On Trails

CHAPTER 3

STRANGE CREATURES paced the pale autumn grass. Out the left window of our Land Rover stood a trio of wildebeests. Out the right: a muscled cluster of elands. The truck slowed to a crawl. Up ahead ambled a flock of mountain goats, clotting the road. As we crept forward, a nearby giraffe craned down and peered through our windows with the slow, sleepy eyes of a courtesan.

Beside me, in the driver’s seat, was Nidhi Dharithreesan, a biologist specializing in the herd behavior of large mammals. She pointed out the more obscure species—gnu, oryx, kudu, addax, waterbuck—whose names reminded me of characters in a science fiction novel. Over the months she had spent watching these animals, she had formed lovingly frank opinions about each: White rhinos are “sweet,” but zebras are “assholes.” Elephants will “tear up everything” if given the chance. Male kudus, like boys at their first school dance, are more interested in performing elaborate mating displays than in actually mating.

I had met Dharithreesan at the Swarm Lab in Newark, where she was finishing her PhD. Alongside her insect-obsessed colleagues, her interest in swarms of giant furry beasts was somewhat unusual. However, she informed me that there was a great deal of overlap between their work and hers: Mammals, like insects, aggregate on a massive scale, share information, and create highly efficient networks of trails. If you were to step into a hot-air balloon and float high above the Serengeti during the annual great wildebeest migration, the herds of ungulates would resemble nothing so much as an invasion of safari ants.

By studying insects, I had learned that trails can function as a form of external memory and collective intelligence. Bugs benefit from trails because they are tiny and small-brained but nevertheless must manage huge, complex tasks. But why, I wondered, do we big-brained, highly individualized land mammals—the greatest class of walkers in the known universe—feel the need to trail after one another? Why not walk alone, utterly free?

It can be tough to puzzle out why other animals do what they do. Between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom lie near-­insurmountable psychic and linguistic barriers. And yet humans have always been peculiarly curious about what motivates other animals, and whether those motivations resemble our own. I have yet to find a culture on Earth that does not speculate about the interior lives of our animal brethren. And for good reason: our survival often depends on it. To understand the psychology of their prey, many indigenous hunting societies perform magical rites, including ritual trances, sacrifices, ceremonial dances, various forms of fasting, even self-mutilation. Driven by that same basic question, Western scientists perform elaborate experiments and concoct dazzlingly complex computer models. The understanding we’ve sought and the bonds we’ve formed with other animals have, over millions of years, made humans—all of us, from the gazelle hunters of the Kalahari to the cat fanciers of Tokyo—into who we are today.

Traditionally, humans have learned to empathize with other species in three distinct ways. Perhaps most commonly, we have bonded with animals by living alongside them: housing them, feeding them, breeding them, and herding them from place to place, until we attained a kind of loose symbiosis. Conversely, we have also learned about them by hunting and killing them, which produces a wholly different kind of mind-meld—the cold empathy of the predator. And most recently, we have begun studying them: cataloguing what they eat, tracking where they travel, testing how they react, and modeling how they organize themselves.

This is how I found myself sitting in a Land Rover beside Dharithreesan. I had decided to spend some time trying out each of these oldest forms of cross-species communication: watching, herding, and hunting. (Naturally, I began with the one that intimidated me least.)

In all three of these pursuits, I would learn that trails provide a helpful (if narrow) portal into the minds of other animals. Despite what we sometimes imagine, the animal world is not a rigidly compartmentalized place, like a child’s coloring book, with zebras on one page, giraffes on another, and lions on the next. Animals are all intermixed, interdependent. Flocking and stalking, they follow one another across landscapes. And in those places where their most vital needs overlap, trails inevitably appear.

Human animals are not excluded from this collaborative process; the earliest humans no doubt relied on the paths of other land mammals, just as many modern roads overlay old game trails. By following in the footsteps of other animals, we have learned to intuit their intentions. Expert trackers, it is said, begin to identify themselves with their quarry; this inclination allows them to follow trails that intermittently vanish, and even to experience the same sensations the animals felt as they walked—the prick of a thorn in a paw, the soft give of warm sand under hoof—a process that is sometimes referred to as “becoming the animal.”

We may not be able to read other animals’ minds, but we can read their trails. In learning to do so, we have become recognizably human: hunting animals, we sharpened our intelligence and invented some of our earliest technologies; herding animals, we reaped the reliable luxuries of milk and meat, leather and wool; harnessing animals, we tilled fields, transported goods, and built cities; and studying animals’ wisdom, we have increased our own. That long, slow waltz across continents—as humans and animals clashed, meshed, and, ultimately, began to prop one another up—would in time transform us all.

PART I

Watching

A sugary rain began to sift down as Dharithreesan and I watched the animals enact the mundane chores of being alive. An addax delicately scratched an itch on his back with one long curved horn. A baby antelope wobbled beside its mother, who bent down, stuck her nose up under the calf’s hind legs, and licked its rear. The calf looked over at us, blissfully unabashed.

Staring at these herds of striped and spotted ungulates, I could almost be fooled into believing that we were on a safari in some far-off veldt, if it weren’t for certain discordant details: the high steel fences, the cartoonish faux-wood sign reading AFRIKKA, and, most jarring of all, in the distance, the swooping steel scribbles of roller coasters. In fact, we were in an enormous outdoor zoo—­reportedly “the largest drive-through safari outside of Africa”—­attached to the Six Flags Great Adventure theme park in suburban New Jersey, less than a two-hour drive down the turnpike from New York City. The safari park was introduced in 1974, alongside attractions like the world’s biggest hot-air balloon and the world’s largest teepee. It now contains over twelve hundred animals from six continents, including a sizable population of African herd animals.

Dharithreesan set up a camera on a tripod on her windowsill to film the animals’ movements. She began jotting notes in a field journal: date, time, temperature, weather conditions, and any notable behavior. She was in the preliminary stages of a multiyear campaign to tag the park’s African ungulates with GPS-enabled collars. The data would be transmitted wirelessly to a receiving station then relayed to the Swarm Lab, where it would eventually help solve the riddle of why mammals form herds.

One of the most prominent explanations, which she hoped to test, was called the “many eyes theory.” The more eyes a herd has, this theory holds, the more likely it is to detect a predator or a new source of food. By taking turns scanning the plains, more herd members are free to graze in peace. Many African ungulates—zebras, wildebeest, gazelles, antelopes—tend to live in mixed herds, perhaps because the strengths of one species make up for the deficiencies of another. Zebras, for example, are nearsighted, but have excellent hearing, while giraffes and wildebeest have keen long-range vision. By herding together, they increase their chance of spotting (or hearing) the approach of a stalking lion.

Dharithreesan planned to test this theory by installing electronic collars on all the ungulates, which would track not only each animal’s location, using GPS, but also employ gyroscopes and accelerometers to record which direction its head was pointing. Scientists have so far conducted only a few studies like this on the dynamics of mixed-­species herds. The logistics were staggering, Dharithreesan told me. “You can’t really do this type of study in the wild, because there’s just too much space; we don’t have the resources,” she said. “And you can’t quite do it in a laboratory setting, because these animals are huge.” Fortunately, the owners of Six Flags Great Adventure had unwittingly built the ideal scientific testing ground.

Out in the wild, scientists often sacrifice this kind of granular data for a much broader scope. With the rise of satellite technology, humans have suddenly acquired a god’s-eye view of how animals move across vast stretches of land. Previously, to track a group of animals in the wild, scientists had to tag them with radio collars and then, using jeeps equipped with special antennas, chase after the tagged animals. Now with GPS collars, researchers can tag an animal, let it roam for months, and then download the collar’s data either manually or, increasingly, wirelessly. This new technology—paired with ever more detailed satellite imagery—is revealing how groups of mammals create and pass down migration routes from generation to generation. Some of the oldest of these migratory routes, like those of Canadian mountain sheep, likely stretch back tens of thousands of years.

A few years ago, an ecologist named Hattie Bartlam-Brooks attached GPS collars to a group of zebras in Botswana’s Okavango Delta to track their grazing patterns. At the time, it was widely believed that the zebras never left the delta, so when a large number of the zebras disappeared from sight at the onset of the rainy season, Bartlam-Brooks assumed they had been eaten by lions. Then, six months later, the tagged zebras reappeared. When Bartlam-Brooks recovered their collars and downloaded the data, she discovered that the zebras had somehow walked halfway across the country, to feed on the sprouting grasses of the Makgadikgadi salt pan.

By reading through old hunters’ and explorers’ records, she learned that a large zebra migration had once existed along that same route, but it had been severed when the Botswanan government installed hundreds of miles of veterinary cordon fences in 1968. One of these fences blocked the zebras’ migratory route for decades before the government finally dismantled it in 2004. Since the fence stood for thirty-six years, and the average lifespan of a zebra is only twelve years, no living zebras could have possibly remembered making that trip. But then, I wondered, how could the zebras have known where to go?

When I spoke to Bartlam-Brooks on a long-distance call to Botswana, she quickly ruled out my first guess: there was no grassy runway—as I had imagined—that lured them across the country. Instead, they had to pass over hundreds of miles of dry Kalahari scrub. The study’s coauthor, Pieter Beck, explained that migrations, by definition, involve not only long distances, but also high stakes: in a migration, there is always a considerable “energetic cost” to the journey. Every voyage is a gamble. (This may explain why not all the zebras ended up taking the trip. Even among zebras, there are bold and timid individuals.)

Because the cost of unsuccessful exploration is so high, successful migration routes are precious and hard-won. Older herd members teach the routes to their children, passing them down as a kind of traditional knowledge. But like all traditions, migratory routes are delicate. Once a route is disrupted, it rarely reemerges. What Bartlam-Brooks had apparently uncovered was a rare instance of a species reviving their ancestral lifeway.

But still I wondered: How? I pushed Bartlam-Brooks to venture a guess.

Her answer surprised me. She said that her hunch was that, through a series of exploratory walks, the zebras might have followed a chain of elephant trails that led them from water source to water source all the way to the salt flats.

“Elephants are obviously much more long-lived than zebras,” she said, “so when the fence went down, it’s very possible that some elephants remembered that old historical pathway that they used to take. Elephants could have easily re-created game trails, and zebras may well have just followed them.”

Of course, I thought. Elephants.

+

I once spent three weeks hiking across the grasslands of Tanzania, through the Ngorongoro Crater, to reach an active volcano called Ol Doinyo Lengai. During the day, we would occasionally spot surreal animals grazing in the distance: giraffes, buffalos, a dozen kinds of antelope, their horns twisting upward like Chihuly glass. At night, hyenas rubbed up against the walls of our tents, giggling menacingly, their bitter musk seeping through the nylon.

The walking was hard. The land was covered with tall yellow grass and corrugated with deep trenches, called drainages. Fortunately, elephants had created a convenient system of trails for us to follow. They proved remarkably clever route finders. On many occasions, after following an elephant path down yet another steep drainage, I marveled at the fact that the elephants had somehow selected the shallowest gradient available for at least a hundred yards in either direction. I wondered: How does the elephant know where to go, when even we, with our maps and compasses, do not?

Descriptions of the elephant’s topographic genius—a cherished gift when the land is barbed with thorn bushes and aflame with stinging nettles—lie sprinkled throughout colonial literature. “The sagacity which they display in ‘laying out roads’ is almost incredible,” wrote Sir James Emerson Tennent about the Ceylonese elephant. “The elephants invariably select the line of march which communicates most judiciously with the opposite point, by means of the safest ford.” The same is true of African elephants, wrote the poet Thomas Pringle. Their trails always seemed to have been cut “with great judgement, always taking the best and shortest cut to the next open savannah, or ford of the river; and in this way they were of the greatest use to us, by pioneering our route through a most difficult and intricate country.”

The trail networks of elephants can often cover hundreds of miles, connecting distant food sources and salt licks, while expertly avoiding whatever obstacles—canyons, mountains, dense forests—might stand in their way. But how did elephants figure out exactly where their trails should go? What allowed them to find the far-off mineral deposits they needed or the shallowest ford across a river?

I went in search of an answer to this question. And fortunately, I knew just where to start. My old AT thru-hiking buddy “Snuggles” (real name: Kelly Costanzo) happened to work at a place in rural Tennessee called The Elephant Sanctuary. There, nineteen female elephants, which had formerly been held captive in zoos, circuses, and backyards, now roam free across 2,700 acres of open forest.

One summer afternoon I traveled to the sanctuary to pay Kelly and the elephants a visit. I drove down a dirt road and then pulled up to a password-encoded steel gate, which bore a sign that read WARNING: BIOHAZARD. The whole property was surrounded by two rows of tall steel fences, one topped with barbed wire. At first glance, the place had the feeling not of a sanctuary, in the holy sense, but of a top-secret compound where monsters are made.

Kelly met me on the other side of the gate in her car and led me inside. She showed me to her home, a sunny, one-story ranch house on the sanctuary property. She shared it with two dogs, four cats, and one ingenious gray parrot (who had learned to bark, meow, trumpet like an elephant, and chime like a cell phone). From her backyard, off in the distance an elephant with a crippled trunk could be seen ambling along the fence line. This juxtaposition between the warmly familiar and the eerily exotic was one I would experience often during my stay at the sanctuary.

Kelly and I sat up late that night, drinking beer and reminiscing about the AT. She recalled one darkly comical morning we’d spent together in Erwin, Tennessee: We were sitting at a greasy lunch counter, eating breakfast before hitching back to the trail, when a local man turned to Kelly and began recounting, with evident pride, Erwin’s claim to fame—the fact that in 1916 they had “lynched” a mad elephant, named Mary, before a crowd of thousands. He gestured to a framed black-and-white photo on the wall immortalizing the event. The man—having no way of knowing that Kelly had been working intimately with elephants for years—waited for her reaction, expecting, perhaps, coos of intrigue. The best she could manage was to stare back at him wordlessly, her face fixed in open horror.

