff ’s search-and-rescue team roared up looking for some high school kids some criminal son-of-a-bitch had hired to collect 20- and 40-mm brass military cartridges. When a helicopter flew over, this bastard had driven off, ditching the kids. One of kids, we later learned, died of thirst and exposure. The search team pulled us out of the sand and went on. Ed and I drove through Montrose Well west into the Mohawk Valley. At the low pass we found bighorn sheep tracks. Later, on New Year’s Eve at Eagle Tank, it sleeted and snowed on us—an unusual occurrence. We stayed three days in the Sierra Pinta, then dropped south into the Pinecate lava fields, a place of black basalt.
Years later, I followed the tracks of a desert sheep from the bottom of Temporal Pass in the Growler Mountains to the center of the Growler Wash where I lost the trail. I had gotten out there by walking southwest from Ajo after I had taken the bus from Tucson. I had come on a one-way ticket purchased for me by Lisa, the woman I later married. The Greyhound Bus clerk had been reluctant to even sell her the ticket for me.
“Lady,” the clerk had said to Lisa, “nobody buys a one-way ticket to Ajo.”
At Ajo I shouldered my backpack and disappeared over the mine tailings, passing the camp of the O’odham hermit, Chico Shunie, just before daylight. It was dark again the next night when I reached the bottom of the Growler Valley. Even by the dim light of the moon I could see big pieces of Hohokam pottery and Glycymeris clam shells lying on the desert pavement—the “Lost City” of the Hohokam shell-trekkers. From here in the Growler Valley, an ancient shell trail ran south to Bahia Adair on the Sea of Cortez and north to the Gila River near Picture Rocks where the most common animal petroglyph motif was that of desert sheep. I lost the trail of the bighorn because of the darkness and because a rattlesnake nailed me in the calf that night, though the snake-bite turned out to be a dry one. The next day, with a story to tell, I walked out twenty miles to Papago Well where Clarke and Ed Abbey were waiting for me.
Shortly after Gage’s death, the man—a mutual friend—who co-founded the Sanctuary Movement asked me to consider “taking over the Southwest Sector.” This meant illegally leading small groups of refugees, mostly from El Salvador, from Highway 2 in Mexico north through the Cabeza Prieta up towards Interstate 8 or to some other point where they could be picked up by vehicle. I agonized long and hard over this decision. I had already begun my work with grizzly bears and I knew enough about myself from radical politics in the sixties and later in Vietnam to figure out where my talents didn’t lie and the exhausting dangers of over-committing myself. Still, this was something I could do and it needed doing.
The dilemma tore at me and I couldn’t sleep. Once again, I went into the Cabeza Prieta to slumber and to track the sign that would show me what to do. The bus dropped me off on the Tacna off-ramp. I shouldered my backpack draped with three gallon canteens and staggered into the creosote headed towards Mexico. I skirted the Copper Mountains, passed Buck Mountain, and, at the mouth of A-1 Wash, I found the corrugated remains of a giant set of ram’s horns. The next morning I followed another sheep’s tracks south up the wash until I passed over the tiny divide into the inner valley north of the tanks where Gage had seen his ram.
Sooner or later everyone runs into death and I ran into a lot of it early on. And so I have used this great desert to bargain with the departed and get a handle on my insomnia. It’s true, I invent ceremonies when necessary, especially when my own culture provides none; I erect my own memorials and celebrate my own Day of the Dead. But mostly, I just shoulder a backpack and walk beyond fatigue across the bajadas, maybe crossing a set of sheep tracks and following them up a wash, finding a perfect campsite. The story of this place is not of loss but renewal.
The Cabeza Prieta desert is the most important thing Ed Abbey, Ed Gage, and I ever shared and it is no coincidence that these two closest desert friends from the past two decades are out there. Gage was a tough one because he was a suicide; I maintain a secret and no doubt illegal memorial for Gage on a hilltop in one of these desert valleys. Each year for seven years I took a hike to visit this monument and hold a private ceremony.
The last time Ed Abbey smiled was when I told him where he was going to be buried, and I smile too when I think of this small favor, this last simple task friends can do for one another—the rudimentary shovel work, this sweaty labor consummating trust, finally testing the exact confirmation by lying down in the freshly dug grave to check out the view, bronze patina of boulder behind limb of palo verde and turquoise sky beyond branch of torote, then receiving a sign: seven buzzards soaring above joined by three others, all ten banking over the volcanic rubble and riding the thermal up the flank of the mountain, gliding out and over the distant valley. Even three years later, I grin as I crest the ridge above his grave, the earth falls away and mountain ranges stretch off into the grey distance as far as the eye can see; there is not a human sign or sound, only a faint desert breeze stirring the blossoms of brittlebush. We should be so lucky.
On the eve of March 16th, I journeyed to the edge of this desert place. March 16th is a “Day of the Dead” for me, the anniversary of the My Lai massacre (I was twenty miles away in Vietnam that day) and also the day in 1989 three friends and myself buried Ed Abbey here, illegally, in accordance with his last wishes.
I had travelled out here alone to Ed’s grave, bearing little gifts, including a bottle of mescal and a bowl of pozole verde I had made myself. I sat quietly on the black volcanic rocks listening to the desert silence, pouring mescal over the grave and down my throat until the moon came up an hour or so before midnight. Suddenly I heard a commotion to the south, the roar of basaltic scree thundering down the slope opposite me. A large solitary animal was headed my way.
I got the hell out of there.
Two days later I told my story of the desert bighorn ram I heard but never saw to my poet friend Jim Harrison.
“Well, Doug,” Jim said, “maybe it was old Ed.”