Meloy lived on the San Juan River in Southeast Utah and spent four seasons watching a band of about eighty desert bighorn on the cliffs near her house — sheep she called the Blue Door Band. They’d been written off as gone from that country in the 1960s, then quietly came back, and nobody could fully explain it. So she sat on ledges with a scope through the whole year, watching lambs launching five feet straight up and ewes doing the work of keeping everybody alive. She eats a ram that was killed and finds her title in it. Rock becomes plant becomes milk becomes bone becomes her. She finished the book three months before she died at age fifty-eight.
Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild