SHEEP, STARS AND SOLITUDE

"Fifty-two days of hell. Fifty-two nights of heaven." Such was the ten-word telegram with which I described my journey on the Heber-Reno Stock Trail, after having followed a migrating herd of sheep one spring along its two-hundred-odd miles of ghastly grandeur in east central Arizona. For nearly two months the great band of sheep fought its way across wickedly beautiful deserts and ravine-wrinkled forests along the cruelest sheep trail in America. At journey's end I boarded a plane and in less than two hours flew the same route back to Phoenix.

One can never know Arizona simply by flying above it. Even its highways picture its personality only in part. The Heber-Reno Stock Trail, meandering in wild abandon over vast terrain that leaves week-long gaps between roads or fences, grapples with the very spirit of Arizona, and portrays its soul.

The Heber-Reno Trail is a long, almost pathless strip-several miles in width-laid out largely across National Forest and Indian Reservation, over which migrating sheep are allowed to move from winter pastures of the Salt River Valley near Phoenix to summer range as far north as the White Mountains near Springerville. In order to make a motion picture of the trek, I appeared before sunrise one April 16 at a sheep camp near Chandler. My outfit and belongings were packed on a burro, one of seven which would carry supplies and food for our journey. This trail is far too rough for the chuck wagons of ordinary sheep terrain.

The herd-1547 of them by actual count-oozed like melting grey snow out of the pasture onto a dusty highway. Nearly all were ewes, freshly shorn. The lambs, born in winter pastures, had been sold; and pampered rams would come up later by truck and rail.

The burros were in charge of Pablo, jovial Mexican-American campero or camp cook, who rode a horse. Sole responsibility for the 1547 sheep was on the shoulders of Rosalio, who would trudge or run or climb on foot for the entire fifty-two days, guarding the animals with his very life.

Crossing the Salt

For a day and a half we followed dusty roads of the Salt River Valley, but this was the only time that there were roads or trails at all. Crossing the final irrigation canal which separates lush cultivated acres from grim waste land, we headed into the desert. Two nights later, camp was pitched beside the Salt River.

This Salt River crossing is a carnival prologue to the trek. Herds formerly swam the stream, with occasional drownings. Now a sheep bridge has been erected -a suspension span three feet wide which sways and snakes under the weight of pounding feet.

Rosalio headed his charges into a chute which funneled onto the bridge. The leaders, pushed by those behind, were forced out onto the span. Gyrations began. Running, pushing, bleating, the animals stampeded two abreast across a runway meant for single file. Upon approach to solid ground at the far end they leaped, circus-fashion, for joy.

Burros showed similar fear, but reacted by freezing in their tracks. We had to tug them across. Some spectators had come down to watch the crossing. Good-byes filled the air; civilization was being left behind. Wilderness lay ahead.

The sheep trail is hardest at its very start. For this is cactus country. Some cactus is beneficial to sheep. Hungry animals nibble the buds. Joints of the prickly pear provide thirsty sheep with moisture.

But cholla-the jumping cactus-is the enemy of all it touches. We had finished breakfast and were on our way by dawn on the second morning out from the sheep bridge. Presently the herd topped a ridge and headed into a vast valley of wicked green-a miniature forest of cholla.

Cholla, observed at a distance, is glorious to see. The fat individual burrs stand against the sun, back-lighted, with their clusters of long-tapering needles snaring the early-morning sunrays until each plump burr is clothed in a jacket of light. The cholla is the cactus with a halo.

But, close up, it becomes a devil's pitchfork. Cholla burrs claw like a cluster of hot fishhooks into all they touch.

Into the mass of camouflaged torture ahead-too widespread to detour-the sheep drifted innocently. Suddenly a lead ewe, stung by cholla, sprang like a projectile into the air, and scrambled across the backs of the herd. Soon the whole senseless mass of sheep, pushed by those behind, churned cruelly into the thicket.

I was filming. As though from nowhere two spines, apparently touched by my shoes, shot up and lanced into my legs. The cholla is called jumping cactus for a reason. The spines burned like needles dipped in fire. It was impossible to remove them completely. I longed for some pincers.

There was little we could do for the sheep. Somehow they got through; in a few days the festering wounds would expel the spines with no permanent injury.

Contrast is a commonplace on Arizona's desert. No sooner was the cholla behind us than I saw a cactus in bloom. The flower beamed from the desert floor like A country maiden. The bloom was as delicate as an orchid. But I touched it and found that the petals were sturdier than those of an orchid, able to blush like a girl, yet capable of keeping that smile all day long in the desert sun. The orchid is a city lady with a hothouse flush to her cheeks; the bloom of the cactus is a girl born and reared in the sun and air of open spaces, with radiance in her smile.

As we moved on, the wilderness burst into flower. More blooms of cactus. Even the giant saguaros showed signs of budding. Paloverde trees blossomed into saffron. Ocotillo waved crimson flags against blue skies.

