Ha ha--you got to read it to understand the title!

Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild
by Ellen Meloy
   

Poetry in prose so beautiful I can't write about it.  I'm not good enough.
It's a loosely structured ode to the Bighorn Sheep of North America--both the Blue Door band that the author is watching and the other small enclaves widely scattered around, occupying a tiny portion of their original range.  I can't imagine a world in which I'll never have the hope of hiking the canyon and coming unexpectedly on a band of bighorns...or canoeing a remote river and or catching sight of them edging down the cliffs...but it might happen.  Contact with domestic sheep leaves them sick with diseases they have no resistance against.  Only the determination of wildlife biologists--and the stubborn nature of bighorn--that gives them a fighting change.

I lost the many bookmarks of momentous passages, whimsical and weighty writing, all of which made her words sing like angels.  Only a few of them remain, and not the best:

Chukars...[...] they have in tow six windup toys--tiny speedy chukar chicks, the avian version of loose electrons.
The gulls fuss and shriek over the entrails of the day's catch.  Frigate brids move in and make the whole scene edgier.  A gull nonchalantly swallows an entire fish head and bulges with meat.  Too heavy to get off the ground, it sits on the sand like coyote fodder, shoulders hunched, belly distended, looking as if everything would be fine if it could just belch.
It's impossible to give a start marking to a book like this, so I'll default to 5.  I'm missing the little bit of personal connection that I would usually require to mark a book 5 instead of 4, but that's me, all me.