The next morning she gave me a tour of the grounds. We began at the first “barn,” where the African elephants were housed on cold days: a vast, echoey shed with diaphanous polycarbonate walls, heated floors, and a corrugated steel roof. The elephants’ stalls led out onto a cropped lawn and, beyond it, a vast forest. Outside, the elephants’ turf was surrounded by a fence made up of rectangular steel arches, like a row of gigantic steel staples, that were large enough for a human to pass through, but too narrow for elephants. I asked if we could walk through to the other side. Kelly gravely shook her head.

On the other side of the fence, twenty or thirty yards away, hulked a giant creature the color of unglazed Japanese pottery. We drew closer, but not too close. The giant had two nubby white tusks and a trunk like a crocodile’s gray tail. Her name, Kelly said, was Flora.

Flora’s trunk reached out to sniff us, slithering bonelessly over the fence. That one organ, I had read, could pluck a blueberry, uproot a tree, jet gallons of water, or catch a scent from miles away.

“What an amazing animal,” I said.

“I know, they’re really amazing,” Kelly sighed. “But she’s one that would, like, kill somebody if she had the option.”

“So if I were to walk up to the fence . . .” I trailed off.

“Oh gosh. She’d probably swing her head over it and try to grab you and kill you.”

In the two decades since it first opened, the sanctuary has suffered only one deadly incident, in 2006, when a caregiver was stomped to death by an elephant named Winkie. In the aftermath of that event, the caregivers pared back their contact with the elephants; no more are the days when people could stroll through the fence to pat their favorite elephants on the trunk. Kelly suspected that many captive elephants grow unusually aggressive toward humans as a result of the trauma they suffer in captivity. “There are some that just have such deep, deep scars that they’ll never trust humans,” she said.

Flora, for example, had almost certainly witnessed the slaughter of her parents as a young calf. (Many scientists now believe that elephants understand the concept of death; elephants have even been seen grieving over the gravesites of family members.) Flora was subsequently abducted, put in chains, sent overseas, broken by trainers, and forced to perform for the amusement of paying customers. In the circus where she had performed, she was billed as “the world’s smallest and youngest performing elephant.”

Flora bent back her trunk until it touched her forehead, forming a bubble-letter S. The inside of her mouth was shell pink. It curled softly in on itself like the bloom of a snapdragon. “She’s so pretty,” Kelly said. “Look at that mouth!”

We stood and stared until Flora lost interest in us and sauntered off across the yard and into the trees. “This whole area used to be pines when I first came here,” Kelly remarked. “The elephants just knocked them all down.”

I asked her why.

“They’re savannah makers,” she shrugged. Many experts believe elephants act as what biologists call “ecosystem engineers.” Research by zoologist Anthony Sinclair has shown that elephants take advantage of wildfires to clear patches of forest and convert it to grassland. The elephants let the fire do the hard work of burning down most of the trees, and then they pluck out the tender green shoots that spring up in the wake of the fire, to prevent the trees from growing back. Along their trails, elephants have also been known to “garden”—­pulling up saplings of encroaching trees and dispersing the seeds of the fruit they eat. In dense jungles, where wind cannot disperse seeds across long distances, elephants play Johnny Appleseed; their dung spreads the pits of large fruits like mangos, durian, and (fittingly enough) so-called elephant apples. As a result, the trails of elephants are often lined, conveniently, with their favorite fruit trees.

A young caregiver named Cody shuffled over, wearing a frayed baseball cap and a T-shirt emblazoned with skulls. I asked him something I had been wondering since I arrived there: Do the sanctuary’s elephants make trails, as they would in the wild?

I half expected him to say no. It appeared to me that whatever reasons elephants might have for following trails in the wild were absent at the sanctuary: they did not need trails to help them navigate long distances; there are no swift rivers to cross, no mountains to climb. However, Cody and Kelly both nodded; the elephants seemed to love making trails, they said. Cody pointed out a faint elephant trail that ran across the yard and along the fence line. There were others; narrow two-lane tracks that crisscrossed all over the property. Neither of them knew where most of the trails came from; most had simply appeared years ago. One elephant, named Shirley, had created a trail that led to the grave of her former companion, Bunny. (Today, the caretakers call it “Bunny’s Trail.”) They said that some of the elephants would stick to certain trails even if those trails did not provide the fastest way to get from one point to another.

I asked Kelly why she thought they were so trail obsessed, even now, after a lifetime of captivity, when trails weren’t necessary for their survival.

She smiled and shook her head.

“I’m guessing it’s deep-rooted,” she said.

+

Later in the day I began piecing together more clues. Kelly and I were visiting the Asian barn, on the other side of the property. Outside the barn sat two dust-yellow elephants named Misty and Dulary. They were smaller and pudgier than the Africans. Misty was lying on her side on the ground, while Dulary stood guard. Spying us, Dulary walked slowly over to the edge of the fence and stared. The shape of her forehead resembled a bull’s skull: a pair of bulging orbits hourglassing into deep, hollow temples. Her trunk hung like the hose of an old gas mask. Where the whites of her eyes should have been, there was black.

Misty rolled over onto her stomach, tucked her knees underneath her, and, in a toddlerish motion, stood up, front legs first. Her face was noticeably chubbier and wrinklier than her companion’s. Kelly described it as “smushy,” like a marshmallow. Misty walked over to Dulary. The two stood side by side: the embodiment of cuteness, the visage of death. They began feeling each other with their trunks, sweetly. Then, as if on cue, they both pissed a torrent.

Cody soon stopped by on his rounds to check in on Misty, which set in motion a smoothly choreographed routine. He walked up to the edge of the fence. Misty turned around and stuck out her knobby tail. He pulled on it gently. Then she lifted her foot. He gave it a hug.

Kelly told me that the caregivers trained the elephants to lift their feet so that they could provide medical treatment. The caregivers dedicated hours each week solely to mending damaged feet—cracked toenails, abscesses, infections—which were common among elephants that, in their former life in captivity, once spent much of the day standing on hard concrete. Making matters worse, a few of the elephants, during their former lives in captivity, had developed odd tics—some rhythmically swayed their bodies from side to side; others tossed their trunks forward and back—which zoologists call “stereotypic behaviors.” Elephants are magnificent long-distance walkers; in the wild, they can travel up to fifty miles per day. So when they are confined, they will often begin fidgeting to release the excess energy. Because the movement releases endorphins, it can become ingrained as a form of self-soothing, which over time can lead to joint and foot injuries. Foot problems, Kelly pointed out, were the leading cause of death among captive elephants.

Despite its stump-like appearance, an elephant’s foot is an oddly delicate appendage. Hidden within that fatty cylinder lies a bone structure resembling a kitten-heeled shoe. This tiptoed design allows elephants to be surprisingly nimble climbers; one hunter in colonial Africa described finding elephant trails leading up the face of a cliff he considered “inaccessible to any animal but a baboon.” In the circus, elephants have even been trained to walk tightropes.

On flat ground, a disc of fat on the sole of each foot dampens much of the impact of walking—a nine-thousand-pound elephant exerts less than nine pounds per square inch of pressure underfoot—giving them a soft, quiet tread. Their tendency to clear paths further facilitates silent creeping. Dan Wylie, the author of a cultural history of the elephant, recounts the story of a group of rangers in the Zambezi Valley of Zimbabwe who, while camping out one night, unwittingly fell asleep in the middle of an elephant path. In the morning, they realized that an elephant had walked directly over their bodies without waking even a single one of them. Its footprint was stamped into the groundsheet between where they lay.

Yet more incredibly, it appears that elephants may also use their feet to listen for messages from distant members of their herd. An elephant researcher named Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell—who previously studied the way Hawaiian planthoppers communicate by sending vibrations through a blade of grass—found that elephants can use what she called their “giant stethoscope feet” to detect distant alarm calls transmitted through the ground. She theorized that elephants’ feet could also detect the rumble of thunder from up to a hundred miles away. If so, this would help explain their mysterious ability to travel across vast distances to the precise location of newly rain-fed land.

The feet, I realized, might provide a clue to how elephants can find the easiest route across hundreds of miles of jungle or desert. In fact, when I thought about it, the whole of an elephant’s body is perfectly engineered for creating trails. With their powerful sense of smell and hearing, elephants can detect food, water, and other elephants from many miles away. With their broad shoulders, they can bash through dense brush. Because of their immense weight—it requires twenty-five times the amount of energy for an elephant to climb one vertical meter as it does to travel the same distance on flat terrain—elephants will travel to great lengths searching for shallow inclines. (This explains why, as I had noticed in Tanzania, elephants always find the easiest place to cross a river drainage.) Elephant brains, too, are ideally tooled for trail-making; their fabled memory is no myth, particularly in regards to spatial information. They have evolved, it seems, to learn the land.

On top of everything else, the family structure of elephants is extremely conducive to trail creation. Typically, herds of female elephants travel single file, with their matriarch in the lead. It is the role of each matriarch to memorize the location of grazing spots and watering holes; over repeated journeys, those routes are taught to the younger elephants, one of which will grow up to become the next matriarch.I This hierarchical, clan-based form of travel likely dates back to the dawn of their species. Paleontologists have discovered a six-million-year-old “Proboscidean trackway”—the fossilized footprints of thirteen female elephant-like creatures moving together along the same path. Over time, given their sheer size and social structure, elephants will—whether they want to or not—print out trails in their passing.

The unique physiology and social structure of elephants explains how they create such elegant trails. But why they follow them remained unclear to me. With all these powerful instruments of perception at their disposal, do elephants need trails, or are trails merely a by-product of walking? Do they give them any more thought than we give the footprints we leave in an inch of newly fallen snow?

I asked these questions to an ecologist named Stephen Blake, whose work focuses on how animal movement affects the land’s ecology. In the late 1990s, Blake began studying the ways that forest elephants disperse fruit seeds throughout Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in northern Congo. To better understand where the elephants were traveling, he started creating a rough map of their trails. Hiking through the swamps and rainforests, he systematically surveyed the trees surrounding the elephant paths, paying special attention to trail intersections. He discovered that the trails overwhelmingly found their way to clumps of fruit trees or to mineral deposits. Other studies have revealed that in desert landscapes, where elephants are forced to cover vast distances to survive, trails likewise tend to connect watering holes and grazing areas. “Lo and behold,” Blake said, “just like all the footpaths in England lead to either the pub or the church, all elephant trails tend to lead to something that elephants want to get to.”

Blake suggested that, even if these trails are not created with any conscious foresight, they quickly come to serve a number of functions. “Let’s say you’ve got naive elephants in a forest they’ve never been to, and there are various trees dotting the area,” he said. “I suspect at first elephants would go bumbling around and wait until they bumped into a fruit tree, and in doing so, they would have knocked down a load of vegetation to get there, and they would perhaps remember the geographic location of that tree. And even if they didn’t, as they kept bumbling, they’re probably going to create a path of least resistance through otherwise thick vegetation. So, just like when you go for a walk through the woods, you get to know which trails lead to a good place and which don’t, presumably elephants learn, and certain trails start being reinforced.”

In the jungle, where resources like fruit trees are plentiful but randomly distributed, or in the desert, where resources like watering holes are rare and far-flung, trails serve to reduce the amount of bumbling (a costly activity, energy-wise) and lower the chances of an elephant missing the mark. “Elephants, just like people, get disoriented,” Blake explained. Trails can reorient lost elephants and reconnect disparate populations. In doing so, trails serve as “a form of societal spatial memory”—a collective, externalized mnemonic system, not unlike that of ants or caterpillars.

And it turns out that the big brains and powerful sense organs of elephants, rather than obviating the need for trails, in fact allow them to create vaster and more complex trail networks. Instead of just signifying this way leads to something good, as a caterpillar’s trails do, memory allows for the nuance of new categories: Animals can learn that this way leads to fruit, this way leads to water, and even (in an elephant’s case) this way leads to my sister’s grave. Animals can begin to feel oriented within a network, aware of where they are in relation to the things they need. In a sense, memory can serve as a trail guide—not necessarily a full record of where things are, but an index of how to quickly access them.

Given their powerful memories and the similarity of their trail networks to our own, I wondered if elephants had grown to regard trails roughly the way we do—which is to say, symbolically. I asked Blake: Does an elephant know what a trail means? In other words, do elephants recognize a trail not just as an easy place to walk or an instinctive attraction, but as a symbolic indication that something worth reaching lies at the other end?

I had posed the same question to dozens of animal researchers—with areas of expertise ranging from caterpillars to cattle—without ever getting a satisfying answer. Blake’s response was unequivocal: “For sure.”

Creating symbolic trails may seem an onerous mental feat for a nonhuman animal, but in fact, with a vast enough plot of land to memorize, thinking symbolically becomes the path of least resistance. It collapses a complex environment down into neat, easily recognizable lines, and then individuates each of those lines according to its destination, like the color-coded lines of a subway system. Certainly, animals could navigate without them, but it would be more difficult, and natural selection, as Richard Dawkins has observed, “abhors waste.”

Relying on trail networks for survival is not without its dangers, though. In places like the Congo, the elephant trail network has recently been disrupted by logging operations, which has left the elephants dangerously disoriented. Blake described the effects of the destruction this way: “Let’s say you take a vibrant city that was bombed to buggery in World War II—you take Coventry or Dresden—that had transport networks all over the place. It was interconnected, everybody knew how to get from one side of the city to another. All of that infrastructure that people understood, it was the basis of their lives—and then it got the crap bombed out of it, and buildings fell, piles of rubble everywhere. Then, you just have chaos. Similarly, when you selectively cut a rainforest—you send in bulldozers, you chop out one or two trees per hectare, you pull them out, and in doing so you knock down a lot of other trees, you create other roadways—you just erase what was there. Even if you don’t go in and kill the elephants, you’ve done astonishing damage to that sort of beautiful latticework, that functioning system.”

Once a trail system or a learned migration route is severed—as, increasingly and alarmingly, they are, due to human habitation and industry—it rarely reestablishes itself, and the population suffers crippling losses. This is why the zebra migration route Bartlam-Brooks had uncovered in the Okavango served as such a startling, hopeful discovery. If her theory is correct, it means that, once the fence fell, a herd of elephants managed to revive one of their ancestral routes, which led to a blooming valley of fresh grass hundreds of miles away. Once the elephants’ path was reestablished, hordes of other animals could then benefit from the wisdom revealed by the passage of those broad, sensile feet.

