It was early morning, the milk light of late dawn. My husband and I were lying in bed in his childhood home, in the suburbs of Sydney.

It was December 2019. The house was silent but nevertheless charged with a faint vibration of anticipation; everyone still sleeping, but lightly. Remi and I were planning to depart that morning for a trip to Queensland, where we would spend a few nights camping on one of the world’s most beautiful beaches, and then dive the Great Barrier Reef. Though Remi had spent a large part of his childhood in Queensland, he’d never had a chance to visit the reef. It was a dream trip.

It was also a promise of escape. Normally, we spent most of our time in a cabin we owned in British Columbia. I wrote books; he ran a film-production network. We both worked from home, so we could live just about anywhere. In the winters, to escape the Cascadian gloom, we sometimes hid out with Remi’s parents on the underside of the planet. But that year the plan had backfired. For weeks had been burning in the nearby mountains and elsewhere, the worst fires in anyone’s memory, fires already burning their way into the pages of history. We had inadvertently traded one gloom for a darker, more ominous one. After weeks spent mostly indoors, hiding from the smoke, we were itching to head north, into humid jungle and sea wind.

That morning, I had just woken up and spent ten or twenty or thirty minutes staring at my phone—who knows really, phone time being slippery—and was rising from the bed and glancing out the window when my husband abruptly sat up and looked out the window, too. He was staring at the waving branches of a eucalyptus tree, its bark peeling away in white shreds. We had a habit of doing this, waking up and looking out the window at the trees across the road, to judge how thick the smoke would be that day: faint trees meant bad air.

The air that day was bad.

He turned to me, then he looked out the window again. His face was oddly slack, his lips drooping at the corners.

I figured I had woken him abruptly, and that he was still groggy and half dreaming. “Go back to sleep,” I said.

He looked at me, at the window, back at me, squinting, mouth open, with an expression almost of curiosity, as if everything looked slightly unreal.

The gum trees waving in a silent, numb wind.

The spotted doves going roo, roo.

Remi’s right hand was bent and held close to his body, like a little broken wing. He looked at it, then felt it with his left hand.

“Something’s not right,” he said. His eyes were childlike. “Something’s not ri-ight. I fee lilly meer.” The words melted on his tongue. He tried to rise from the bed, but found that he couldn’t stand on his right leg and toppled backwards.

I felt a cool, distant wave of panic. I knew I needed to call an ambulance. But, as if in a nightmare, when I reached for my phone, I realized that I didn’t know the number for 911 here in Australia.

I later learned that it’s 000, a number I will never forget: nothing nothing nothing, or void void void, or oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.

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I once heard a story about the rain that has stuck with me ever since, the way deeply horrifying things tend to do.

This one guy, a friend of a friend, had planned an epic 40-day hike through Patagonia. Before embarking, he packed all of his food into one enormous backpack: a small mountain of ramen and peanut butter and white-gas canisters and whatnot. Only a few days into his trip, it began to rain. And not just a soft dusting of rain, but a cold, hard rain; it was, as they say in Brazil, raining pocketknives. Thinking the clouds would soon disperse, the man holed up in his tent, eating through his food supply out of boredom and malaise. But the rain never stopped. Day after day, week after week, he sat there. When he finally flew home, having finally abandoned his hike early, he had gained so much weight that his girlfriend, giddily awaiting his arrival at the airport, failed to recognize him.

This is what we outdoorspeople fear most about rain: it destroys adventure, douses it like a campfire. That rain is bad is our default reaction, no doubt formed during childhood, when it shooed us from lakeshores and open fields, locking us inside our houses, forcing us to play board games. But we can choose to view rain another way. In 2009, I completed a rain-soaked thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. It was there, rising reluctantly from my sleeping bag and walking through the mud, day after day, that I began to fully realize its aesthetic (as well as the obvious ecological) value.

