Read Online Eating Stone by Ellen Meloy - Free Book Online

animal among us. Their survival, I am convinced, guarantees the tangible truth of our imaginations.
    The sheep are bedded down, exhausted from orgies. Their ears twitch and a few let their chins rest on the ground. Others chew and stare at the canyon walls, blinking their pale lashes. I pull from my pack the Book of Common Prayer, a new tack in the strategy to chill the fevers of an aging brain. First prayer, then acupuncture, I think, picturing a forest of tiny needles in my forehead.
    The thick book, bound in dark navy cloth with gold letters on its spine, is small enough to fit across the palm of the hand when it is open. Its pages are as thin as tissue. The one I held was a 1945 edition of the 1789 version, an American adaptation of the origi-nal text by the sixteenth-century British scholar Thomas Cran-mer. In 1979, Cranmer's lineage was replaced by a “simpler” text.
    The 1945 edition of the Book of Common Prayer was the prayer book of my childhood, of Sundays in a pew, sitting in my stiff cotton dress and straw hat, reading this small tome not as a canon but as a storybook, a piece of literature, all the while ignoring the minister, a gray-haired Irishman whose name was, confusingly Lord—“The Reverend LORD,” one of my brothers boomed in a baritone-in-a-culvert God voice.
    The Irish minister's name had a remarkable effect each time a prayer began with “O Lord.” “O Lord, we beseech thee, mercifully hear our prayers,” we implored over and over, as if he were deaf.
    The men in the congregation seemed to need a great deal of help. O Lord was forever beseeching “brethren,” and since I wasn't one of them, I took this as a sign for me to tune out and read this exquisite little book, to wander over scourges and plagues, epistles and epiphanies, idols and bleating, bleeding goats.
    Something called “alms,” a bill from my mother's wallet, went into a collection plate. Over time and remodeling, the church's windows went from clear glass and views of leaves and birds to stained-glass portraits of Saint Francis with pigeons. “The days of man are but as grass,” I read.
    Today, under a boundless desert sky, I encounter in the prayer book a homeland not of faith but of images. I find movable feasts, holy days gauged by full moons, psalms grounded in an arcane physicality Pelicans and owls, lions and sheep. The “great and wild sea also; wherein are things creeping innumerable …” Rivers swollen with flow, valleys soft with rain, rain greening the hills. “Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy clouds drop fatness.”
    Nothing fat drops here; no innumerables creep. The lean,parched desert withers under ten years of drought. The ewes are off their beds, bunched up in a flock, eating sticks and brittle blond grasses. It is a miracle that they are fed.
    A ram lifts his head from a bush, then charges the herd, scattering it across the talus. He isolates a ewe and approaches her in a low stretch. Three younger rams form a huddle, heads inside the circle, white rumps facing out. The huddle reminds them of rank without the risk of fights. They are figuring things out with their heads. Theirs is a world beyond me as I sit on my rock with a book of moons and liturgy resting on my palm.
    With desert bighorns, as with any other life-form, there is faith in time. From time emerges a more certain yet always elastic portrait of the hooved herbivore that, born in thin glacial air and ice caves, eventually took hold in vertical desert rock.
    This is not an animal that eats you. It travels through but won't live in forests or on the flats. It binds its group by matrilineal threads and passes knowledge about home ground from generation to generation. Move a group of bighorns to a place from which their predecessors have been extirpated, and the new ones must draw a map, find the water.
    Desert bighorns are gregarious herbivores with clear, predictable, edgy social rituals. Their loyalty to the group into which