PART II

Herding

After I left the elephant sanctuary, I kept thinking back to the image of Misty obediently raising her hind foot so that Cody could inspect it. Before I arrived there, I had expected the elephants would be distant and aloof, carefully avoiding humans, the spindly creatures who had once terrorized them so viciously. But watching Misty and Cody, what struck me about their exchange was that it seemed so calm, so natural; it had none of the air of begrudging acquiescence one often sees when elephants are forced to perform silly tricks. It was gentle, almost affectionate. What it reminded me of most, I later realized, was a handshake.

Knowing how much violence can go into training circus elephants, I was curious about how much coercion had gone into teaching Misty this gesture. According to Kelly, the process was totally pain-free. It was a textbook case of Pavlovian conditioning: First, the caregiver teaches the elephant to associate the sound of a clicking device with a treat, like an apple. The purpose of the clicking device—called a “bridge”—is to let the elephant know the exact moment it has completed the desired behavior. The caregiver begins by clicking and giving the elephant a treat.

Click: treat.

Click: treat.

Click: treat.

The caregiver does this until the elephant reaches out her trunk for a treat whenever she hears a click.

Then, the caregiver touches the elephant’s leg with a stick (or “target pole”).

Stick: click: treat.

Stick: click: treat.

Stick: click: treat.

Finally, the caregiver holds the stick a few inches away from the elephant’s leg and says “foot.” Then, the caregiver waits.

“Foot.”

“Foot.”

If and when the elephant finally lifts her leg to touch the stick, click: treat.

Using a roughly similar method, Kelly was training some of the elephants to receive treatment for their tuberculosis. The elephants needed a course of medication, but they had refused to swallow the foul-tasting pills. So once a day, seven days a week, each infected elephant had been trained to wait patiently while Kelly or another caregiver inserted her rubber-clad arm into the elephant’s rectum. According to Kelly, the elephants did not enjoy receiving this treatment any more than she enjoyed administering it.II In the long coevolution of humans and elephants on this planet, this is where we have ended up. First, we ran from them, then we hunted them, then we enslaved them; and now we—some of us, at least—do disgusting things to keep them alive.

The elephants fortunate enough to have found their way to the sanctuary probably enjoy better lives than any other elephant in North America—roaming freely across many acres of open forest, well fed, free from predation, their every scab and sneeze worried over. Nevertheless, I imagine they must sometimes feel like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, comfortably trapped on an alien planet—probed, pampered, and constantly, if politely, surveilled. Despite the caregivers’ best efforts to simulate their natural environment, simply by virtue of being cut off from their families and their homeland, the elephants have been made strange to themselves.

Elephants have been tamed countless times throughout history, but have never been domesticated. Nearly every trained elephant—from Hannibal’s war beasts to Barnum’s ballerinas—was wild born, and subsequently “broken,” as animal trainers used to say. This is what separates a tame animal from a domesticated one. A domesticated animal, like a sheep or a cow, never needs to be broken, because it has already been bred to live comfortably in a human environment. We have sculpted it, right down to its genes, to fit into our version of the world.

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond noted that the “Major Five” domesticated animals—sheep, goats, cows, pigs, and horses—share a rare set of just-so features: they are neither too large nor too small; neither too aggressive nor too fearful; they grow quickly; they can rest and reproduce in close quarters; and they abide by what Diamond has called a “follow-the-leader” social hierarchy. Channeling Tolstoy, he quipped: “Domesticable animals are all alike: every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way.”

Elephants share some of these traits (a strict dominance hierarchy), but not others (they are too big, too restless, and grow too slowly). As almost-domesticates, they have been entered into a rather grisly lottery: each year, for the past four and a half millennia, an unlucky few are abducted, broken, and forced to work for humans, while the rest roam free.

In his controversial 1992 book The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, the science journalist Stephen Budiansky argues that “virtually all of the important characteristics that set apart domesticated animals from their wild progenitors” can be accounted for by a single biological phenomenon called “neoteny”: the retention of juvenile traits in an adult animal or, as Budiansky playfully puts it, “perpetual adolescence.” These traits include notably cuter physical features and more flexible brains. In stark contrast to the behavior of adults, which tends to be rigid, neotenates explore, play, and solicit care just like the young. Notably—and crucially—they also tend to lack a defensive or fearful posture toward other species and new situations. These traits are most notable in dogs (which were, not coincidentally, the first animal to be domesticated), but are also evident, to varying degrees, in all of the Major Five domesticates.

Yet more striking is Budiansky’s panoramic description of how humans and domesticated animals, having locked themselves into a symbiotic blood pact, proceeded to colonize the earth. What unites humans and our motley alliance of herd animals, he suggested, is that we are all “edge-dwellers,” opportunists who continually exploit new and shifting landscapes. Our flexibility is our chief weapon; we are “the scavenger or grazer that can eat a hundred different foods, not the panda exquisitely adapted to living off nothing but huge quantities of bamboo.” Far from having been enslaved, domesticates “chose” (read: evolved) to rely on humans and the changes we wrought on the landscape. The Major Five animals—along with chickens, guinea pigs, ducks, rabbits, camels, llamas, alpaca, donkeys, reindeer, exotic bovids like the yak, and a handful of other species—became domesticated for the same reason some people chose to give up the free-ranging life of a hunter-gatherer to toil as agriculturalists: because it allowed them to outbreed and outcompete their rivals. It was easier to follow the shepherd into the pen than to strike off alone into the wilderness.

It is no coincidence that domestic dogs, sheep, goats, horses, and cattle all vastly outnumber their wild counterparts. Meanwhile, farming and raising animals has allowed one hundred times more people to live on the same area of land as hunting and gathering. While many animal rights activists argue that animal husbandry is unnatural and cruel, Budiansky vigorously defends the pastoral lifestyle. “In raising animals,” Budiansky writes, “we are reenacting something not as old, culturally speaking, as hunting, but in a way more profound, for the rise of animal agriculture is an example of evolution operating at its highest level—on systems of species, one of which is us.” Together, we agro-pastoralists, our livestock, and our crops reshaped ourselves to suit one another’s needs. In doing so, we evolved into an indomitable (if not infallible) ecological system that has reshaped the earth.

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A trail forms when a group of individuals unites to reach a common end. Many of the animal world’s most impressive trails therefore come from herds of big mammals—elephants, bison, a varied assortment of African ungulates—which are able to expertly band together.

For all our lofty scientific studies, though, we still have only a vague sense of how herds operate. As I began to think more about the dynamics of a herd, it occurred to me that humans have been intimately studying one herd animal, up close, for millennia: the humble sheep. To observe how sheep collaborate to form trails—and, moreover, how humans and sheep collaborate to change landscapes—I resolved to try my hand at shepherding.

At the heart of every sheep lies an inherent tension between obedience and disorder. Every child knows that sheep are archetypal herd animals; indeed, the word sheep is virtually synonymous with something that blindly follows those around it. This trait led Aristotle to deem sheep “the most silly and foolish animals in the world.” And yet, in the weeks I spent working as a shepherd in the spring of 2014, I learned that the better one gets to know sheep, the less sheep-like they appear. In fact, each individual sheep has its own personality and temperament. Some are stubborn and (relatively) solitary, while others are meek and clingy. Nevertheless, they manage to cooperate to such a degree that they sometimes appear to be moving as a single body.

The naturalist Mary Austin—who spent almost two decades observing and talking with shepherds in California—wrote that flocks are invariably made up of “Leaders, Middlers, and Tailers.” The leaders head up the flock; the middlers keep to the middle; and the tailers chase up the rear. Individual sheep tend to stick to a single role, she wrote, and because leaders can be used to steer the flock, shepherds typically took special care of them, saving them from slaughter to “make wise” the next generation. Some even went so far as to name them after their girlfriends.III

However, in my experience, the flock dynamic was not so simple as Austin describes. There were, rather, many leaders in a single flock, who would arise in different situations. Even more curiously, I began to notice that certain individuals seemed to feel the need to be perceived as leading the flock—when the flock abandoned their leadership and changed directions, they would hurry to its front, like a politician scrambling to keep ahead of a shifting electorate.

The relationship between a shepherd and a flock, similarly, is not as clear-cut as it looks. The shepherd is not the master of the flock; instead, the flock and the shepherd are engaged in a continuous negotiation, in turns pushing against each other and pulling together, harmonious one moment and fractious the next. Some shepherds claim to be able to control their sheep with words or whistles, which may be true, but the only signaling mechanism my sheep and I needed was the language of space: if I moved too close to them, they would inch away. In this way, I was able to shape their movements, but only vaguely, like a cloud of smoke. The essence of herding is not domination, but dance.

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Shepherding, like any craft, is a skill acquired over a lifetime—or, ideally, passed down over many lifetimes. My time as a shepherd, by contrast, was a mere stint, a neophyte’s first foray. For three weeks in the airy lull of a late Arizona spring, I was stationed near the border of the Navajo and Hopi reservations, in a place called Black Mesa. It was a three-hour drive northeast of Flagstaff, along miles of rutted dirt roads. The area was wholly cut off from municipal electricity, running water, and phone lines. In exchange for herding the sheep, I was given one meal each day and a hut in which to sleep. I had learned about the opportunity from my friend Jake, who had in turn learned about it from an outfit called Black Mesa Indigenous Support, a volunteer organization that helps aging Navajo families remain living on their traditional lands. Jake, who had been shepherding for the past nine years, had regaled me with stories of life among the Navajo, who were among the only people left in North America still herding sheep in the old style, on foot.

A shepherd’s life, I learned, is both repetitive and chaotic; like a water wheel, there are whorls within each slow turn. In the morning, just after sunrise, I released the sheep from their corral and worriedly chased them across the hills; in the afternoon, I followed as they galloped to the water trough; and in the early evening, I bullied them back into their corral. At night I slept on a mattress on the dirt floor of a low, octagonal, dome-roofed hut called a hogan. It was part of a homestead that included two hogans, two old stone houses, two new prefabricated trailers, two outhouses, a horse corral, a sheep corral, and the skeletal remains of other hogans long abandoned. There was no running water and no electricity, save a few rooftop solar panels in the main house, which did not appear to get much use.

The whole of it belonged to an elderly Navajo couple named Harry and Bessie Begay. They were both in their late seventies. Harry was a gray-haired man with a talon nose, thumb-punched cheeks, skeptical eyes, and perfect posture, who wore a baseball cap when he rode his horse and a cowboy hat when he went to town. He was missing two fingers on his right hand—lost, I would learn, to the slip of a chainsaw. Bessie, his wife, was a sweet, tough woman who stood no more than five feet tall. She wore velveteen blouses clasped at the neck with a turquoise-and-silver brooch and a black scarf knotted around her tight bun of steely hair. Her mouth rested in a soft frown, except when she found something amusing, and then it lifted to form a smile the exact size and shape of an upturned cashew.

Harry and Bessie may well be the last generation of sheepherders in their bloodline; none of their six living children had plans to return to their ancestral land and scrape out a living raising sheep. The steady decline of shepherding is a source of great concern for many Navajo people, since the practice has long been integral to their cultural identity. Archaeological and documentary evidence suggests that Navajos first acquired sheep around 1598, when the conquistador Don Juan de Oñate brought roughly three thousand Churra sheep to the American Southwest. However, the Navajo oral tradition maintains that shepherding stretches back much further, to the dawn of their existence as a people. “With our sheep we were created,” proclaimed a local hataałii, or ceremonial singer, named Mr. Yellow Water. According to one particularly vivid version of the Navajo creation story, when the celestial being known as Changing Woman gave birth to sheep and goats, her amniotic fluid soaked into the earth, and from it sprouted the plants that sheep now eat. Next, she created human beings—Diné, as the Navajo call themselvesIV—and sent them to live within the four sacred mountains that still demarcate Navajo country. As a parting gift, she gave them sheep.

For centuries, that gift has shaped Navajo culture, just as water sculpts a canyon. Navajos’ internal clocks were set to the daily schedule of herding, and their calendars were structured by the seasonal migration. The introduction of wool radically altered their material culture, by providing the means to weave lightweight clothing, warm blankets, and intricate rugs. Their architecture was fortified by the need to protect sheep from raiders. Pastoralism altered their diet, their relationship to the landscape, and perhaps even their metaphysics. One Navajo woman told the author Christopher Phillips that herding sheep informed her understanding of the sacred Navajo principle of hozho, or harmony. “The sheep care for us, provide for us, and we do the same for them. This contributes to hozho. Before I tend my sheep each day, I pray to the Holy People, and give thanks to them for the sheep and how they help make my life more harmonious.” When a baby is born, Navajo parents often bury its umbilical cord in their sheep corral, in order to symbolically tie the child to the sheep and to the land. Indeed, as the anthropologist Ruth Murray Underhill suggested, in some sense the Navajo people as we know them—or more importantly, as they know themselves—arrived in this world alongside sheep.

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On my first morning of shepherding, I sat on a metal folding chair in front of my hogan, waiting for someone to tell me what to do. This was my first mistake: as a rule, older Navajos do not relish the opportunity to explain things to naive, inquisitive white people. They would typically prefer the pupil learn through silent observation. Moreover, Harry and Bessie only spoke Diné Bizaad, the traditional language of the Navajo people. Their English was extremely limited, as was my grasp of Diné Bizaad. Unless one of her children was visiting, the only person who could translate for us was Bessie’s brother, a rascally character whose name was either Johnny, Kee, Keith, or all three. (Navajos are known to accumulate multiple names over their lifetimes.) When he was around, J/K/K acted as the translator between me and the Begays, but he had left that morning in a pickup truck with his friend Norman, saying he wouldn’t be back for five days. I was on my own, the only English speaker for miles.