In this strange land, intricacy went hand in hand with vastness. Each of the giant saguaros had a thousand hand-tooled needles. Perfection in pinpoint. Every paloverde tree had a million tiny leaves, each no larger than a baby's fingernail, yet more wonderful to look at than the giant leaves of the elephant's ear, just as a Swiss watch is a thing of greater perfection and delicacy than the works of an eight-day alarm. Every leaf of the greasewood, the catsclaw, the mesquite, was seventeen-jeweled in its perfection.

During the early morning hours, cholla had thrown their weight around and lorded it over all else. But presently, prickly pear began to come into the ascendancy.

Prickly pear country is harder-though less dangerous-to walk through than cholla land. The fatty hands of this cactus reach out across a possible path to join hands with a brother or sister, leaving no place to pass.

Adding-as the desert was now doing-a stout growth of mesquite and stunted paloverde, both with claws eager to reach you, and the going is arduous.Then to compound the contrasts came the rocks. In a glacial country rocks are often smooth, or rounded and worn. But no lake-bed ever flushed this land. No river or constantly running water has worn the edges of these rocks near the beginning of the Heber-Reno Trail. They are sharp, broken, rough-every one.

Already I could feel them jabbing into the soles of my shoes. I was thankful that Pablo had packed a shoelast and some old rubber tires in our provisions. We would have need of them often.

By 9 a.m. on this day, dawn seemed ages in the past. Pablo came up with the burros and we pitched camp. "Shading up," it is called, even though in the early stages of the trail, the shade is scarce. Sheep and men would rest during the heat of the day.

All of this was just a few hours of the second day out from the bridge. But in that fashion, for nearly two months, the sternness and the glory of Arizona's wilderness was revealed to me.

Three days from the Salt River we reached our next water-a tiny creek. The next drink cost three more days of toil. As we approached Rock Tank, an artificial storage place for water which the Wool Growers Association and the Government had constructed, the sheep had gone for seventy-two hours without a drink. Half a mile from the goal, the lead sheep smelled water. Instantly the entire herd was stampeding madly. It was a joyous sight.

Two days of struggle and climbing brought us to the summit of Reno Pass where, spread out before us, lay Tonto Basin, one of the wild sections of America. And, after the drop down to Tonto Creek, came the most isolated section of the trail. For nine days, as we climbed slowly up to the summit of the Sierra Ancha Mountains, and then on to Pleasant Valley, we saw no ranch, or man, or road, or fence. Complete wilderness.

In the ascent, the trail led us onto a flat plateau carpeted with dry filaree, palo verde, and mescal. On the next leve level, greasewood wood perfumed the air. Then came junipers. The altimeter of changing vegetation registered our ascent. At the top of the Sierra Anchas, pines took over. The change in plant life had been complete.

The Heber-Reno Sheep Trail accomplishes the whole range of seasons. The herders traveling north each spring find that debilitating summer soon stems into refreshing spring, sometimes winter, as the trip progresses. The calendar of half a year is condensed into fifty days.

The trail spans the range of wild life and things which grow. Brown lizards, sun-bathing in lethargy on rocky deserts, give way to brown deer, bouncing gloriously in silent forests. The towering cactus makes a lap-dissolve into towering pine. There are many other trails in America where vastly more sheep travel, but no other with the variety of this.

Historically the Heber-Reno Trail accomplishes the mightiest span of all. For time dips backward swiftly, as each day carries the sheep away from signs of modern man and into silent hills; time recedes until those hills of Arizona become closely knit in an historical fleecy skein with the hills of Persia, of Ur, and the Holy Land. Sheep are symbols of man's trek across the world. And the symbols have not changed.

The similarities between shepherd's life as it occurs in Arizona in this twentieth century and as it existed in Bible times is amply evident along the sheep trail by day. But by night the analogy becomes complete.

Not enough has been written about Arizona nights. In his book, "Midnight on the Desert," the English author Priestley has said: "Arizona is geology by day and astronomy by night."

It was no accident that Priestley wrote his most philosophical book under a nocturnal spell in Arizona. It was no accident that most of the great religions of the world were born under the starlight of desert lands.

City dwellers know neither sky nor stars. The herders of the sheep trail, sleeping out in a land with air of burning clarity and with unbroken horizons, embrace the stars as a part of their normal lives.

On the first night out from the sheep bridge I had not seen the stars. Utter weariness of a new and exhausting experience had deadened me into a sleep from which I did not stir until dawn.

But on the second night out, some movement of the herd after midnight-a sudden fright caused by a coyote's approach-wakened me. Drowsily I looked upward, then -unbelieving-rubbed my eyes.

The whole sky was a carnival of dancing lights. Thestars blazed and burned. It was a fiery, glistening, wild heaven. The whole earth-and I an attached part of it -was bathing in the starlight, and something inside me seemed to be expanding like opening petals-a cereus which blooms only at night.

