Potsherds - Ghost of Metabolic Relationship – End of a Long Day
The Vermillion Cliffs still looked like a long way off. We continued through the piñion and juniper hills, stopping to take pictures and video whenever we passed another waypoint. We tried to reimagine the deer in the places she recently occupied. But the form of her ghost was uncertain. Was she alone? Was she with others?
Soon we began finding potsherds. Some were black on red or black on white. There were corrugated rim pieces and even the very bottom of a pot. According to the GPS, the deer stood in this very spot about a month ago, browsing bitterbrush where people once resided. A new, overlapping story began to form out of the land.
The people who made these pots were the Virgin Branch Ancestral Puebloan Culture, occupying the area from about 1 CE to around 1200 CE. They chose this area in part because of the prevalence of faunal resources. The area has been an important migration corridor and mule deer winter range for centuries, and elk were also present historically. The dominant animal remains excavated from the nearby Dead Raven, Park Wash, and Kanab archaeological sites were mule deer. Petroglyph panels prominently feature deer in nearby Johnson Canyon and Oak Canyon, as well, often with lines drawn from arrow tips to animal hearts. Knowing that this always was a mule deer migration corridor reveals a story whereby the Ancestral Puebloans dry farmed during the 190 or so frost-free days, and then hunted during the cooler months.
We dropped our packs and walked to the top of a hill from which the potsherds and pieces of chert seemed to emanate. Someone sat on this shaley hill leaning into the frail warmth of an early spring sun pressing a piece of antler against a hunk of chert. Antlers are much stronger and more elastic than skeletal bone, making them ideal not only for knapping but also for weapon tips in some cultures. Tiny flakes cascaded down the hillside. Was the very animal whose heartline this rock would pierce the same animal who dropped his rack in a muddy, red wash that winter?
The link between animal movement and human subsistence is revealed by these artifacts. Today, because we are no longer reliant on seasonal animal movement, we can’t relate to these migrations in the same way. The ghost of the metabolic relationship between human beings and deer haunts the land. In the absence of this relationship, we have cheat grass and russian thistle where I stood eating beef jerky out of a plastic bag. The ghost is not just the absence, but also what replaces it.
The movement of deer back and forth between winter and summer ranges transfers energy across landscapes. Deer and other native ungulates consume autotrophs, organisms that turn the sun’s energy into food for growth. This energy is then transformed into portable food for other heterotrophs like mountain lions. Energy is transferred in this way from Buckskin Mountain through the Grand Staircase, over the Pausaugunt and across the Markagunt. Forbs, grasses and shrubs are also transformed into excrement, which is deposited across the landscape. And when a deer dies, the mobile energy stops. The body lies in the blazing heat where it seems no body should. It lies splayed out in the icy winds that rip across the Arizona Strip in January. The body endeavoring for no shelter displays the starkest absence of life. But spark absent, energy is not. Ravens and vultures pick at the body. A coyote tugs until a leg comes off and she carries it into the trees. Brown and gray opens to pink and red. Pink and red opens to white. A blooming which disperses energy through trophic systems far from the place where the deer was born. Precolumbian humans and wolves understood this transfer of energy and followed it, hoping to capture it in a form barely removed from life. Still warm. Mountain Lions follow, wait, follow, wait, follow, wait.
Today, much autotrophic energy along this corridor is absorbed into cows who are then trucked elsewhere. They contribute little to the metabolism of the land. Predators are not allowed to touch them. Ravens, vultures, and bacteria might get lucky every once-in-a-while and find a lost, drowned, or otherwise dead cow.
