A hot wind whisked across the boulder and cholla-laden slope of Elephant Mountain as the sounds of cloven hooves on stone trickled from the ridge below. At first, the big ram didn’t notice me, but as the wind changed, our eyes locked. Could he possibly understand his significance and that he was a key player in the salvation of desert bighorn sheep in the American West? As the seconds slowed to a crawl, I could see the wildness in his eyes and remembered that he was doing what millennia of evolution had trained him for: to thrive in a landscape more rugged and unforgiving than any I’d experienced on foot or horseback. This lone ram represented a half-century of successful conservation and the future of desert bighorn sheep reintroductions across a landscape once carved up by a legacy of exploitation. And in that very moment, the future of Texas desert bighorn sheep stared back at me, and then was gone before the blink of an eye, bounding down a field of car-sized boulders burnt under an autumn sun.
American conservationist Aldo Leopold, once said, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” By 1900, America’s ecological fabric had been largely dismantled as megafauna like bison, pronghorn, grizzly bears, and gray wolves had been slaughtered for the sake of blind progress at any expense. With a theological North Star guiding each stroke of the axe, westward expansion did away with each cog and wheel lacking a conspicuous and timely value deemed worthy as wagon ruts, barbed wire and train tracks cut up and spit out a once endless sea of American wilderness.
No ecological community was spared: passenger pigeons that clouded the heavens and provided the single largest dose of nutrients in North America no longer