The hogan, like all hogans, was built facing the east, and the risen sun was on my face. Hearing bells, I turned to see a storm cloud of sheep pouring out of the corral. Bessie walked behind them, leaning on an old broomstick. I jogged over to her. With her stick, she drew a circle in the dust, and then bisected it with a straight line: . At the top of the circle she drew another, smaller circle.

“Tó,” she said, using one of the only Diné Bizaad words I knew: “Water.”

Using gestures and a few scattered English words, she made it clear that she wanted me to take the sheep to a nearby windmill, which pumped water from the ground into a trough, let them drink, graze them in a big circle, and then bring them home by nightfall. I had seen such a windmill on the drive in, and, while I didn’t know how to get back to it, I trusted that the sheep did. (This was my second mistake.)

The sheep were already streaming loosely across the yard toward the shallow canyons to the northwest, so I ran to my hogan, threw some supplies into my backpack, and jogged after them.

I found the sheep in the weeds just beyond the Begays’ yard. They went snuffling along the ground, plucking out tender green shoots of grass, their lips fluttering rapidly. Occasionally, I glimpsed the bright flash of a wildflower before it vanished.

I noticed that this flock had recently been shorn; the khaki folds and fissures of their backs resembled an aerial view of the desert. The Navajo-Churro sheep, the oldest breed in North America, is known for its long, straight wool, which is much prized by Navajo weavers. The breed—which has declined greatly over the decades, due in part to the meddling of federal officials who ignorantly judged them “scrubby,” “inbred,” and “degenerate”—is also known as the American Four-Horn, because some rams grow four full horns. Though I had hoped to see one, this particular flock contained only castrated rams and, therefore, no such marvelous oddities.

Orbiting the flock were five shaggy mutts. Four of them stuck close to the sheep. The fifth, a brown-furred, sweet-eyed little adventurer, quickly attached herself to me. She stayed on my heels from morning to night; when we sat down for a break, she would rest her chin on my knee. Harry had mentioned to his children that he was thinking of getting rid of her, because she followed humans instead of the sheep, making her useless as a sheepdog. But this habit endeared her to me, and I snuck her pieces of beef jerky when the other dogs weren’t looking.

Dogs have been used to herd sheep and ward off predators since at least the Middle Ages. With proper training, sheepdogs can be trained to follow a system of whistles and hand signals to manage enormous herds. The Begays’ dogs, however, were not those dogs. They responded to no commands (save the one that indicated it was mealtime) and obeyed no master. Their role, so far as I could see, was to bark at anything that moved, be it a sprinting jackrabbit, a terrified horse, or a passing pickup truck.

I had been warned that the Begays’ sheep had a reputation for being “a difficult flock,” but as we left the homesite and dipped down into a series of sandy stream beds, they seemed sane enough. (Admittedly, I had very little frame of reference.) After spending all night penned up, they walked with vigor, only stopping to nibble once every few steps. The lambs leaped into the air in fishy wriggles. From time to time the young males paused to buck heads, then jogged to catch up.

When the flock encountered a trail, they sometimes jostled into single file—“stringing,” shepherds call this—and broke into a senseless run, their ears flapping up and down, until one of the leaders became distracted by a tasty piece of forage and broke up the race. The geometry of the flock varied according to its speed: As soon as they slowed down, the sheep would fan out into a triangular shape, with the widest part leading the way. When the forage was particularly good, they would slow to a crawl and form a roughly horizontal line, like protesters marching arm in arm. As soon as they sped back up, they resumed stringing. As I watched the sheep running in single file that morning, I quickly realized how and why sheep trails form: it was a matter of speed.

But over time I came to notice that even when the sheep were walking slowly, they sometimes showed a strange, almost idiotic, fidelity to these trails. They liked to graze along the trail’s edge until it intersected with another trail, at which point, if I didn’t intervene, some or all of them would absentmindedly turn onto the new trail rather than follow their former trajectory. They were apparently happy to follow any trail, anywhere.

According to the rancher William Herbert Guthrie-Smith, when domestic sheep are brought to a new area, they immediately begin to establish a habitat for themselves by creating trails. He watched this process firsthand after he purchased twenty-four thousand acres of rain-soaked New Zealand wilderness in 1882, which he patiently converted into a sheep ranch. The first action of sheep in a new land, he wrote, was to “map it out, to explore it . . . by lines radiating from established camps.” The sheep trails snaked outward, skirting around bogs, cliffs, pitfalls, and “blind oozy creeks.” Many sheep were reportedly “swallowed up” by the wet earth in this exploration process. But eventually, the trails that failed to reach adequate foraging grounds faded, while the useful ones improved. The radial pattern that Guthrie-Smith describes is common for sheep; sunken paths (called “hollow ways”) have been found radiating out from Bronze Age villages in Mesopotamia.

Reading Guthrie-Smith, I began to formulate a two-part theory as to why the Begays’ sheep placed such blind trust in trails. In the absence of a shepherd, paths provide the basic guidance sheep need to find their way to food, water, and shelter. As they do for ants and elephants, trails function as a form of external memory. Just as the notion of building a road that leads nowhere seems absurd to us, it would never occur to sheep that one of their trails might not lead to something desirable. So they follow them, trusting that the destination will be worthwhile. At the same time, sheep trails also carve out new sunny spaces (what ecologists call “edge habitats”) where different species of grass take hold; in New Zealand, Guthrie-Smith noted that along sheep trails sprouted “succulent green stuff such as white clover, suckling, cape-weed, and sorrel.” I would not be surprised if something similar was happening in Arizona, because the sheep showed a preference for grazing along roads and trails (assuming the forage hadn’t already been picked clean by another flock). In this simple fashion, sheep use trails to begin bending the land to their needs.

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In the calmer moments that first morning, I was able to able to admire the desert. The soil was the mingled color of pencil shavings, in turns a pale yellow, a powdery pink, and a dry black. Out of it grew a stiff yellow grass. I recalled John Muir’s description of California’s Central Valley in late May: “Dead and dry and crisp, as if every plant had been roasted in an oven.” Actual tumbleweeds actually tumbled across my path. Things poked at my ankles as I walked: spiky tufts of grass, tiny bamboo groves of the green ephedra plant called “Mormon tea,” ankle-high cacti with spines the color of old toenails. The only shade came from the scattered juniper trees, which writhed against an ageless wind.

Off to the northwest, I spotted a windmill, but it looked as tiny as a tin toy. While I was contemplating whether, and how, to turn the flock around, the sheep—as if hatching a whispered scheme—began to divide into two equal-sized groups. I watched the split slowly forming, but I couldn’t move quickly enough to prevent it.

One group drifted downhill, off to the east, while the other nosed up the hill to the west. Placing my faith in the directional sense of the leaders—my biggest mistake yet—I focused my attention instead on the tailers, figuring that they would be less headstrong. I broke into a run and skirted wide around them. Then, shouting curses, I attempted to rush them up the hill. But now their gait—which all day had been brisk and light—was suddenly slow, their hooves leaden. They stopped often, glancing about, as if entering unfamiliar and dangerous territory. Growing increasingly panicked that I would lose half of the Begays’ sheep, I left the sluggards where they were and ran up the hill in the direction I’d last seen the other half of the flock.

The land rose to a flat tabletop, runneled with narrow washes and forested with pinyon pine. I imagined that sheep were lurking behind every stand of trees, and I even heard the spectral gonging of their bells, but they were nowhere to be seen.

As I reached the top of the mesa, something trotted across my path. It moved from my right to my left, low and quick. For a moment I thought it was one of the dogs.

Then I recognized it: a coyote. Ears up, mouth open, it glided over the sand with the cool certainty of a missile.

A sick feeling bloomed in my abdomen. I envisioned finding one of the lambs torn open, its red chest toothed with white ribs.

Running in a circle, I shouted for the dogs, whose names I did not know. Then I ran back down the hill, where I’d left the other half of the flock, only to find that they, too, had disappeared. It seemed impossible, an elaborate practical joke. I turned in circles, feeling dazed. In my mouth had grown a cat’s dry tongue.

The word panic, fittingly enough, refers back to Pan, the mischievous goat-legged god whose bellowing used to terrify shepherds and their flocks. Suddenly I felt its true meaning—a blinding electricity that floods the mind, prompting action without premeditation. I ran back up the hill. I found nothing. I ran back down to the valley: more nothing. Then, losing hope but unsure of what else to do, I ran back up the hill.

It was not yet ten in the morning on my first day of herding, and I had lost every last sheep.

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It is perhaps no accident that the idyllic stereotype of the happy, lazy shepherd—as popularized by poets like Theocritus, Milton, Goethe, Blake, and Leopardi—began to crumble as soon as it reached the wide expanses of the American continent. John Muir, a self-described “poetico-tramp-geologist-bot. and ornith-natural, etc.!!!,” spent the summer of 1869 with a sheep outfit in the Sierra mountains as a young man. Most of the time he left the shepherds to mind the sheep while he traipsed around making sketches of glaciers and pines. He hated the sheep (deeming them “hoofed locusts”) and had scarcely more respect for shepherds, whom he found to be filthy, intellectually dull, and mentally unstable. “Seeing nobody for weeks or months,” he claimed, the sheepherder “finally becomes semi-insane or wholly so.” Archer Gilfillan, a herder of nearly twenty years, agreed. “Considering all the things that can and do happen to a herder in the course of his work,” he wrote, “the wonder is not that some of them are supposed to go crazy, but that any of them stay sane.”

I was beginning to see what he meant.

Looking to the south, I spotted the Begay’s blue pickup truck inching along a dirt road. I wondered if they had been quietly tailing me all morning, having anticipated just this sort of debacle. As I approached, Bessie rolled down the passenger-side window. Her eyes were big behind her glasses, her mouth down-curled into a perfect omega. She said something complicated in Diné Bizaad, then, registering my confusion, simply asked: “Where the sheep?” Her voice quavered. I attempted to pantomime what had happened, with poor results. She looked down and fished an old flip phone out of an embroidered pouch around her neck, poked at it a few times, then handed it to me. On the other end of the line was her daughter, Patty.

“Okay, what happened?” Patty asked.

I told the story: fission, drift, the frantic race between two widening poles, then . . .

I handed the phone back to Bessie. Patty translated. With a sigh, Bessie clapped the phone shut and gestured for me to get in the truck.

We slowly prowled the dirt roads. Once every few minutes Harry would stop the truck and they would get out to inspect the ground for fresh tracks. After one of these stops, I hopped up into the bed of the truck to gain a higher vantage (and to avoid Bessie’s sightline). I was queasy with guilt. In the matrilineal and matrilocal Navajo society, a family’s sheep traditionally belong to the women, and Bessie’s deep attachment to her sheep was palpable. They represented not just a sizable chunk of her life savings—ten thousand dollars, more or less—but also decades of labor and centuries of tradition. The sheep I’d lost were a living inheritance from her ancestors, and future gifts to her grandchildren.

After an hour of searching, we gave up and drove home. Patty was waiting there with her two boisterous kids. They were sitting on the couches that lined three walls of the Begays’ sunny living room. Patty paused from shushing her children to welcome me back.

“So, how many did you lose?” she asked.

I sighed painfully. “All of them.”

“Don’t worry, happens all the time,” she said. “They show up eventually. Maybe we lose one to a coyote. That happens too. Wouldn’t be the first time. Won’t be the last.”

She had brought a plastic cooler full of raw skirt steak—a welcome treat for Harry and Bessie, since they lived almost an hour from the nearest grocery store and had no refrigerator. She went outside to stoke the wood fire for the grill. I sat in the living room and stared at the walls, which were lined with old family photographs, calendars, and a large tapestry one of the Begay boys had brought back from his stint in the military, which depicted two colonial officers, astride elephants, hunting down a tiger. A bookshelf was stocked with yellow-­spined National Geographic magazines dating back decades. The couches were neatly covered with bedsheets. Flies circled the room in endless, spirographic patterns.

Some time later, Harry came riding into the yard on his horse, herding half the flock in front of him. Watching them funnel into the corral, I felt some relief, but not much. The other half was still out there with the coyotes.

After lunch, we got back into the truck. Rather than driving west, where I had lost the sheep, we drove due north, on a dirt road that ran up the middle of a grassy valley. At the northern end stood the chrome-bright windmill I had spotted earlier.

Patty pointed out her left window and told me to avoid taking the sheep over there, to the west—the precise place I had taken them. “They get all crazy up in those hills,” she said. Plus, she added, it was too easy for a new shepherd to lose sight of them among the trees and gullies. It was better to walk them in wide circles around the valley, a place I would later, in my endless perambulations of its grassy slopes, come to call “the salad bowl.” (I recalled Bessie’s map, drawn in the dust, which suddenly made perfect sense. It was the salad bowl bisected by the road: .)

We pulled up to the windmill, which revolved slowly, its innards pistoning, drawing water from the ground. On its tail vane, in red paint, was printed: THE AERMOTOR CO/SAN ANGELO, TX/USA. Beside it stood a trough and a ten-foot-tall holding tank of water.

In its shade stood the sheep.

We counted them: They were all there. None had been eaten by the coyote. The dogs were all nearby. Something in my gut slowly unclenched, and I could breathe. (Perhaps those dogs aren’t so useless after all, I thought.)

Patty told me to walk the sheep home. “Slowly,” she added.

I stepped out of the truck and walked around the sheep in a wide circle. They looked at me placidly, without a wrinkle of guilt. Even a dog would have had the courtesy to avert its eyes, but they were blameless as lumps of snow.

When they had finished drinking, we started off home. The sheep seemed to know the way, so I slung my walking stick over my shoulder and ambled behind them as they crossed the sun-washed valley. Once again, the shepherd’s life seemed idyllic.

