Nothing had changed. The sheep were in the meadow, the ravens in the trees, Anise and the dog where she’d left them, the rain holding steady. She was about to call out to her daughter, something silly and lighthearted—“Second shift reporting for duty” or “I would prefer not to see you sitting out here in the rain one minute more”—when the stillness was broken by the report of a rifle. It was a single sharp crack, as if someone had snapped a stick in two, but loud, impossibly loud, the sound charging out of the hills to chase itself across the meadow and then back again. Everything hung suspended for a single airless instant and then the second report rang out and the flock, as one, sprang into motion. She was already running when she saw the dark hurtling streak slicing across the meadow and the sheep flowing away from it, panicking now, bolting for cover, for the hills, and what was it, what was happening? Then she saw it—a hog, a boar, its head fused with the big neck muscles in a picture of flight, ears flat, legs beating so fast they slid out of focus—and before she could think the three men were there with their guns and their machines.
“Hey!” she shouted, her breath coming in gasps, the sombrero torn back and away from her head and lost to the elements. She was running full-out, arms pumping, knees high, but this was the thing, and she couldn’t have been more astonished if a Martian probe had swooped in for a landing: the men were mounted on vehicles, three-wheeler ATVs that chewed up the wet earth and spat it out again in dark ropes of mud, and they weren’t about to stop for anything. The boar was already gone, vanished into the scrub along the wash. And before she could do a thing—before she could confront them, demand an explanation, chase them off now and forever—the men were gone too, the pop and rattle of their engines fading away in the distance. She saw Anise running toward her, her face robbed of everything, saw Francisco jerking the staff over his head in agitation and Bumper veering for the nearest panicked ewe. And then she saw the ravens.
Off to her right, a hundred yards or more—and she was closing on it, flailing her arms and shouting—the first of them careened into a lamb, going for the head, always the head. Bewildered, abandoned, unsteady on its neophyte’s legs, the lamb went down as if it had been struck with a club. And then the bird, implanted, rose up to stabilize itself on the cross trees of its wings and strike out the eyes, even as the next arrived to rip open the breast where the thin new tegument of skin was as yielding and soft as a vat of cream cheese. She bent to snatch up stones, still running, out of breath and ringing with hate and rage and panic, another lamb gone down and another, the ravens piling on and beating from one to the other like checkers jumping squares all across the meadow. She flung the stones. Bent for more. Ran like a terminal case, like brain damage, ran, because there was nothing else she could do.
Every time she closed on a mob of them they rose and flapped off to the next kill and she was left with the dead and dying stretched out like refuse at her feet, the barely formed limbs twitching still, eye sockets bloodied and vacant, the looping blue entrails exposed. They were in a hurry. They wanted the heart, the still-beating heart, and the liver and kidneys—the rest they could come back for. She got to the next lamb within seconds—it was right there, no more than fifty feet away—kicking at the black sheen of the wings and the quick reptilian stab of the slick bloodied beaks, but she was too late, the birds bounding away in short contemptuous hops till they got wings under them and glided off while the lamb thrashed in the grass. She watched it shudder along its length, attempting to lift its head, thrusting out its legs for balance, but its eyes were gone and the pale drum of its abdomen was sheeted in red. The sound it made—not a bleat, but a whisper, a choked gargle in the back of the throat—froze her for just that instant. And then she was on to the next while all around her the ravens plunged and screamed.
This one—just ahead and to her left—was untouched. It stood there weaving over its legs as if buffeted by a stiff wind, bleating weakly in its confusion. She grabbed it in stride and tucked it under one arm and then she had another one, this one with the umbilical still dangling and the ears and crown of the skull wet with afterbirth—and where was Anise? Where was Francisco? And Bumper? She spun around twice, shouting out her daughter’s name. If she could only get her here, by her side, they could gather up as many as they could, make a stand . . . she heard the barking of the dog then but he was all but useless, chasing the ewes up and away from the meadow in a futile effort to turn them. “Anise!” she roared, the cords tightening in her throat. “Anise, damn it, where are you?”
