I was driving north on Interstate 35 through Austin one recent afternoon when I passed a billboard for Shiner Bock, the popular beer brewed here in our home state. “The Original Texas G.O.A.T,” the sign read, alongside the familiar logo found on every can or bottle of Bock—a ruminant with large, curling horns. The moment I saw the sign, I clocked that something was amiss. “That’s no goat,” I thought. “That’s a sheep.” Specifically, a bighorn sheep. I knew this because for months, I’d been working on a story about the desert bighorn, and by then I had memorized its anatomical features—most notably its namesake bulky, coiled horns (which remind me of Diva Plavalaguna’s cranium in the nineties sci-fi flick The Fifth Element). The celebrated sheep,…