When we arrived back at the Begays’ property, I steered the sheep toward the corral, a shoulder-high enclosure made up of wooden boards, scrap metal, and mismatched plastic tarps. The other half of the flock was already waiting inside the corral, and upon hearing our approach they began bleating frantically. My half of the flock shouted in idiotic response. The moment I opened the corral door to let my sheep in, chaos broke loose: the trapped sheep attempted to escape as the other half attempted to invade. A white liquid roil ensued. Hungry lambs rushed out and swiveled their snouts between their mothers’ hind legs, latching onto their udders even as the ewes strode forward into the corral. Despite my best efforts, two hungry sheep escaped. I assumed they would obey their flocking instinct and follow the rest back into the corral, but instead, to my horror, the majority of the flock turned and rushed to follow the escapees before I could shut the unwieldy gate.

The glitch, I realized, was that my half of the flock had already stuffed themselves with grass, whereas the other half, which Harry had rounded up earlier, had spent the afternoon growing hungry.

The escapees slunk off, looking for grass. No matter what I tried, I could not coax them back; I could herd them as close as the corral, but as soon as I opened the gate, the leaders would rear their heads and gallop back out to pasture, trailing the rest behind them. Eventually the two rebellious sheep allowed me to herd them into the corral, but only once they had eaten their fill. This was my final lesson that day. In the words of Muir: “Sheep, like people, are ungovernable when hungry.”

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Over the course of many years, shepherds and their flocks mold to each other. They tailor each other’s behavior and shape each other’s bodies—the shepherd tries to keep the sheep fat, while the sheep endeavor to keep the shepherd thin. With time, humans weed out the sheep that refuse to follow (by butchering them), and the sheep weed out the humans who are unfit to lead (by driving them to a state of either insanity or depression).

One morning, Bessie went off to run an errand, so she sent Harry off with the sheep and tasked me with preparing lunch. Leaving a pot of beans to simmer, I snuck out to observe Harry at work. I was struck to find that, under his care, the sheep were utterly calm, stopping for long periods of time to pick over the grass, whereas with me they had been as restless as fleas. Being too old and stiff to walk long distances, Harry sat tall atop his horse, a brown stallion with a white star on his forehead. He paced around the flock in graceful curves, slowing down the leaders, hurrying up the stragglers, gently molding the cloud. I never even saw him trot; the horse took slow, balletic steps. When a straggler failed (or refused) to catch up, Harry sometimes circled back for it. Other times, he appeared to leave it behind, confident it would eventually return to the fold.

Over the centuries shepherds have developed many clever ways of managing their flocks. In many countries, shepherds train a goat or a castrated ram, called a “wether,” to follow spoken commands. (To more easily locate it, shepherds tend to put a bell on this sheep, a practice that furnished us with the term bellwether.) The custom of bellwethering was noted as far back as Aristotle’s The History of Animals. In 1873, the British writer and magazine editor Thomas Bywater Smithies relayed an anecdote that, under other circumstances, would haunt the nightmares of anyone who has herded sheep: One day, he watched as thousands of sheep from many different flocks mixed together by the banks of the Jordan River. “It seemed a scene of inextricable confusion,” Smithies wrote. “But as each shepherd gave his own peculiar call, the sheep belonging to him, and knowing his voice, came out from the crowd, and followed their own leader.”

In my three weeks of herding, I did not have time to train my sheep. I was instead relegated to the role of benevolent predator, chasing them to where I thought they should go. As the weeks passed, though, I did pick up a few tricks. I learned not to micromanage the sheep, because (as Moroni Smith, a Utah sheep rancher, once wrote) “an anxious herder makes a lean flock.” I learned to see the differences between each member of my flock; I gave each sheep a nickname and started to recognize their individual personalities, which allowed me to predict their movements. I learned that the tailers hung back for a reason—by slowly hunting up the dregs the hard-charging leaders left behind, they filled a niche. I learned that stray sheep are at the greatest risk of wandering off when they are in a large group and feel insulated from danger.V And I learned the importance of setting the sheep off in the correct direction as they left the corral in the morning, since the trajectory of their first hundred steps tended to dictate the following thousand, a phenomenon social scientists call “path dependence.”

I also learned why certain sheep stray. Some of my sheep—most notably the one I called Burr Face, a gaunt, knock-kneed old ewe with a large burr permanently fastened to the wool on her left cheek—would routinely wander off. Initially, this just seemed like an error to me, but I came to realize that straying is a calculated gamble. The goal of every sheep is to spend as much time eating and as little time walking as possible (while, in turn, keeping themselves from being eaten). Most of the time, straying was an ill-advised decision, because I would chase the strays back to the herd, which meant they spent more time walking and less time eating. However, in the desert not all foods are considered equal. Grass is a staple for sheep, but what they prefer is pygmy sagebrush, wildflowers, or, especially, the fruit of the narrow-leaf yucca plant. (The very sight of yucca could send even the most indolent of sheep into a mad dash.) Every few escape attempts, the stragglers chanced upon one of these calorie-rich foods. On one occasion, Burr Face staged a small insurrection, leading six other sheep away from the herd toward a large patch of sagebrush. Seeing the wisdom of her discovery, I turned the herd around and led them all back to where she stood—and so, for thirty glorious minutes, a lifelong straggler was transformed into a far-sighted leader.

Most important, I learned that whenever possible, a shepherd should attempt to bend the will of the sheep, rather than break it. By locating the nodes of desire that sheep naturally gravitate toward, I found I could steer the flock without unduly stressing it. Smith wrote that the object of skillful herding is not to bully the sheep, but rather to “create a desire with the sheep to do the things that the herder wants them to do,” which, he added, “is the secret of successful handling of all animals.”

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When I was younger I used to see the earth as a fundamentally stable and serene place, possessed of a delicate, nearly divine balance, which humans had somehow managed to upset. But as I studied trails more closely, this fantasy gradually evaporated. I now see the earth as the collaborative artwork of trillions of sculptors, large and small. Sheep, humans, elephants, ants: each of us alters the world in our passage. When we build hives or nests, mud huts or concrete towers, we re-sculpt the contours of the planet. When we eat, we convert living matter into waste. And when we walk, we create trails. The question we must ask ourselves is not whether we should shape the earth, but how.

When you herd sheep, those living lawn mowers, this question becomes all the more urgent. A skillful herder with a willing flock can radically transform the ground they walk on, for better or worse. In Tutira, Guthrie-Smith describes how, over the course of forty years, he and his sheep converted a tract of land covered in bracken, bush, and flax into a bucolic, grassy sheep ranch. First, the sheep trampled trails through the bracken and manuka, which created canals to drain the bogs and allowed palatable native grasses, like weeping rice, to sprout along the trails’ edges. Areas of spongy, fern-choked turf were soon compressed into a soil fit for grass. The sheep’s manure fertilized the ground and re-sodded hills blown bare by the wind. The sheep even constructed “viaducts” between hilltops and “sleeping-shelves” on the hillsides. Year by year, they quite literally carved out a place for themselves to live.

However, Guthrie-Smith warned that, if the shepherd isn’t careful, sheep can have the opposite effect. When they walk across a plot of land too often, their hooves can compact the soil to an “iron surface,” which hinders grass growth. More destructive still is the problem of overgrazing, which is described in alarming detail in Elinor G. K. Melville’s A Plague of Sheep. When allowed to breed unchecked, sheep sometimes enter a pattern of what ecologists call “irruptive oscillation” (boom-bust), which can permanently degrade the landscape. When too many sheep graze in the same area, they eventually begin chomping grass down to its roots. In warm, dry climates, this can eventually lead to what is known as “ovine desertification.” The process is deviously self-reinforcing: Grass normally serves to both shade the soil and retain rainfall, so when grass is cropped too low, the soil desiccates. Drier soil leads the existing plant species to die off, and new species—those which are better suited to drier climates and, not coincidentally, inedible to sheep—take their place. As this prickly new plant life spreads unchecked, the sheep hunt down the last of the good forage and a vicious circle forms: less forage leads to more cropping down to the roots, which then leads to even less forage. Eventually, the sheep die off in large numbers and the cycle is broken, but not before the soil and vegetation are irreparably changed.

According to Melville, in the sixteenth century the introduction of Spanish sheep—against the strenuous objections of the indigenous population—into Mexico’s Valle del Mezquital converted a number of grasslands and oak forests to arid scrublands thick with thistles, mesquite, and other spiny plants. By the end of the century, Melville wrote, “the ‘good grazing lands’ of the 1570s had become scrub-covered badlands.”

In the 1930s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs believed that this process was taking place in the Begays’ corner of the Navajo reservation. Between 1868 and 1930, the Navajo population grew fourfold. Their growth was fed by a roughly parallel explosion in the population of sheep and goats, which the Navajo herded along looping routes from the summer highlands to the winter lowlands. However, the soil had begun to dry out, and the good forage was giving way to (aptly named) toxic plants like snakeweed, sneezeweed, Russian thistle, and locoweed. Federal officials believed that if drastic reductions were not made in the Navajo livestock population, the bulk of the reservation might effectively degrade into a wasteland.

At the time, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was headed by a well-­intentioned but ultimately tragic figure named John Collier. Raised in Atlanta and educated in New York and Paris, Collier romanticized the Navajo nation as “an island of aboriginal culture in the monotonous sea of machine civilization.” However, he also viewed their herding practices—based as they were on tradition, spirituality, and firsthand knowledge—as inferior to the burgeoning science of range management. While it was plain to Collier and his colleagues that the Navajo range was over-grazed, many Navajos believed that the poor forage was merely the result of an unusually dry spell of weather. (Indeed, the region was suffering from the same climatic shift that famously converted the prairies of Oklahoma into a dust bowl.) Some Navajo elders held that the drought was brought on by a breakdown of religious tradition, which, ironically, meant that Collier’s proposed plan—of slaughtering huge numbers of sheep—could further upset the Holy People and worsen the drought.

The Navajo, who had lived on the land for centuries before Collier even arrived, were understandably upset by the notion of a white stranger from Georgia telling them how to manage their sheep. Some of Collier’s advisors, like the forester Bob Marshall, stressed to him the importance of crafting an approach that respected the Navajos’ metaphysical beliefs, complex family dynamics, and profound knowledge of the land.

Collier did not heed this advice. Instead, he instituted a draconian system of stock reduction in which thousands of sheep, goats, and horses were shot en masse. Many corpses were either left to rot or doused in kerosene and burned. In the end, the total number of livestock was cut in half. Moreover, Collier sought to “modernize” the Navajo herding system by breaking the land into eighteen grazing “districts,” which disrupted the annual migrations that had long allowed the Navajo to adapt to a harsh and volatile climate. The Navajo Tribal Council frantically passed a number of resolutions in an effort to halt the regulations, but Collier exercised his congressionally mandated veto power. In frustration, many Navajos resisted violently, while others protested to Congress. Finally, by 1945, Collier was ousted, and his livestock reduction plan quietly scrapped. His bitter tenure is still remembered by many Navajos as a period of cultural genocide.

In hindsight, it seems clear that the core problem of the 1930s was not that the Navajo had too many sheep, but that the land had too many people. As the historian Richard White has noted, as the Navajo population continued to grow, an exploding population of Anglo and Chicano ranchers were edging into Navajo-owned lands. Indeed, over the same time span that the Navajo population quadrupled, the total population in Arizona multiplied by a factor of sixty-seven. Throughout the 1930s, government officials repeatedly warned the Navajo that they were facing a Malthusian disaster. However, White noted, no one ever told the Anglos to slow their population growth, or cease encroaching on Navajo land. Collier and other federal officials, being unwilling to grant more grazing land to the Navajos, opted instead to cull the Navajo herds and disrupt their traditions. In the process of trying to preserve their land, Collier ended up embodying many of the worst aspects of imperialism—ignorance, racial supremacy, and brutality. Despite his efforts, or perhaps in part because of them, the rangeland’s vegetation has continued to wither ever since.

In effect, Collier believed his job was to shepherd the shepherds: for his plan to work, he needed to convince a population of intelligent, independent-minded people to alter their traditions and sacrifice much of their wealth. It was a delicate task that would surely have been better handled by the Navajo themselves. Perhaps, as some have suggested, a Navajo leader could have forged a collective agreement around their core belief in hozho (harmony). What’s more, any Navajo who had grown up herding sheep would also have understood the most basic axiom of shepherding: though a wise shepherd can bend the flock’s trajectory, the shepherd must ultimately conform to the needs of the flock, not the other way around.

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Two weeks passed. May became June. The sky increasingly took on the blue hue of a butane torch. As the heat intensified, the sheep grew lazier, and the herding became easier. Around two P.M., the flock would gather in the shade of a large juniper tree for a siesta, panting rapidly through flared nostrils. The lambs—who had not yet been shorn—would occasionally become so oppressed by the heat that they would fall forward like drunks and eat while resting on their elbows. Here and there, I would find white balls of wool nested in the grass. When I startled them—and only then—they would sprout legs, spring up, and trot on. By three P.M., every last sheep was heat-stunned, and I would have to chase them from shade tree to shade tree all the way home.

One morning near the end of my stay on the Begays’ property, just as I was beginning to gain some confidence in my abilities as a shepherd, Harry and his daughter Jane drove up in a pickup truck carrying five white Angora goats.

After they had unloaded the goats into the corral, I walked over to take a closer look. I peered over the fence and was surprised to find only sheep. Then something uncanny caught my eye. Off to the side stood five strange beings, camouflaged among the sheep, but whiter, shinier. They had tilted eyes and thin limbs, and from their chins hung long white beards. Their nervousness was palpable. I imagined that, to them, the corral must have resembled a prison yard in a foreign land. The sheep’s blunt faces and muscled shoulders no doubt seemed brutish, whereas to the sheep, the goats must have looked, as they did to me, otherworldly and effete.

I later learned that this type of goat, the Angora, is highly prized by many Navajo families. Originally from Tibet, the breed made its way to America by way of Turkey, passing through Ankara, where it picked up its name. It is an ancient breed, mentioned in the book of Exodus, but has only been raised by the Navajo in any significant numbers since the turn of the twentieth century, when the goats’ long silken hair, called mohair, began to fetch higher prices than sheep’s wool. Today, Angora mohair from Navajo country is considered some of the best in the world.