I could not sleep. Whole new worlds swarmed around me. The hard desert where I lay seemed magnetized with strength. The air was gently warm and I threw back the covers, opening my bed to the breezes blowing up from the Salt River far below. By now, Jupiter was streaming its blaze earthward like a spotlight, so I got out my notebook and in the brightness of the stars-stars which I had really not seen for years-I began writing the secrets of the night about me. During the first part of the trek, Jupiter became a new and silent friend. Glowing like one of the coals of our smouldering campfire, each night it would wheel into the sky from the southeast at 10 p.m., followed closely by Scorpio, then the Milky Way.

The Milky Way. When I had seen it first-on that second night out from the bridge-I had mistaken it for a long soft cloud. The next night I purposely wakened after midnight. By the light of the stars alone, the tiny face of my wrist watch was clearly visible. But no watch was needed. The Big Dipper-brilliant timepiece of the sky-pivoted overhead about the Pole Star. Never was I more than ten minutes off in my judgment of the time as I read its star-studded dial. The sky was hot with stars. They didn't twinkle, for the night was clear and a breeze had swept away all trace of haze and dust. The stars burned steady and bright. There was a cloud in the east. But the cloud kept its shape. It was self-luminous. The delicate stems of an ocotillo near our camp swayed against the brilliance of this cloud-like formation. Only slowly did I begin to realize that it was not a cloud, but galaxies of distant universes.

Stars I can understand. I lie awake in awe beneath them. But the Milky Way is almost too much; it is more than man can even hope to grasp or comprehend. A star is a definite point of light; the Milky Way is a hazy symbol of inscrutability. Thought expands to the Infinite in its very contemplation.

I spoke of Jupiter as a silent friend. Being a planet, it may indeed be silent. But the stars which surround it are not. Lying on my back on a moonless night under Arizona skies, I had a sensation of music in the stars. I analyzed it thus. After having separated each sound of the night which I knew-and classified it as best I could into bird call, or wind, or breath of trees there was still a constant undertone of singing vibration, low but distinct, which filled the air.

Perhaps it was an accumulation of tiny unnamed noises the breath of a million insects, the disintegration of a million rocks, the tag ends of a million pulses from the other side of the earth. At all events, that undertone of constant singing was there. Absolute stillness in the world, I discovered, did not exist. I have since learned that definite sound vibrations can be picked up from the stars by delicate instruments. At all events, thatsinging of the night (for such it was) which I heard along the sheep trail, in my mind easily became associated with the stars, which were a luminous reality at midnight, much greater to the eye and the consciousness than insects or rocks or the far side of an unseen earth.

During these desert nights (although it was equally true by day) came also my first comprehension of the values inherent in Solitude. To be torn for a time from all contacts with civilization can in itself be a civilizing experience. No newspapers, no headlines, no telephones or radio or television, no noise of traffic. Until one escapes these things completely he cannot fully know their debilitating effect on original thought.

Man's greatest spiritual discoveries have been made by tenders of sheep or dwellers in wilderness. Moses was a shepherd. So also was Amos, who for the first time in world history evolved the concept of a God of Justice. Christ himself sought a wilderness retreat for forty days. No man of His powers and relations to God could spend that long under the spell of solitude and desert stars without receiving such a glow of new life as would change the world. The discoveries of men such as these resulted in large part because they had the time and the surroundings conducive to pure thought.

The symbol for the planet Jupiter-given it by desert men before the pyramids were built-is Rx. That symbol is today a sign of healing. Stars and Solitude are healing agents largely lost in modern life. Stars and Solitude are among the real treasures to be discovered in Arizona.

From the Sierra Anchas, our route lay through Pleasant Valley. Climbing Potato Butte, in its center, I found Indian ruins and broken pottery.

Then onward through dreaded Ramer Canyon, and out over the Mogollon.

This Mogollon is a severe escarpment which rose like a Chinese Wall, magnified a hundredfold, before us. Its approaches were a wicked array of ravines and gorges, strewn with twisted pines. In places the undergrowth was so thick that we could not see a dozen sheep out of the fifteen hundred in our herd. As I looked ahead, I wondered how the herd was going to conquer this long, tremendous barrier.

Rosalio seldom used the dogs. Dogs run sheep; he knew it was not good for the animals. But in surmounting the Mogollon the herder knew he would have to employ every tactic at his command. He set the dogs on the sheep; he yelled and shouted, he threw sticks and stones into the air. In some manner, the herder and his herd made it up.

The trail passed near Heber, then swung out in a great arc across open plains. We skirted Dry Lake and Snowflake and entered the Apache Indian Reservation. Now we were at an elevation so high that ice formed in our dishes at night. On June 3, we arrived at the home ranch, in the White Mountains.

The owner of the herd was on hand to welcome us, and a final tally of the sheep was taken. Fifty-two days before we had started with 1547 sheep. The final tally showed exactly that number. Rosalio had successfully brought his entire herd through one of the wildest and roughest sheep countries in all America.