In short: . The light diffuses, almost inverts; shadows vanish. Certain animals become scarce, while others slither forth. Plants—polished to a high gloss and juiced with cloud-born nitrogen—begin to glow. A sweet, dirty perfume (called ) rises up, aerosolized, . Sounds are amplified: the lone trill of a warbler can sometimes be heard from many miles away. And yet sounds also become warped, so that same trill might be unrecognizable to . Even your skin feels different: slick, nacreous, and, so long as you are moving, surprisingly not-cold. At the end of the day, when you strip off your clothes and change into something dry, even a modest campfire becomes a form of opiate. Afterward, you sleep like a junkie, long and dreamless. Rising the next morning to another day of rain, you again dread the idea of walking in it. Then, once you start walking, invariably, you’re glad that you did.

Robert Moor is the author of .

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Back in 1930, Bob Marshall—, , and —set out to define what the wilderness is. He settled on two basic preconditions: “first, that it requires anyone who exists in it to depend exclusively on his own effort for survival; and second, that it preserves as nearly as possible the primitive environment.” This means that all roads, mechanical transportation, and human habitation would be forbidden. But according to Marshall, trails—the most ‘primitive’ of all our myriad inventions—would be “entirely permissible.”

This belief was later reflected in the first version of the National Wilderness Preservation Act, introduced to the Senate in 1957, which defines wilderness as a place where “man” is “a wanderer who visits but does not remain and whose travels leave only trails.” That’s the thing about trails: if enough people visit a piece of land, they are going to make them. It’s what we as a species—we as animals—instinctively do. The act of creating and following trails is one of the oldest and most profound ways that we make sense of this chaotic planet we all live on.

The question, then, is not whether we want to make trails, but how—with our feet, or with our hands? In other words, do we want to create them unconsciously and with little foresight? Or do we want to build them deliberately, with the aim of making them as sustainable as possible? 

Up until the 1970s, trails were often built along the paths of least resistance. This was fine until the backpacking boom of the 1970s, when hordes of hikers wearing rubber-soled boots (called “waffle stompers”) swarmed our most popular trails, churning up the soil and accelerating erosion. In response, trail-builders learned to design sustainable trails that would shed water in a slow, controlled manner. For the most part, that project has succeeded; I would hate to see what my favorite mountains would look like had we not made the shift to sustainable trail design.

Despite our best efforts, many conservationists still worry that our most popular wild spaces are being ‘loved to death.’ In light of these concerns, I fully understand why some people don’t want any new wilderness trails. Trails have their downsides: they can compact the soil, blocking subterranean water flow and choking tree roots; they can fragment ecosystems; they can scare off bears and wolves; they tend to collect litter at their edges. Some people, quite fairly, see them as scars upon the otherwise pristine wilderness. And in some sense, that’s true: a trail, when you get right down to it, is little more than a long, precisely wrought stretch of dead ground. 

But I suspect that deep down, the real reason certain outdoorspeople dislike trails is because they’re reminders of the existence of other people. That, I would argue, is exactly the wrong reason to oppose them. Because the only thing that is going to save wilderness from people with tree saws and oil drills and cement trucks are other people—people who love wild land for its beauty, its sense of freedom, and its ecological complexity, rather than for its monetary worth.

I’ll admit that I am biased: I have a special love for trails. (Hell, I just wrote a about them.) I like they way they make it easier to walk. I like the way they lessen the burden of wayfinding, freeing up my brain for deeper thought. I like the way they keep me from getting lost and falling into a pit of quicksand. Perhaps most of all, I like how trails efficiently allow us to visit the wilderness without trampling it all to dust. 

Consequently, trails have also become one of our best methods for protecting a patch of wilderness. A particularly vivid example: In 1980, a man named Hap Wilson—then a 25-year-old canoe bum and burgeoning eco-warrior—was hired to map out the old canoe routes and portage trails through the waterways in northeastern Ontario’s Temagami region. At the time, logging companies were clear-cutting the Temagami’s old-growth forests under the (mostly correct) assumption that paddlers never stray far from the waterways, and no one would mourn the loss of those ancient trees. Outraged, Wilson decided to monkey-wrench the process. At night, he snuck into the Ministry of Natural Resources office and foraged through timber allocation maps to determine which lands were slated to be clear-cut. Then during the day, he would clear hiking trails into those blocks of land. 

“Once the trail was established, the people came, and they walked through a forest they would not normally have opportunity to see up close,” he writes in his book, . “The existence of the trail created its own lobbying group.”

Using this method—aided by an unnamed group of eco-radicals, who spiked trees, blockaded roads, and destroyed logging bridges—Wilson and other members of the Temagami Wilderness Society were able to protect an area called the Wakimika Triangle, the largest remaining stand of old-growth red and white pines in the world. It was later folded into the park system, and has remained intact to this day. Wilson has now repeated this process—building trails, attracting hikers, preserving wilderness—all over Ontario. 

In addition to preserving wilderness areas, hiking trails have even been used to actually create new ones. Benton MacKaye, the founder of the Appalachian Trail, originally envisioned the AT as the “backbone of a publicly owned 'super national forest' stretching from Maine to Georgia,” according to his biographer, Larry Anderson. Incredibly, that dream eventually came true. Back in those days, the trail ran through long stretches of farmland and heavily logged timberland—what would today be regarded as decidedly un-wild land. But in 1978, under President Jimmy Carter, the federal government began spending hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase new lands and re-route the trail so we could preserve the land surrounding America’s most iconic footpath. As a result of this herculean effort, today, for all but a few of its miles, the AT is jacketed by a thousand-foot corridor of protected wilderness. (This is sometimes referred to as “the longest, skinniest part of America’s national park system.”) Mackaye’s genius was to recognize that, rather than a scar, a trail can act as a backbone around which wilderness can grow.

Call me anthropocentric, or pathological, but I believe in the promise of smart design and elegant infrastructure. I believe in seeking balance over (doomed) prohibition or (damned) profligacy. I believe that the earth is most beautiful when people walk lightly upon it, in admiration and awe, rather than trampling it widely or not walking upon it at all. All of which is to say: I believe—deeply, fervently, wildly—in trails. 

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On my first morning as a shepherd, I sat on a metal folding chair in front of my hogan waiting for someone to tell me what to do. 

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Robert Moor is an essayist and journalist living in British Columbia. His first book, 'On Trails: An Exploration,' was published in July.

This was my first mistake: as a rule, older Navajos do not relish the opportunity to explain things to naive, inquisitive white people. They would typically prefer the pupil learn through silent observation. Moreover, Harry and Bessie Begay, whose land I was sleeping on and whose sheep I would soon be herding, only spoke DinĂ© bizaad, the traditional language of the Navajo people. Their English was extremely limited, as was my grasp of DinĂ© bizaad. Unless one of her children was visiting, the only person who could translate for us was Bessie’s brother, a rascally character whose name was either Johnny, Kee, Keith, or all three. (Navajos are known to accumulate multiple names over their lifetimes.) When he was around, J/K/K acted as the translator between me and the Begays, but he had left that morning in a pickup truck with his friend Norman, saying he wouldn’t be back for five days. I was on my own, the only English speaker for miles. 

The Begays’ land was wholly cut off from municipal electricity, running water, and phone lines. In exchange for herding their sheep, I would be given one meal each day and a hogan—a low, octagonal, domed roof hut—in which to sleep. I had learned about this opportunity from my friend Jake, who had in turn learned about it from an outfit called , a volunteer organization that helps aging Navajo families remain living on their traditional lands. Jake, who had been shepherding for the past nine years, had regaled me with stories of life among the Navajo, who were among the only people left in North America still herding sheep in the old style, on foot.

The hogan, like all hogans, was built facing the east, and the risen sun was on my face. Hearing bells, I turned to see a storm-cloud of sheep pouring out of the corral. Bessie walked behind them, leaning on an old broomstick. A sweet, tough woman in her late seventies, she stood no more than five feet tall. She wore a velveteen blouse clasped at the neck with a turquoise-and-silver brooch, and a black scarf knotted around her tight bun of steely hair. Her mouth tended to rest in a soft frown, except when she found something amusing, and then it lifted to form a smile the exact size and shape of an upturned cashew. 

I jogged over to her. With her stick, she drew a circle in the dust, and then bisected it with a straight line: φ. At the top of the circle she drew another, smaller circle. 

“TĂł,” she said, using one of the only DinĂ© bizaad words I knew: “Water.” 

Using gestures and a few scattered English words, she made it clear that she wanted me to take the sheep to a nearby windmill, which pumped water from the ground into a trough, let them drink, graze them in a big circle, and then bring them home by nightfall. I had seen such a windmill on the drive in, and, while I didn’t know how to get back to it, I trusted that the sheep did. (This was my second mistake.)

The sheep were already streaming loosely across the yard toward the shallow canyons to the northwest, so I ran to my hogan, threw some supplies into my backpack, and jogged after them. 

I found the sheep in the weeds just beyond the Begays’ yard. They went snuffling along the ground, plucking out tender green shoots of grass, their lips fluttering rapidly. Occasionally, I glimpsed the bright flash of a wildflower before it vanished.     

I had been warned that the Begays’ sheep had a reputation for being “a difficult flock,” but as we left the homesite and dipped down into a series of sandy stream beds, they seemed sane enough. After spending all night penned up, they walked with vigor, only stopping to nibble once every few steps. The lambs leaped into the air in fishy wriggles. From time to time the young males paused to buck heads, then jogged to catch up. 

The naturalist Mary Austin—who spent almost two decades observing and talking with shepherds in California—wrote that flocks are invariably made up of  “Leaders, Middlers, and Tailers.” The leaders head up the flock; the middlers stick to the middle; and the tailers chase up the rear. Individual sheep tend to stick to a single role, she wrote, and because leaders can be used to steer the flock, shepherds typically took special care of them, saving them from slaughter to “make wise” the next generation. Some even went so far as to name them after their girlfriends.

However, in my (admittedly limited) experience, the flock dynamic was not so simple as Austin describes. There were, rather, many leaders in a single flock, who would arise in different situations. Even more curiously, I began to notice that certain individuals seemed to feel the need to be perceived as leading the flock—when the flock abandoned their leadership and changed directions, they would hurry to its front, like a politician scrambling to keep ahead of a shifting electorate.

The relationship between a shepherd and a flock, similarly, is not as clearcut as it looks. The shepherd is not the master of the flock; instead, the flock and the shepherd are engaged in a continuous negotiation, in turns pushing against one another and pulling together, harmonious one moment and fractious the next. Some shepherds claim to be able to control their sheep with words or whistles, which may be true, but the only signaling mechanism my sheep and I needed was the language of space: if I moved too close to them, they would inch away. In this way, I was able shape their movements, but only vaguely, like a cloud of smoke. The essence of herding is not domination, but dance. 

This simple act—walking behind a flock of sheep—is a dying art. Harry and Bessie may well be the last generation of sheep herders in their bloodline; none of their six living children had plans to return to their ancestral land and scrape out a living raising sheep. 

The steady decline of shepherding is a source of great concern for many Navajo people, since the practice has long been integral to their cultural identity. Archaeological and documentary evidence suggests that Navajos first acquired sheep around 1598, when the conquistador Don Juan de Oñate brought 3,000 Churra sheep to the American Southwest. However, the Navajo oral tradition maintains that shepherding stretches back much further, to the dawn of their existence as a people. “With our sheep we were created,” proclaimed a local hataaƂii, or ceremonial singer, named Mr. Yellow Water. According to one particularly vivid version of the Navajo creation story, when the celestial being known as Changing Woman gave birth to sheep and goats, her amniotic fluid soaked into the earth, and from it sprouted the plants that sheep now eat. Next, she created human beings—DinĂ©, as the Navajo call themselves—and sent them to live within the four sacred mountains that still demarcate Navajo country. As a parting gift, she gave them sheep. 