The following morning, when Bessie let the goats out of the corral, I was apprehensive; Jane had told me that the family had tried raising goats before, but had quit because they were too much trouble to herd. As the gate swung open, the first few seconds passed normally. The goats fell in line with the sheep and filed out of the corral. Then the dogs, after an interval of suspicious sniffing, recognized that there were alien beings in their midst, and began barking viciously at the Angoras. The goats flew into a state of panic, skittering away from the dogs with wild eyes. Bessie and I shouted and swung our walking sticks ineffectually at the dogs, who paused from their righteous chase to look up at us with confused and hurt expressions.

I was told by numerous people that goats usually walk ahead of the sheep, but these had the tendency to walk in the back—at times falling so far behind that I would have to circle around and hurry them along. Their hesitation seemed largely to be due to their (understandable) fear of the dogs, who, throughout the day, would periodically forget that morning’s lesson, sniff out the presence of these weird not-quite-sheep, and excitedly renew the attack.

The skittishness of the goats threw off my rhythm. It was as if I had spent weeks learning to juggle three rubber balls, and then someone tossed a golf ball into the mix. As we passed through the canyon on our way to the grassy valley, they lingered in areas the sheep trotted past, rearing up on their hind legs to gnaw on flowering cliffrose bushes and low trees. The subtle differences in their behavior made me realize how much I had grown to rely on my ability to intuit the sheep’s intentions.

This slight disconnect would lead to calamity. The following day, when the flock reached the far side of the valley, the sheep, as they always did, recognized the windmill, fell into a trail, and galloped for it. But the goats—either not knowing what the image of the windmill signified, or not smelling the water—balked. I decided to follow the sheep, which, if unchaperoned, tended to wander off onto the neighbor’s property. (That land was patrolled by a young Navajo man in a black pickup truck, who had angrily scolded me, on two separate occasions, for encroaching on his family’s grazing area.) The goats, I reckoned, would either follow behind us, or they would remain where they were.

When the goats did not show up at the trough, I jogged up a hill and caught a glimpse of them in the distance, their wispy tails raised, burning white in the morning sun. Then I ran back, gathered the sheep, and circled around to where the goats had been—only to find that they had vanished. The sun grew hot, pressing the lambs to their knees. Many of the sheep gathered in the shade. I left them there and crisscrossed the valley searching for the lost goats. I looked for hours. Sick once again with shame, I brought the sheep back home and informed Bessie and Harry that the goats had disappeared.

“Oh,” Bessie said. We all climbed into the truck.

And so my time herding ended as it began: standing in the bed of a pickup, straining my eyes against the sere hillsides, seeing phantoms in every clump of yellow grass or gap in the trees. From time to time Harry got out of the truck and peered at faint signs printed in the dust, trying to track down what I had lost.

PART III

Hunting

Days later, back in New York, I called to check on the whereabouts of the goats. I was relieved to learn that Harry had eventually tracked down all five, and they were unharmed.

This skill of Harry’s amazed me. I had often tried to track down lost sheep or goats myself, but I was never successful. In the talc-fine desert soil, which preserved footprints with surprising clarity, it was impossible for me to differentiate between a track that had been made a few hours ago from one that had been made a few days ago; hoofprints ran in every direction like voices chattering over one another. Harry, however, could easily differentiate between the different tracks with a glance. Indeed, oftentimes he would release the sheep from the corral and allow them to roam free for hours while he attended to some other task. Then, in the late afternoon, he would saddle up his horse and patiently track them down.

Information resides in trails, but it is encoded in a language that must be painstakingly learned. Aboriginal Australians, who are considered by many to be the finest trackers in the world, begin teaching their children to track almost from birth. According to Thomas Magarey, who moved to South Australia in the 1850s, Aboriginal mothers taught their babies to track by placing a small lizard in front of the infant; the lizard would scamper off, and then the child would crawl after it, meticulously tracking it to its hiding place. From lizards, the child would rise in proficiency “until beetles, spiders, ants, centipedes, scorpions, and such like fairy trackmakers are followed over the tell-tale ground.” For fun, men of the Pintupi tribe would create startlingly accurate reproductions of animal tracks with their knuckles and fingers in the desert sand, writing fluently in an alien script.

Elsewhere, in the Kalahari Desert, young boys of the !Kung tribe are encouraged to set traps for small game in order to learn about animal spoor. In order to trap an animal, one must predict its future, and the first clue to an animal’s future movements is to locate its habitual trails. The simplest traps—crude deadfalls, pitfalls, and foot snares—are often placed along animal trails, a technique trappers call a “blind set.” Elaborating on this technique, the indigenous Ndorobo tribe of Kenya dig deep pits, which are sometimes lined with spikes, in the middle of elephant trails. It is an inspired innovation; they locate the elephants’ paths, read their futures, and then, like Theseus battling the Minotaur, use the beast’s chief asset—its immense bulk—against it.

Following animal trails is the most basic form of what the evolutionary biologist Louis Liebenberg calls “simple tracking.” Liebenberg has spent years studying the !Kung people’s particular form of persistence hunting, which requires highly advanced tracking skills. As they gain expertise, !Kung hunters graduate to a more “refined” technique, called “systematic” tracking, where a pattern is found and followed among less distinct or discontinuous tracks. Finally, the most complex form of tracking, which Liebenberg calls “speculative tracking,” requires the tracker to piece together scanty and scattered evidence to create a hypothesis of where the animal might be headed, so he can expect where to find the next set of tracks.

In his 1990 book The Art of Tracking: The Origin of Science, Liebenberg argues that a close study of tracking techniques could resolve a seeming paradox of evolutionary history: How did the human brain evolve the ability to think scientifically—which, in turn, led to an explosion of technology and knowledge—if scientific reasoning was not required for hunter-gatherer subsistence? Plainly, humans did not evolve with the “aim” of one day diagramming the structure of an atom; evolution, as the saying goes, doesn’t plan ahead. But then why would humans have evolved the abilities necessary to practice science if we didn’t need them to survive?

Liebenberg’s answer is simple: tracking is science. “The art of tracking,” he argues, “is a science that requires fundamentally the same intellectual abilities as modern physics and mathematics.” The famed astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who often wrote about the !Kung, agreed. “Scientific thinking almost certainly has been with us from the beginning,” he once wrote. “The development of tracking skills delivers a powerful evolutionary selective advantage. Those groups unable to figure it out get less protein and leave fewer offspring. Those with a scientific bent, those able to patiently observe, those with a penchant for figuring out acquiring more food, especially more protein, and live in more varied habitats; they and their hereditary lines prosper.”

This theory is an offshoot of an older—and hotly contested—­theory in paleontology called the hunting hypothesis, which holds that the pursuit of big game led to much of the development of human language, culture, and technology. I have my doubts about both theories. Liebenberg in particular goes a bit too far in equating “science”—a specific, standardized system of inquiry—with the advanced analytical skills and imagination (what he calls “hypothetico-deductive reasoning”) that would eventually allow humans to develop that codified system. Tracking was hardly the only facet of prehistoric life that would have required this skill-set; if tracking is a prehistoric form of physics, then gathering plants is also an early form of botany, and cooking is a precursor to chemistry.

Nevertheless, there is a kernel of truth to these theories: Hunting is an indisputably fundamental human tradition, which has shaped us in various ways. Long before we ever looked at other animals as pets or test subjects, we viewed them as either predators or prey. To understand the full role that trails play on Earth—to see how they can lead not just to a long life, but also to a quick death—I needed to see them through the eyes of a hunter.

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Until I began researching it, the sum total of my lifelong hunting experience was limited to a few mornings spent in a deer blind on my grandfather’s ranch as a child. (My memories consist of staring numbly into the cellarine dawn of a Texas autumn for hours—an exquisitely subtle kind of torture for a child.) So I began asking around in search of an expert hunter. An acquaintance pointed me to a man in Alabama named Rickey Butch Walker. When I emailed Walker, he replied with a concise list of his credentials: with his bow and arrows, he had shot 114 white-tailed deer over his lifetime, and seven that season alone. He didn’t use bait, he didn’t use dogs, and he had never killed a deer with a gun, in part because he didn’t like the noise a gun makes. (He had gotten his fill of guns as a rifle platoon leader in the National Guard, he wrote.) Most important—to me, at least—he only hunted for food, not trophies.

Walker graciously agreed to put me up in his spare bedroom for a weekend and take me out hunting, so I flew down to Huntsville. At the bottom of the escalator to the baggage claim, a big, bullish man was waiting for me. His head shone under the cold cathode lights. It was shaved slick, along with everything else above his collarbone, as if that morning, and every morning, he had placed a razor at the base of his nape and dragged it up over his crown and down the front of his face in one continuous motion. Where his eyebrows should have been were just two wrinkles of muscle. His bright blue eyes were pinched in behind a deep squint—eyes that could be either cheerful or circumspect without changing shape. We shook hands. He took one of my bags. The back of his T-shirt sported the slogan of a brand of hunting clothing called Mossy Oak: “It’s not a Passion. It’s an Obsession.”

Outside the airport it was dusky and warm. We threw my bags into the bed of a red Ford truck and climbed aboard. Walker turned onto a highway, which soon passed over the wide, slow Tennessee River. His cell phone lit up with a text message from his cousin, which I read aloud for him: I got 1800 lbs of corn today. 36 sacks. My little trailer pulled it great.

His cousin was apparently planning to use the corn as deer bait, a practice Walker frowned upon. Walker preferred to give the deer a chance. “I like to do it fair and square,” he said. “If he can dodge that arrow at thirty yards, that’s his business. But if not, I’m gonna put him in the freezer and eat his ass.” All year round, virtually the only meat Walker cooked was wild game. When he had a surplus, as he did most years, he gave it away to his elderly neighbors.

As we neared Moulton, the nearest city to where Walker lived, a coyote streaked brightly through the periphery of our headlights. Along the roadside, Walker pointed out some of the twenty-six historical markers that he had researched, written, and installed. He was at least the seventh generation of his family to live in this area—a legacy that, owing to a considerable quantum of Cherokee and Creek blood in his veins, almost certainly stretched beyond recorded history.

After Andrew Jackson chased most of the Cherokee and Creek people out of Alabama in the early nineteenth century, the state imposed fines for anyone caught trading with members of those tribes, so those who escaped the Removal tended to assimilate. Walker’s ancestors, many of whom were mixed-race or full-blooded Cherokee, learned to call themselves “black Irish.” They were proud, independent folk who lived off the land, never made much money, and occasionally intermarried. Walker often joked that his family tree was more like “a family wreath,” because his great-great grandparents had the same grandparents, a fact that is (at least somewhat) less scandalous than it initially sounds: a brother and a sister married a brother and a sister, and then two of their children (first cousins) married each other. Walker said he was not personally opposed to marrying a first cousin, either, though the opportunity had never presented itself.

At the age of sixty-three, he had already quit his job as the director of the Lawrence County Schools’ Indian education program to devote himself full-time to bow hunting and studying local history. He had published fourteen histories, eight of which were in print through a publisher out of Killen, Alabama, called Bluewater Publications. “I can talk your ear off about history,” he warned me. “I’m a history nut.”

His grasp of the local history was indeed profound, even overwhelming. He would often begin enumerating a single piece of information, such as the age of a courthouse, but then become lost amid the rhizomatic tangle of ancestry, language, and geography that makes up the Old South. (One afternoon, during a soliloquy on Indian trails that had somehow veered into an account of the life of the hometown hero and Nazi-conquering Olympian Jesse Owens, Walker caught me dozing off in the passenger seat.) Never in my life had I met a white American who was as deeply rooted in one piece of land. He seemed to know the history of every brick in town. But if he were to drive seventy-five miles away, he would be on terra nova. “I don’t know the history of anything else,” he said, “but I know the history of my little area.”

For him, the wide four-lane roads were overlaid with the onionskin of history. Instead of Highway 41, Walker saw the Old Jasper Road, a wagon trail that once ran from Tuscaloosa to Nashville. As we turned onto Byler Road, Walker said: “See, now this was called the Old Buffalo Trail. They say you could ride a horse at a full gallop along a buffalo trace and never worry about tree limbs or anything.”

Before they were decimated by the rifle and the railway, buffalo had once swarmed the continent from coast to coast, transforming it as they went. American bison (as they are properly known), rather like elephants, tend to walk in single file and can travel great distances. However, unlike elephants, they also sometimes move in oceanic herds; in 1871, Colonel R. I. Dodge encountered a single herd he estimated was twenty-five miles across and fifty miles long. In their endless search for grass, water, and minerals, buffalo created graded trails down hillsides and riverbanks, which became known as “buffalo landings.” Where they stopped to wallow, they dug dusty saucers and shallow ponds. They bashed through canebrakes and smashed down groves of Quaking Aspen. Some of their trails were faint, while others were so deep that their shoulders rubbed against the embankments. (A few of these trails, which are still visible in aerial photographs, are so deep that they have been mistaken by geologists for trenches carved out by glaciers.) The Old Buffalo Trail that Walker had pointed out once connected Moulton up to a massive salt deposit called Bledsoe’s Lick, where, in 1769, a hunter named Isaac Bledsoe had stumbled upon thousands of buffalo. Around the area’s salt licks, the buffalo created radiating trail networks reminiscent of Parisian avenues.

As buffalo trails often do, this section of the Old Buffalo Trail lay on a dividing ridge between two rivers. Buffalo tended to clear trails along dividing ridges, where the walking was easy. Like elephants, they also found the lowest passes over the mountains. When Daniel Boone blazed the Wilderness Road, he followed the path of the Cherokee and Shawnee Indians, who in turn followed the bison, through the Cumberland Gap. In Rising From the Plains, John McPhee recounted learning from the geoscientist David Love how bison had discovered the so-called “gangplank,” a geological ramp that provided “the only place in the whole Rocky Mountain front where you can go from the Great Plains to the summit of the mountains without snaking your way up a mountain face or going through a tunnel.” The gangplank provided the ideal route for the Union Pacific Railroad, which would link the industrialized east to the Wild West.