There was nothing, nothing but the cacophony of the birds, until all at once her daughter’s voice carried back to her—“Over here, Mom! Hurry!”—and she pivoted to see Anise stumbling toward her through the rain-slick grass, a lamb cradled in her arms. She was sobbing, her lips thrust back against her teeth, her mouth a hole carved out of her face, the wet hair hanging limp in her eyes and her eyes streaming. “I can’t,” she cried, her voice cracking, “I can’t,” and Rita saw that the lamb in her arms was bloodied.
She might have comforted her—should have—but she was caught up in the fury of the moment. “Put that goddamned thing down, will you? Can’t you see it’s dead?”
“It’s not, Mom. It’s not. It’s still breathing.” Anise was coming toward her, weak-kneed, stringy, a child still, the house and Bax and his lit window so far behind them they might as well have been in another country.
There was a smear of blood on the grass just there in front of her and the sight of it, the fact of it, lashed her forward. She meant to set the lambs down gently, but the rage jerked at her shoulders and she just dropped them there in the mud and trampled grass and flew at her daughter. “What in hell’s the matter with you?” she demanded, snatching the thing out of her arms and flinging it aside like the refuse it was. She could have slapped her. Could have screamed in her face. Couldn’t she see what was happening? Didn’t she understand?
“You stand right here—and don’t you even think about moving. I’m going to bring in as many as I can, right here, right here to you.” Her voice was rising up the scale. A quick hot glandular jolt burned through her.
Anise just stared at her.
“Just keep the goddamn birds off them. Okay? That’s all I ask.”
Her daughter’s face was blanched and small, as distant as if she were all the way across the field still. She was fifteen years old. She loved animals, loved her dog, loved the lambs, but this had nothing to do with love.
“Wake up!” she shouted, spitting the words at her over the rocketing surge of her blood, already turning away to scan the meadow for the lambs that had been spared, for the spindly inadequate legs and the rain-wet, blood-wet fluff of their coats, but all she could see was the ravens, dozens of them, piled up on the corpses like black blankets flapping.
Ovis Aries
No one knows when sheep were initially introduced to Santa Cruz Island, but the first flocks of any size appeared sometime in the 1850s, under the direction of the island’s first individual owner, Andrés Castillero, or rather, his agent, James Baron Shaw, a Santa Barbaran he’d hired to manage the property. Castillero had been instrumental in negotiating a settlement after Alta California briefly seceded from Mexico in 1836, and for his efforts, the minister of the interior, by order of the president, granted him sole and exclusive ownership of the whole of Santa Cruz Island. From the point of view of the Mexican government, this was no doubt a reward of negligible value, since the Mexicans considered the islands too distant, arid and forbidding to be of much interest. Shaw erected a house and ranch buildings in the central valley, some three miles inland from Prisoners’ Harbor on the north shore, and introduced cattle, horses and sheep. In the interim, the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded all of California to the government of the United States, along with what is now Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Arizona, and Castillero, who had understandably begun to feel insecure about the legitimacy of his title, placed the following advertisement in the Daily Alta Cal
ifornia for May 25, 1858:
FOR SALE: An island containing about 60,000 acres of land, well-watered and abounding in small valleys of the best pasturage for sheep. There are no wild animals on it that would interfere with livestock. There is a good harbor and safe anchorage.
A year later, a consortium headed by Eustace Barron, the English consul at Tepíc, Mexico, purchased the island, keeping Shaw on as manager. The new owners set about establishing a sheeping operation on a large scale, going all the way across the Atlantic to acquire the finest pedigreed stock, merinos from Spain and Leicester longwools from England, breeds known for the superior quality of their wool as well as their hardiness and adaptability. Given a virgin range and no predators to interfere with them (not even the golden eagle, which was not then known to nest on the Channel Islands), the sheep throve. Within ten years, there were as many as fifty thousand of them roaming the island. Santa Cruz, formerly sheepless, was suddenly rich with sheep. So rich that Barron was able to sell his interest at profit to a partnership from San Francisco, but the new owners, who incorporated as the Santa Cruz Island Company under the directorship of Justinian Caire, a perspicacious French dealer in hardware who’d sailed west to take advantage of the gold fever sweeping the region, found the population unsustainable. Water sources had dried up. There was insufficient forage. Something had to give.