For centuries, that gift has shaped Navajo culture, just as water sculpts a canyon. Navajos’ internal clocks were set to the daily schedule of herding, and their calendars were structured by the seasonal migration. The introduction of wool radically altered their material culture, by providing the means to weave lightweight clothing, warm blankets, and intricate rugs. Their architecture was fortified by the need to protect sheep from raiders. Pastoralism altered their diet, their relationship to the landscape, and perhaps even their metaphysics. One Navajo woman told the author Christopher Phillips that herding sheep informed her understanding of the sacred Navajo principle of hozho, or harmony. “The sheep care for us, provide for us, and we do the same for them. This contributes to hozho. Before I tend my sheep each day, I pray to the Holy People, and give thanks to them for the sheep and how they help make my life more harmonious.” 

When a baby is born, Navajo parents often bury its umbilical cord in their sheep corral, in order to symbolically tie the child to the sheep and to the land. Indeed, as the anthropologist Ruth Murray Underhill suggests, in some sense the Navajo people as we know them—or more importantly, as they know themselves—arrived in this world alongside sheep.

In the calmer moments that first morning, I was able to able to admire the desert. The soil was the mingled color of pencil shavings, in turns a pale yellow, a powdery pink, and a dry black. Out of it grew a stiff yellow grass. I recalled John Muir’s description of California’s Central Valley in late May: “Dead and dry and crisp, as if every plant and been roasted in an oven.” Actual tumbleweeds actually tumbled across my path. Things poked at my ankles as I walked: spiky tufts of grass, tiny bamboo groves of the green ephedra plant called ‘Mormon tea,’ ankle-high cacti with spines the color of old toenails. The only shade came from the scattered juniper trees, which writhed against an ageless wind. 

Off to the northwest, I spotted a windmill, but it looked as tiny as a tin toy. While I was contemplating whether, and how, to turn the flock around, the sheep—as if hatching a whispered scheme—began to divide into two equal-sized groups. I watched the split slowly forming, but I couldn’t move quickly enough to prevent it. 

One group drifted downhill, off to the east, while the other nosed up the hill to the west. Placing my faith in the directional sense of the leaders—my biggest mistake yet—I focused my attention instead on the tailers, figuring that they would be less headstrong. I broke into a run and skirted wide around them. Then, shouting curses, I attempted to rush them up the hill. But now their gait—which all day had been brisk and light—was suddenly slow, their hooves leaden. They stopped often, glancing about, as if entering unfamiliar and dangerous territory. Growing increasingly panicked that I would lose half of the Begays’ sheep, I left the sluggards where they were and ran up the hill in the direction I’d last seen the other half of the flock. 

The land rose to a flat tabletop, runneled with narrow washes and forested with pinyon pines. I imagined that sheep were lurking behind every stand of trees, and I even heard the spectral gonging of their bells, but they were nowhere to be seen. 

As I reached the top of the mesa, something trotted across my path. It moved from my right to my left, low and quick. For a moment I thought it was one of the Begays' dogs, which normally stuck close to the flock. 

Then I recognized it: a coyote. Ears up, mouth open, it glided over the sand with the cool certainty of a missile. 

A sick feeling bloomed in my abdomen. I envisioned finding one of the lambs torn open, its red chest toothed with white ribs. 

Running in a circle, I shouted for the dogs, whose names I did not know. Then I ran back down the hill, where I’d left the other half of the flock, only to find that they, too, had disappeared. It seemed impossible, an elaborate practical joke. I turned in circles, feeling dazed. In my mouth had grown a cat’s dry tongue.

The word panic, fittingly enough, refers back to Pan, the mischievous goat-legged god, whose bellowing used to terrify shepherds and their flocks. Suddenly I felt its true meaning—a blinding electricity that floods the mind, prompting action without premeditation. 

I ran back up the hill. I found nothing. I ran back down to the valley: more nothing. Then, losing hope but unsure of what else to do, I ran back up the hill. 

It was not yet ten a.m. on my first day of herding, and I had lost every last sheep. 

Robert Moor is an essayist and journalist living in British Columbia. His first book, , was published in July.

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