The geographer A. B. Hulbert wrote that the buffalo “undoubtedly ‘blazed’—with his hoofs on the surface of the earth—the course of many of our roads, canals, and railways.” However, this neatly teleological account—from bison trails to roads and railways—­drastically underplays the role humans played in creating these networks. In many areas, buffalo trails ran in all directions, providing a wealth of options but little direction—historical reports are filled with accounts of pioneers becoming lost in a “maze” of buffalo paths. In other places, there were no buffalo trails at all. What now seems likely is that many of those travelers who marveled at the buffalo’s “wonderful sagacity,” like Lewis and Clark, had Indian guides who knew which buffalo (or other game) trails to follow, knew which to ignore, and had already furnished paths for the areas where game had not.

The subsequent decline of the bison is well known. As demand grew for their hides, which were used as fur coats and factory belts, white hunters poured westward on the railways, often shooting the buffalo directly from passing trains. Other times, the buffalo were killed by the trains themselves; the sound of an approaching locomotive sometimes prompted them to rush across the tracks in blind terror.

For the federal government, the destruction of the buffalo held a certain monstrously efficient logic: it removed one nuisance (cutting down on the pesky buffalo, which ate up valuable grass, muddied ponds, and derailed trains), while weakening another (depriving the Plains Indians of their staple food source and forcing them to end their roaming existence). President Ulysses S. Grant wrote in 1873 that he “would not seriously regret the total disappearance of the buffalo from our western prairies,” as their extinction might increase native people’s “sense of dependence upon the products of the soil and their own labors” (i.e., agriculture and capitalism). Millions of buffalo were killed in the 1870s, and by the 1880s they were already becoming scarce. Their bones piled up like snowdrifts, and then were shipped back east to be turned into fertilizer and fine bone china. More than a century later, their absence is felt primarily as a ghostly presence. They are gone, but their trails remain.

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It was dark by the time we pulled up to Walker’s home—a huge, lovingly crafted two-story house, which he had built largely on his own. “I got seven bathrooms in this house,” he proudly announced when we walked in from the garage. “Did all the plumbing myself.”

He gave me a quick tour of the house’s many rooms, flushing the unused toilets in each bathroom so the pipes wouldn’t dry out. He was divorced (five times, in fact), and his kids were all grown up, so he lives there alone. On the second floor, he took out a laminated map of the surrounding area and unrolled it on the floor. The map was incredibly detailed; it spanned eight feet from the left edge to the right, but covered less than twenty-two miles. Each hill and hollow was named: Brushy Mountain, Cedar Mountain, Sugar Camp Hollow. “This was my stomping grounds,” he said. “I’ve hiked every creek and hollow in this whole area. Never have been lost back there, that I know of.”

Walker had spent his entire life hunting and gathering in one way or another. He pointed out where he used to dig for ginseng, where he used to fish, where he used to probe for mud turtles. As a young boy he had prowled those woods with his tick hound, Blue John, hunting for possums, rabbits, and raccoons. He had set traps for mink and bobcat. Whatever meat he brought home—be it deer, groundhog, possum, raccoon, muskrat, beaver, skunk, squirrel, rabbit, quail, dove, wood cock, snipe, duck, goose, turkey, turtle, bullfrog, or any kind of fish or small bird—his grandmother would expertly cook it up on her wood-fired stove. Pork and chicken were reserved for special occasions.

When Walker was eight his great-grandfather—who was one-eighth Cherokee—had agreed to make him a traditional Cherokee bow and a set of arrows. In his memoir, Celtic Indian Boy of Appalachia, Walker describes the process with exacting detail: First, the old man and the boy set out in search of a straight-grained white oak tree that was about two feet in diameter. When they found it, they cut it down with a cross-cut saw, marked off eight feet, and sawed it again. Walker watched as his great-grandfather used a set of metal wedges and a sledgehammer to split the tree in half lengthwise, and then again into quarters. The brittle heartwood was removed and set aside, and the sapwood was split again to create “bolts.” His great-grandfather then used a drawknife and then a pocketknife to carve one of the bolts into a bow. (The other bolts were saved for future projects, like axe handles and walking canes.) The old man sanded the bow smooth, rubbed it with brown beeswax, and attached a bowstring made of hemp string, also rubbed with beeswax. Then he carved a set of arrows from slivers of the white oak, fletched them with turkey feathers, and attached steel arrowheads he had forged by hand.

Walker hunted with that bow all through his adolescence. After hunting, he had a habit of storing his bow beneath the tin roof of his grandpa’s barn, so that it wouldn’t warp. One day, he came back to find that someone had taken it. He was in his twenties by that point, but he nevertheless cried over the loss.

Back downstairs, in the garage, Walker showed me his current bow collection, which hung from screws in the wall. First, he handed me a long wooden bow, which was unstrung. It was made of pale white oak; the grain ran north-south. “This is nearly exactly a replica of the bow my great-grandpa made me,” he said. A friend had made him the replica as a gift after his first bow had disappeared, but by that point Walker had already upgraded.

He told me to flex the bow against my thigh as if to string it, to see how “stout” it was. It was like trying to bend a two-by-four. Walker hung the replica back up on the wall. “Now, let me show you what I’m hunting with,” he said.

He opened the door of the truck and pulled out a black plastic case, like that of a musical instrument. Inside, nested in foam padding, was a state-of-the-art compound bow. It was muscular and crooked, like a pair of dragon’s wings. Its limbs were made of some fancy composite metal and painted with a camouflage pattern. As opposed to a single bowstring, this one appeared to have three: the string was looped through two pulleys (called “cams”) at the top and bottom of the bow. Walker handed it to me and instructed me to draw the bowstring. It drew with great reluctance, until the cams began to turn, and then it eased until, near the end, it pulled as smoothly as warm taffy. I looked through the “peep sight,” a metal cheerio connected to the middle of the bowstring, to the neon three-pin sight that Walker used to adjust for distance. Normally, Walker wouldn’t have been pulling the string back with his fingers; he used a “trigger release”—a device that looped around his wrist, ran along his palm, and hooked onto the bowstring—to ensure a smoother shot. I held the string at full draw for a few seconds, effortlessly, and felt a quivering potentiality of power. Instead of letting go (which Walker sternly advised me against), I awkwardly tried to ease it back to its resting position; the string yanked with surprising force, and the bow nearly leaped from my hands.

“It’s like I tried to tell my son-in-law,” Walker said. “You need to make sure you get the best equipment, because killing should be humane and quick. Faulty equipment can cause a bad kill, and you can wound a lot of animals.”

Inside the plastic case was a quiver full of carbon fiber arrows with razor-sharp expandable broadheads. Walker tested each of the arrowheads against the side of his boot to make sure the expansion mechanism was working. They opened and closed like little silver birds, gliding and diving, gliding and diving.

One of them wasn’t opening properly. Walker inspected it and found it was clotted with dried blood, so he rinsed it in the sink. He wiped it dry, and placed it, gleaming, back inside the case.

“I believe if our ancestors”—meaning the Cherokee—“woulda had those bows, things woulda turned out a little bit different,” he said. “I would hate to know that I would have to stand forty yards from me with that bow right there in my hand.”

+

The next morning we woke before dawn. Walker cooked us a breakfast of venison sausage, biscuits, gravy, and wild muscadine jam. Out in the garage, he was upset to discover that he had forgotten to dry his camouflage overalls the last time he went hunting, and they had “gone sour.” The camouflage balaclavas—which would be pressed to our noses for much of the day—had soured, too. We put our kit on anyway, climbed in the truck, and drove to a piece of private land owned by Walker’s friend. We parked the truck and climbed out as quietly as possible, being sure not to slam the doors. Walker led me through the woods, sweeping his flashlight left and right to point out the various deer trails that intersected with the main path. He reached down and picked up a handful of empty acorn caps. “That’s a good sign,” he whispered.

Walker’s system was simple. White-tailed deer love acorns, particularly those of the white oak, so he tried to locate a white oak near trampled vegetation and fresh deer droppings. He would then situate himself in a tree about twenty yards away and twenty feet in the air and just wait. “You can just about bet your bottom dollar that within so many hours there’s going to be a deer coming to that tree,” he said.

“But how do you find that tree?” I asked.

“You have to walk your ass off,” he replied.

We stopped at a tree with a ladder bolted to its trunk, a favorite hunting spot of Walker’s. Off to the right, a clear pathway skirted around a shallow swamp; Walker preferred this spot because the swamp forced the deer to converge here. Above us protruded a steel bench just barely large enough to hold two men. Walker had chosen to start us off in a permanent tree stand—as opposed to the portable one he usually used, which was essentially a folding chair with steel teeth—because he was worried I would fall and break my neck fumbling with the contraption in the dark. Once we were both up on the bench, Walker strapped his arrows to the right side of the tree and his bow to the left side. Then he strapped me to the tree, via a nylon shoulder harness. I bristled, slightly, at his lack of confidence in me—the bench had a railing, after all. Thirty minutes later, I began to nod off, and the strap snapped taut, halting my forward tumble.

We sat for a few hours. The air warmed. The blue leaves grew teal, then green. Wood ducks creaked like old chairs amid the shushing and sighing of distant traffic. From time to time, he tried to summon his prey, almost shamanically, by clacking a pair of antlers against each other and manipulating a small canister, called a “doe bleat,” which produced a sound like a remorseful cat. This technique is widespread across hunting cultures: The Penobscot Indians of Maine, for example, used cones of birch bark to mimic the amorous call of the cow moose, while Ainu hunters in Japan used a device made of wood and fish skin to imitate the cries of lost fawns.

Nothing appeared.

After four hours, Walker began packing up.

“Well, we made a good shot at it, but we didn’t see shit,” Walker said. “You always spend a lot more time waiting than you do shooting, that’s for sure.”

On our walk out, Walker pointed out more signs: hoofprints in soft mud; a field of clover; a big brown hole in the ground, the rocks around it crusted with dried salt. Deer should have been flocking to this area, but they weren’t. Walker’s hunch was that they were napping, because they had been grazing all night under the full moon. “When it’s a full moon, deer tend to move in the middle of the night and the middle of the day,” he said. “It’s just a kind of rhythm they go through.”

After lunch, we went on a hike in Bankhead National Forest. We were joined by Walker’s friend Charles Borden. Beneath his gray beard, Borden had the jarringly youthful smile of a dentist. Like Walker, he wore big leather boots and a T-shirt tucked into his blue jeans. Unlike Walker, he had a black pistol strapped to his leather belt. Behind him trailed a German shepherd named Jojo. He and Walker both carried stout wooden walking sticks as they stomped through the woods, as much to sweep away spiderwebs as for balance.

The two men walked with their eyes pointed toward the ground, like hens searching for seed. Every time Walker found an acorn, he would call out: “Aikerns!” Intermittently, he would bend down to pick one up, crack the shell between his teeth, and inspect the flesh of the nut. A healthy acorn was white and smooth. (Walker handed me one to eat; it tasted like an astringent macadamia.) Sometimes, though, the nut was “faulty,” bored through with wormy black holes. Deer can smell faulty acorns.

When Walker found an area with a particular density of acorns, he would glance up, looking for an ideal tree to climb. The trick, he said, was to find a tree that was downwind of the acorn pile, then to climb above the deer’s field of vision, preferably concealed by a neighboring tree’s lower branches. The two men moved on, looking down, then looking up.

We followed a deer trail that wended gracefully down through the hilly land. One clever hunting method, Borden pointed out, was to find a particularly thick area, then clear a small meadow and a series of paths leading to it, like the spokes of a wheel. The hunter hides near the hub of the spokes, hijacking the animal’s trail-following instinct.

Humans are not alone in our ability to exploit the trails of our prey. Many other predators do too: Bobcats crouch in ambush beside game trails; blind snakes can sniff out the pheromone trails of termites; and tiny predatory mites trace the silk trails of two-spotted spider mites. So-called highwaymen beetles, which can recognize the pheromone trails of ants, lie in wait for ants to march past so they can steal their cargo, while green woodpeckers will lay their long sticky tongues across ant trails and simply wait for their meal to be delivered. For most animals, I had come to learn, the ability to make and follow trails provides an evolutionary advantage, until a predator evolves to wield their own trails against them.

Walker paced in circles around an oak tree, looking for signs. “Aikerns . . . Aikerns . . .” he said to himself, periodically cracking one of the shells between his teeth. As boys, he and Borden had spent much of their free time walking these woods. Both were worried about the fact that their grandchildren wouldn’t have the same upbringing. “When you’re living in a rural area, and hunting and hiking and staying in the woods, you develop an intimate familiarity with the environment,” Borden said. “It gives you a different perspective, because you see the myriad forms of life, and you are able to relate, because you are a part of that. You are not something separate.”

+

In the afternoon, Walker brought me to his new favorite hunting spot, in a different part of Bankhead. It was ideal: the ground was well pawed and showered with acorns. It also bordered a small cleared field, which was good, because deer tend to prefer the edge habitats between fields and forests. Walker guided me to the tree he had picked out for me, a tall oak, and began rigging up a device called a tree stand, which resembled the unholy offspring of a folding chair and a pair of crampons. It consisted of two halves, a seat and a footrest, both of which were secured to the tree with a cable that looped around the tree trunk. Each half bore a set of metal teeth that dug into the bark. I attached my harness to the tree and strapped my feet into the footrest. Following Walker’s instructions, I began to inchworm up the trunk, first lifting the footrest, tilting my feet back so the teeth bit into the bark, then lifting the top half. Each time I leaned on my elbows to lift my feet, there was an alarming moment when the footrest unclenched from the bark and my feet were suddenly dangling over ten, fifteen, twenty feet of air.

When I’d reached the right height, I cinched both halves of the tree stand to the trunk, folded down the padded seat, and secured my harness. By the time I had finished, I looked up to find Walker already sitting high up in a tree thirty yards away, balaclava pulled down over his face, utterly serene, like a green ninja.