If rats are the single most devastating invasive species when introduced to a closed ecosystem, then goats and sheep, with their ability to seek out even the most inaccessible niches and their capacity to consume and digest practically anything short of the dirt itself, are a close second. The problem, of course, is overgrazing. Barron’s sheep burned through the vegetation of the island like a wildfire, adapting their diet successively to include native succulents, shrubs and saplings once the grasses and forbs they preferred had been eliminated. The dry seasons lingered. The winds blew. And when the rains came on the shoulders of the monsoonal storms, the soil, no longer anchored by the roots of the devastated flora, peeled away like ineptly grafted skin. The seas darkened with silt. The native fauna, bereft of resources and shelter alike, died back and the pine forests of the high ridges thinned under the pressure of the relentless grazing so that there were fewer branches to collect and disperse the moisture of the fog, and the island became more arid still. So Monsieur Caire sent his lambs to market, sheared the flock in the transquila at the main ranch and sold the fleeces by weight, and then went out into the hills and shot what he couldn’t use. Twenty-four thousand sheep, give or take a few, were eliminated. And still the coreopsis and live-forever, the silver mallow, the gooseberry, manzanita and monkey flower, the toyon and mountain mahogany and deerweed were grazed to the nub before they could bloom and set seed. And still the woodland skipper and the cranefly and the katydid and the slender salamander declined and declined again.
The solution to the problem of overgrazing, as far as Caire was concerned, was to diversify. He bought out his partners and took up residence on the island. Under his direction, fields were plowed for crops and feed, a vineyard and winery were established, beef cattle were brought in and satellite ranches constructed at Christy Beach in the far west and at Smugglers’ Cove and Scorpion Anchorage in the east. The cattle grazed and so did the sheep, but their numbers were more or less kept in check by rigorous culling. A portion of the flock inevitably went feral and was hunted for sport, along with the wild hogs that infested the place like vermin, destroying fence, digging up the crops, raiding the vineyards under cover of night and leaving nothing behind but pulp and feces. Still, for all the fragility of the ecosystem, the Santa Cruz Island Company made a go of it, shipping lamb and beef, wool, hides, tallow and wine back to the coast, but it was the wine, especially, that made the coffers ring.
Caire had made his fortune catering to the needs of the forty-niners, dispensing picks and shovels and the like as they hit the pier running with maddened looks on their faces and hand-drawn maps of the Feather River drainage, Coloma and Dutch Flat clutched in their sweating hands, and offering them French porcelain, Sheffield china and fine cutlery when they returned flush with their profits, and this was all well and good. But his ambition was far grander. He saw himself as a propriétaire presiding over a château and cellars of his own, like those of Bordeaux or Languedoc. He had the terroir, now he needed les vignes. (And, not incidentally, a wife, a chatelaine to help him found the dynasty he was building in air each night as his head hit the pillow.) He sailed back to Europe first to acquire the wife—Maria Christina Sara Candida Molfino, of Rapallo, a district where the grapevines had woven their way across the terraced hills from time immemorial, a place where people knew grapes, where they knew wine, where their blood was infused with it and no meal, even breakfast, was without its medicinal touch—and then sailed again to bring back the finest French rootstock he could find.
He chose well, both in marriage, which was to produce nine children, six of whom survived into adulthood, and in matching his grapes to the terroir. The central valley, with the rich mineral content of its soil, its warm days and cool, sea-misted nights, presented ideal conditions for the growing of a suite of varietal grapes, and by the early 1890s the Santa Cruz Island label was shipping high-quality zinfandel, pinot noir, Burgundy, muscat de frontignan, Chablis and riesling up the coast to San Francisco. And when the Phylloxera aphid ravaged the Old World vineyards and laid waste to some 75,000 acres in California as well, Monsieur Caire’s 600 acres of grapes were unaffected—neither the aphid nor the adult Phylloxera fly had the means of crossing the barrier of the channel. Wine was scarce. Prices went up. Even after the proprietor’s death in 1897, the winery continued to prosper in the hands of his two sons, Arthur and Frédéric, right up until the unnatural disaster of Prohibition crushed it some twenty-two years later. Unaffected by such vagaries, the hogs continued their raids and the sheep grazed at will, until finally the sons dug out the vines and threw them on the dung heap for burning, so that all that remained were the deep horizontal furrows striping the flanks of the hills like the scars of an ancient wound.