We reached the edge of the trees and the path disappeared. Spread out before us were acres and acres of what was once forest. On the screen of my phone she beelined to the next forested area. We deviated from her path at this point and took the road. We needed a break from bushwhacking. On both sides of the road, stumps and shredded limbs of junipers looked like sunbaked catacombs, and globemallow and pale green grasses rose up around them. I wondered if deer once walked through this area but have been relegated to the forest nearer the Vermillion Cliffs. Deer use piñon and juniper forests as both thermal and hiding cover. The deer we followed appeared to be avoiding grazing areas because it was unsafe for both her and her soon to be born fawn(s). A lack of cover due to the impacts of grazing can increase fawn mortality because it becomes more difficult to hide from predators. I began to see this generational signature of animal movement rewritten by road construction, cattle grazing, and the resulting piñon and juniper removal. A signature rewritten, ghosts born. A juniper graveyard haunted by absences of humans, deer, and mountain lions. Presences of Kentucky bluegrass catch the first light and long, low bawls permeate the dawn.
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In the middle of what was once forest, we began to come across more potsherds in the road. Little black on red pieces lay pressed into the ground inside recent tire tracks. Thousands of sherds lay all around the gray juniper stumps. It was the highest density of artifacts I had ever seen. I wondered if the bullhog drivers knew what was beneath them when they shredded these trees many years ago. As we continued up the road, the artifacts which so excited us a couple hours ago became less noteworthy. We took to pointing with a trekking pole without slowing our pace. Finally, we were passing them without acknowledging them out loud at all.
We paralleled the deer’s path for a couple miles, she in the piñon and juniper at the base of the cliffs, we on the road. As the road veered toward a break in the cliffs, our paths began to converge. The road became steeper and the dry wash fell below us. Piñion and juniper were joined by gamble oak, and as the path of the deer met the path of the human, the sound of water rose up from the wash below us. It was more than a spring, almost a creek. Clear water pooled and spilled, pooled and spilled. Our packs still heavy with water, we didn’t get to experience this joy of discovery with parched lips. This was the first evidence of what appeared to be reliable water along this migration route. I had known that water was a possibility in this wash, but I didn’t trust it, and began kicking myself for this. The deer knew about it. She has been walking through this wash twice a year for her entire life.
The wash took us up through the Vermillion Cliffs. On top, the sun was hot and the wind was chilly as we walked down the road through the forest. As we crested a low rise the next step of the Grand Staircase was revealed. The fortress of the White Cliffs stood on two sides, 500-foot walls of white Navajo Sandstone with occasional streaks of pink and yellow defining the striations—layers of sand deposited on the leeward side of ancient dunes.
Again, we paralleled the path of the deer, she deep in the forest, beelining toward the next spring, we on the road a quarter mile away, hoping we weren’t missing anything in there. Our paths again converged. The deer went to the spring and drank. We watched her ghost cross a field and disappear behind ponderosas. Then she crossed our road and went northwest into the forest and skirted the edge of the white cliffs. We wouldn’t be able to follow her right away because we had to retrieve the water I left at the next spring.
Sadly passing up those two springs the deer surely utilized, we trudged on, my feet beginning to hurt in the sandy road. Eventually, the road trended downhill and we took it straight to the spring. Deer tracks sank into the mossy mud around the water, not our deer’s, though. With my trekking poles in one hand and the water jug in my other hand, I climbed one final hill to camp. The view on top was worth the 17 miles we walked that day. The White Cliffs and the Pink Cliffs beyond them stood in the northwest. A pointy dome dominated the northeast. The vast country we had just crossed lay in the south bluing in the evening light. Chris tiredly talked to himself while his tent lay in a pile at his feet. I paced back and forth drearily, imagining this is what it must feel like to be 80. A western screech owl called from somewhere in the canyon below. The hazy, egg yolk, full moon rose for the first and indeed very last time.
I looked at the moon and thought how I’m still trapped behind these eyes, where the moon comes to meet them. I felt my hands swing through the cold between piñons for the first and last time. Without me the moon wouldn’t rise because no eyes would be here to greet it. The ground would fall away into the nothing there was before there was nothing with no feet for it to press up into. I laid in my sleeping bag on my side while the earth pressed into me. The moonlight between the slits of my eyelids kept the world material and intact until the cracks began to close, a tectonic shift, closing world from world. All trees, all shadowed forms—the bone white walls surrounding a land of blue wind, blue poorwill song, and blue fox shadow—were extinguished. The land fell away for the first and last time. Did anything remain? At least the stars?