The day slowly undid itself. The air cooled again. Greens blued. Oak toads cheeped, and a coyote let out a neurotic whine. Acorns hailed down onto the ground below. No deer appeared, though. Hunting, I learned, is primarily a battle against boredom. I stared so long into the woods that I began to hallucinate deer out of logs; every falling acorn sounded like a branch snapping under hoof.

Walker sat patiently, his head raptored forward, peering. When a branch fell, his head swiveled and locked in on the source of the sound, then slowly, silently, turned back to center. After a time, he began pulling off beech leaves and letting them flutter to the ground to test the wind. Then he pulled out his cell phone and began texting people, perhaps to relay the non-news. Finally, he began folding up his tree stand and preparing to descend, so I did the same.

In the following days, we fell into a pattern. Each morning we would rise before dawn and return to this hunting spot, where we’d left the tree stands the night before. Around noon, we’d scout for new hunting sites, with an eye for tall white oaks and a confluence of deer trails. And in the afternoon, we’d climb back up our trees and wait.

After three days, we still hadn’t gotten close to shooting a deer. As we were driving back from the forest around noon, I asked Walker what he thought goes on in a deer’s head. “Well, I ain’t in a damn deer’s head, but basically what’s in their head is feeding, sleeping, and fucking. Same things in everybody else’s head,” he said. Just then a buck stepped out into the middle of the forest service road about forty yards ahead. The buck’s wide eyes and swiveling ears were tuned to our truck, but he stood frozen. Walker stopped the truck and reached for his door handle, saying that he’d “shoot the shit out of it” in the middle of the road if he got the chance. But then he noticed the buck’s antlers. They were two stubby prongs. The buck, he explained, was too young to legally shoot. He eased the truck forward to see if we could snap a good picture, but the buck dashed off. After it was gone, we got out of the truck to inspect its tracks, which were accompanied by those of three other deer. Their trail passed through a narrow opening in a laurel thicket, which Walker called a “pinch point.”

“See, we fucked up,” Walker said. “Deer are probably moving in the middle of the day.” By then, this observation had begun to rankle. Every afternoon, Walker would note that we had missed the deer because they were grazing under the full moon, but then every morning he would drag me out of bed before dawn. “It’s hard to condition yourself to change your habits,” he admitted. “So I guess we get in a rut just about as bad as the deer do.”

+

The following day, we awoke again at dawn. We sat for hours, watching the leaves fall. When the sun was high, Walker let out a soft whistle to get my attention. A buck had appeared on the far side of the plowed field. It was a creamy brown, with a white belly and slender legs. It began picking its way toward us along the edge of the field, nibbling the grass.

When the buck was forty yards away, Walker rose to his feet and reached for his bow. If things had gone according to plan, he would have notched an arrow, attached his trigger release, drawn the string back in one fluid motion, and held it at full draw for a few seconds as he lined up the shot. He might have let out a little sound—Ert!—to startle the buck and freeze it in its tracks. Then, with a slow constriction of his back muscles, he would have pulled back gently on the trigger until the string released and the arrow leaped silently from the bow, flying at 350 feet per second. It would have slipped in behind the deer’s ribs, the arrowhead expanding to cut a two-inch “blood hole” through the vital organs. The buck would have looked startled, then hurt, and begun to limp off into the woods. Rather than following it, Walker would have sat back down and waited for at least an hour; a wounded deer that feels pursued will walk, sometimes for miles, until it falls dead, whereas an unhurried deer will usually lie down within a hundred yards from where it was shot.

Once Walker traced the blood trail to the deer, he would have pulled apart its front legs and cut a small incision beneath the sternum. Then he would have slipped a finger into the hole to push the stomach aside, being careful not to puncture it. (Deer stomachs tend to bloat quickly. “If you cut it too deep and pierce the stomach,” Walker warned me, “it will go FSHH! and you get shit and chewed-up food all over you.”) Wiggling his finger to open a slot for the knife to run, he would have slipped the knife in and cut all the way down to the tail, opened up the chest, cut loose the esophagus and trachea, sliced down each side of the diaphragm, and rolled the guts out onto the ground, where they’d be left for the buzzards to eat. After having cut a hole through the septum of the buck’s nose, he would have threaded a stick through it, like a bull’s nose ring, and dragged the body snout-first back to his truck.

From there, Walker would drive the dead buck to a special shop for butchering. Years ago, he used to stay up all night butchering his own deer in his backyard with a fine-toothed saw. (“My girls could tell you horror stories about me hanging deer on their swing set,” he said.) He would carve the tenderloin into steaks, hand-grind the shoulder into hamburger patties, barbecue the ribs, and save the spine for stew. But that required an enormous amount of time and work, and Walker ultimately succumbed to the gravitational pull of modern convenience. Now, he took the deer to a special butcher called a processor, who usually threw away things like the spine. (“They do it as quick as they can to make money,” he said. “And you let them do it like they want to do it so you can pay the least amount of money.”) Since Walker already had a deer in his freezer, he would have given the meat away to his daughters or his neighbors.

At least, that is what would have happened—if all had gone according to plan. What happened instead was that, as the buck approached, Walker lowered his bow. “Too young,” he whispered. He raised two fingers above his head to indicate that it was the same buck with the Y-shaped horns from the day before. Catching our scent, the buck stiffened, then, after a calculated pause, changed direction and walked in a wide arc around us. Perched up in his tree, Walker’s eyes followed it for twenty minutes, as it slipped in and out of shafts of sunlight, appearing and disappearing, passing through the trees at a halting pace. Small and distant, the buck paused, glowing, one last time, and then was gone.

+

Compared to the hunting techniques of Native Americans in the past, Walker’s technique was relatively primitive. To better stalk their prey, the Powhatan of the early seventeenth century elaborately disguised themselves as bucks. John Smith described the process in detail: the hunter stuck his arm through a slit in a deer hide while holding a stuffed deer head, “the hornes, head, eies, eares, and every part as arteficially counterfeited as they can devise,” Smith wrote. “Thus shrowding his body in the skinne, by stalking he approacheth the Deare, creeping on the ground from one tree to another” until he was within range of a clear shot.

Larger communities tended to rely more heavily on systematic communal hunts. According to Smith, the Powhatan sometimes hunted deer by surrounding them with wildfires and then forcing them to a central ambush point—a widespread technique. The arrival of the fur trade further encouraged mass killing, as opposed to individual hunting.

According to the anthropologist Gregory A. Waselkov, deer was “the single most important meat resource of post-Pleistocene tribes of the eastern woodlands.” Put simply, the Eastern tribes could not afford to give the deer a “sporting chance”—a notion wholly alien to them. Though recreational hunting existed in numerous ancient empires, the sport as we know it was only codified by European royalty in the last thousand years.

Deer meat was also the single most important meat resource for the European aristocracy, but for different reasons. Venison was a marker of status, a sign of manly virility, and an indication of geographic power. Deer were so integral to the notion of hunting that they became, quite literally, synonymous with it. According to the historian Matt Cartmill, the modern Irish verb fiadhachaim, “to hunt,” literally means “to deer-atize.” In English venison, which originally meant “meat gotten by hunting,” now means “deer flesh.”

Hunting was meant to serve as a relief from the tedium of the court, so it was ironic, but not surprising, that a baroque system of courtly manners soon arose around the sport. In Elizabethan England, according to Cartmill, “a public spanking with the flat of a hunting knife” was the customary penalty for breaking one of the sport’s many rules, “for example, uttering the forbidden word ‘hedgehog’ during a deer hunt.” British royals hunted on horseback, attended by brush beaters, bow handlers, and buglers. In France, the parforce hunt, in which the quarry was essentially run to death by dogs and horse-bound riders, became the norm. Nevertheless, some kings, like Louis XV, managed to kill lavishly. Over his fifty-year sporting career, he is said to have run down some ten thousand red deer, an accomplishment Cartmill considers “possibly unique in the history of the human species.”

The royal hunt created a new type of landscape. In 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England, took the throne by force, and began to radically redistribute the land by means of a process called “afforestation,” whereby large tracts of land were declared royal forests. Though prior residents were allowed to continue living on these lands, hunting, trapping, herding, and logging were outlawed. The famous New Forest—an ancient woodland and heath in southern England, which remains largely intact—was the result of William’s dictate. At their peak, royal forests accounted for one-third of the land in England.

These protections did not stem from some kind of proto-­environmentalist sentiment, though. Rather, it was meant to protect the king’s prized prey: the red, roe, and fallow deer. William’s “forest law” showed a rather sophisticated understanding that without a stable forest ecosystem, large game like deer could not thrive. However, the system was explicitly designed to maximize deer populations; predators did not receive the same protection. Wolves had a royal bounty placed on their heads, and by the 1200s they had been successfully hunted out of southern Britain.

The regulations proved onerous for local residents. William prohibited bows and arrows within the royal forests, and he ordered that all large dogs living near his forests have three claws from their forefeet removed—a grisly procedure, called “lawing,” which was performed with a mallet and chisel—to prevent them from chasing his deer. Poachers faced losing their hands, their eyes, or their lives.

As predation of wild deer increased and their habitat shrank, private parks were built by noblemen to protect their stocks of deer, and harsher regulations were passed. Naturally, the common people chafed against these new restrictions. In 1524, three yeomen snuck into a deer park, hacked two young deer to pieces, and ripped two fawns from their mothers’ wombs, leaving the carcasses where they lay—apparently, an act of pure, bloody rage. In the oral and written literature of the time, there arose a certain heroic aura around poachers like Adam Bell, Johnie Cock, and most famously, Robin Hood. The famed bandit of Sherwood Forest (a hundred-thousand-acre royal preserve) and his Merry Men represented both rebellion and idyll. They dined on delicacies like venison pasties and sweetbreads. They escaped capture with a superior knowledge of the land, moving, wraithlike, on “derne” (secret) paths. A bounty—called a “wolf’s head,” because the reward was the same as for that of a wolf—was placed on Robin Hood’s life. The poor championed his fight against (among other things) the excesses of sport hunting, while the nobility derided subsistence hunters like him, now dubbed “poachers,” as uncivilized and unmanly.

The British eventually brought these mores to the New World, judging Native Americans for their “savage” methods. On seeing the popular Native hunting technique called “lead hunting”—where hunters would locate the seasonal migration route of ungulates, like caribou, and then wait for their prey to appear—the famed British hunter Frederick Selous wrote that he felt “thoroughly disgusted with the whole business. In the first place, to sit on one spot for hours lying in wait for game, is not hunting, and, although under favourable conditions it may be a deadly way of killing Caribou, it is not a form of sport which would appeal to me under any circumstances.”

From these elitist roots—predicated as much on aesthetics as conservation—­arose the so-called sportsman’s code, which frowned on the killing of female and young deer, discouraged hunting for profit, and banned year-round hunting. During the late nineteenth century, these values were enshrined in law by hunter-­conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt and Madison Grant, who were instrumental in the formation of many of the earliest national parks and national forests. At the same time, the American sport hunters, in response to the princely diversions of Europe, fashioned themselves as rough and rustic outdoorsmen.

Walker often told me he hunted with a bow and arrow because he was “a strong traditionalist,” a man who enjoyed carrying on the rites of his ancestors. As he sat in that tree—in a national forest, in a region where white-tailed deer had been hunted to a vanishing point and then “reintroduced” on two separate occasions over the last century, once a hillbilly boy of Irish and Indian heritage, now a middle-class man bound both by law and honor, staying his arrow because a buck was too young to kill—he was the inheritor and embodiment of more traditions than perhaps even he knew.

+

After our last morning of hunting, when Walker had spared the young buck, he gave me a ride back to the airport. He seemed a bit chagrined that we hadn’t shot anything, but overall he was surprisingly equanimous about it. “You aren’t guaranteed anything,” he said. “That’s the reason it’s called hunting, not killing.”

On the long drive to the airport, to pass the time, he tried to list all the animals he had observed making trails. The list was extensive. “Of course, deer make trails like crazy,” he said. “Hogs, that’s another one makes bad trails. When they get in a row, they trot, going from place to place, like a line of ducks. I’ve had trails of them wore out a foot deep. . . . Snakes leave a trail when they cross a cotton patch. Especially rattlesnakes. We’d track them down and kill them bastards . . .”

This was not the first time I’d heard Walker mention an animal making “bad trails,” but it jarred me nevertheless. Some environmental preservationists I’ve met frown upon human trails, which they view as blemishes on the land, but they tend to regard animal trails as natural and good. As a lifelong hunter, Walker sees things differently. He seems to make no differentiation between the trails of humans or any other animal—a rut is a rut. And as the last three days had shown, for the hunter or for the hunted, a rut can be one’s downfall.

He went on to list various other trail-makers: raccoons, skunks, turtles, muskrats, minks, armadillos . . .

“I reckon nearly every kind of animal will follow a trail, because it’s just easier to navigate,” he remarked. “Like the buffalo trails. Most of the time, it’s easier walking.”

“But,” he added after a lengthy pause, his voice brightening to a new thought, “I guess people leave the most obvious trails. Like this damn interstate highway here. Shit, if people cease to exist, somebody could come back here ten thousand years later and probably find remnants of this concrete bridge. So we leave the most destructive trails, I think, of any group of animals.”

I. Kelly noted that when formerly captive elephants come to the sanctuary and are reconnected with other female elephants, for some reason they never re-form large herds with a distinct matriarch. Some paired off like Misty and Dulary; others remained solitary. One elephant named Tarra famously befriended a golden retriever named Bella.

II. Fortunately for everyone involved, in the years since I last visited the sanctuary, the caregivers have devised a way to mix the medication into the elephants’ food.

III. I have read that Inuit hunters do something similar; they routinely spare the leaders of caribou herds so as to avoid disrupting their migration routes the following year.

IV. Like many indigenous tribal names, Diné means simply “the people.” “Navajo” is a Spanish bastardization of the Tewa Pueblo word navahu’u, which means “farm fields in the valley.”

V. The rule of thumb I devised was that any group of seven or more sheep were capable of forming a quorum and wandering off. However, this rule-of-seven was far from ironclad; I once lost a group of five for an entire afternoon.