The proprietor’s will had divided the island into seven parcels, one for each of his children, and one—parcel 5, by far the largest, on which the main ranch and winery stood—for their mother, Maria Christina Sara Candida Molfino Caire, or Albina, as she was known, mercifully, for short. The division was contentious. Each of the siblings felt cheated. Arthur, the eldest son, for instance, was given title to Christy Ranch in the west, but there was no serviceable harbor there to make it useful, while Edmund Rossi, son of his deceased sister Amélie, was awarded the far more desirable parcel number 7, on the eastern end of the island, and Arthur’s sister Aglae wound up with parcel 6, which included Scorpion Ranch and its excellent and protected anchorage. Litigation ensued. The original heirs began to die off and their heirs in turn took up the fight. Conditions deteriorated, the Depression intervened, the sheep kept on grazing.
Finally, in 1937, the main ranch and the four western parcels adjoining it were sold in large to an oil man from Los Angeles, Edwin Stanton, who attempted to revive the sheeping operation, bringing in domestic stock to interbreed with the remnant of the original flock and lure in the outliers. He soon gave it up when the whole of the flock, domestic and feral alike, scattered to the far ends of the island, making it too great a nuisance to round them up annually for shearing, docking and branding, and so he shipped 30,000 sheep to slaughter and focused on cattle, with mixed success. On his death in 1963, his son Carey took over majority ownership and ran the cattle operation until he himself died in 1987 and ceded the entire property to the Nature Conservancy, which hired a professional hunting concern to exterminate the remaining sheep, finally putting an end to the ovine occupation of the major portion of Santa Cruz Island.
But on the eastern two parcels, which remained in the hands of Monsieur Caire’s descendants, the sheep went right on ruminating, stripping the bark from the endemic oak, cherry and ironwood trees, grinding the bis
hop pine seedlings between their reductive molars, running every stamen and leaf and scrap of pith through the chambers of their four contiguous stomachs till the hills felt the pressure of them like a cinched belt, cinched and looped and cinched again.
By the time Bax took over the operation in 1979, things had fallen to ruin and the sheep were little more than an afterthought. The current owners, Pier and Francis Gherini, great-grandsons of the propriétaire, had come up with a scheme for developing their portion of the island into a resort, replete with marina, golf course, lodges and restaurants, but when the County of Santa Barbara denied them permits at the urging of the National Park Service, their interest flagged and whatever Scorpion Ranch once was, it was no more. It was Bax who brought it back to life. They hired him in an attempt to squeeze some profit out of the place, and he threw himself into the task, taking on new hands, repairing fence, rounding up as many of the ferals as he could and bringing in seventy prize Rambouillet rams to breed up the stock. Rita threw herself into it too. And Francisco. And Anise. They all did. But how could anyone hope to hold anything together when the world was as liable to fracture as Bax’s ribs and the long white bone that was like the bone of a ghost on the sheeny black X-rays of his left leg? Bax was laid up, that was the fact, and trespassers were out there shooting their guns at will and scaring the ewes off their lambs.
Anise had been inconsolable. Once it was over—and it was over when the ravens decided it was, lifting themselves from the bloat and scatter like great winged slugs—Rita went to her. She found her crouched in the beaten grass with the lambs all gathered to her, the hair strung dripping across her face, her shoulders quaking and her clothes wet through with the rain and the blood. Some of the lambs were too weak to stand, their outsized ears fanned out in the grass, their bleating like some diachronic dirge. They needed their mothers—for protection, warmth, milk—and if they didn’t get them soon the loss would go far beyond the seventy-three corpses Rita had already counted.