Reaching the pass at the eastern end of the hill I had no option left but to pick my way downriver along the route by which I intended to bring the flock back. Still no path. Exasperated, I struck straight up the steep rock-toothed ridge, clambering on and on through the pine- and rosemary-scented air until, at last, on the summit I discovered a feeble path, that seemingly started nowhere and ran along the ridge from peak to peak.
I sat down to regain my breath and, basking in the late afternoon sunshine, surveyed the scene below. Tiny El Valero was just visible to the trained eye, out beyond the river. Way off to the north were fields of snow shrouding the high peaks, with storm-clouds rolling around them; but where I was sitting was perfect peace, the rivers dimmed to a gentle sussuration, the odd tutubia skeetering away and screeching. I smiled to myself at the thought that the sheep had lured me up to this spot to allow me to enjoy an afternoon’s ramble.
As if to crown the moment I heard the distant tinkle of sheep-bells. There they were, a mile off, tiny specks in the scrub, not far from where I’d seen them earlier. I struck down through the two hidden valleys with their tumbled fortifications – the Serreta had been a Republican redoubt during the last months of the Civil War – and across a long scree-slope waist-high with rosemary. Creeping up, I remonstrated gently with my charges: ‘This is no place for sheep, for heaven’s sake! Goats maybe, but sheep, no. What on earth do you find to eat here anyway? There’s not a stitch of grass.’
Looking around, I started wondering in earnest how I was going to get them down. They didn’t want to go down, I could see that. ‘Right, let’s go home,’ I said, and did a little clucking and whooping. Some of the sheep moved off rather unconvincingly in one direction.
I took stock of the situation. I didn’t know where we were, nor did I know the lie of the land. Everywhere there were smaller or greater precipices, and with the waist-high scrub you couldn’t see them until you were plunging headlong over. The sheep that I was about to throw a rock at, to get them to move along, could be teetering on the very edge of a sheer drop. I skirted around them to have a look. They were.
So with oaths and stones I turned them around and we headed steadily back along the hill the way I had come. It was hell getting them underway. ‘Haaii!’ I shouted, waving my stick, and a dozen sheep would move forward. The rest would look at them without much interest, then amble off down the hill, grazing as they went, so I hurtled down through the thorns and rocks to threaten the lower part of the flock. These moved off reluctantly in the right direction. Meanwhile the top lot had stopped and were heading higher up towards some nasty-looking rocks. I leaped back up again and headed them more or less in the right direction. Meanwhile, the lower part of the flock . . . I cursed myself for being fool enough not to have a proper sheepdog.
Still, by throwing stones and whooping and shouting, I managed to move them all onto the faintly discernible ridge path. As we picked our way gingerly along, I chatted to them to keep them relaxed and in a good mood. ‘Just keep moving along there nicely now, girls. That’s lovely, nice and steady now. Find your own way along, no hurry, plenty of daylight left,’ and suchlike.
The views from that ridge were breathtaking but knowing that if I were to slip I would probably go hurtling over the edge somewhat dulled my appreciation. Luckily I have a fair head for heights, and the sheep, well, they leave such trivial worries to the shepherd. The leaders of the flock insisted on sticking slavishly to the exact ridge path, which meant climbing up to, and then clambering down from, the very pinnacle of every one of the jagged peaks of this saw-toothed little range. We must have cut a farcical figure from below as we moved along, silhouetted against the darkening sky.
With the setting of the sun, the full extent of my predicament began to dawn upon me. Here I was at the back, or sometimes in the middle, of a slowly moving flock of sheep, high on a precipitous mountaintop from which I had no clear idea of the way down. With the deepening shadows, the contours of the slopes which had earlier filled me with such delight took on an increasing menace. If we reached the eastern end of the range, there was, as I well knew, no way down for a sheep. Even if I did manage to get them down to road level – and I could see the road, a fine grey ribbon far, far below, with tiny cars and lorries whispering along it – I would somehow have to turn them towards the river, and away from the lush vegetable fields of the vega at the bottom. No easy feat for one exhausted shepherd. I would just have to leave the whole thing to chance.
The sun sank lower, black clouds fouled the sky, the night drew deeper and the sheep ambled along ever more slowly. My thoughts were by now of the blackest. The plants I had enjoyed earlier plucked spitefully at me as I passed, while rocks seemed to shoot from the ground to wrack my ankles.
‘We ought to cut down to the right here,’ I announced to the sheep, ‘because although it looks a hellish descent, it’s certainly a lot easier than the face at the end – and whatever you do, sheep, don’t you even think about the north side! That way lies despair.’ The urge to talk aloud at that fearful moment, even to sheep, was irresistible.
The sheep didn’t much like the look of the north side either. It was an awesome prospect of steep rocky slopes, covered in thick scrub, with cliffs that plunged hundreds of feet to the river. Running through the bushes on their left flank, I redoubled my efforts, hurling rocks and yelling like a banshee. ‘Down there – down there, you stupid buggers. Look, I know it looks grim, but take my word for it, it’s a lot less bloody grim than what’s ahead of you if you keep on along that ridge!’ They looked at me, chewing insolently, and moved on straight up the edge of the next, last and highest peak.
‘Bloody Nora! You brainless shits – look at the mess you’ve got us into now! How in the name of Beelzebub are we going to get down off this?’ The cars spinning silently along the road below had their lights on now. A quarter moon sailed among the threatening clouds.
As I moved round, stumbling across the north side of the peak, the sheep at the back turned quietly round and trotted off back the way we had just come. I stopped and stared after them in horror. A Sisyphean vision swam into view of an eternity of walking back and forth along the skyline of this ridge with my dim-witted animals. The flock was fragmenting little by little, some moving back the way we had come, some thinking about the north face, one or two eating on the slope I wanted them to go down, but most of them just standing and looking thoughtfully into the gathering night.
I tried one final burst of frenzied activity, leaping back and forth over the ankle-cracking rocks in the dark, howling and yelling and thrashing the scrub with my stick. It was no good. I had to admit defeat for the night, anyway, and slithered off down that horrible slope.
As I went I made the noises favoured by local people who want sheep to follow them. The sheep listened courteously but decided against it. And fifty metres down the hill I came across the path I had been looking for on the way up.
The next day Domingo and Antonio offered to come up with me to get the sheep off the hill. ‘That’s very good of you,’ I said. ‘But I really can’t see how we’re going to get them down.’
We headed up the hill armed with Domingo’s pack of five nondescript curs, and after about an hour’s scramble managed to locate the sheep, more or less where I had left them, at the top of the steep cliffs.
‘We’ll push them down the north side,’ said Domingo. ‘They’ll always go down best the way they came up.’
‘You’re joking, Domingo. That side is about ninety percent vertical cliff.’
Antonio rolled a cigarette and kept his own counsel.
‘Bah!’ said Domingo and whistled the bird whistle he uses to get his flock moving. The sheep raised their heads, startled. Then they bolted as one, straight over the edge of the cliff.
I rushed panic-stricken to the edge, expecting to see their little woolly bodies plummeting hundreds of feet through the air to shatter on the rocks of the river far below. But no, there they were, skittering
from ledge to ledge, bum up, ears down, hurtling headlong down that impossible hill. It took them seven and a half minutes to reach the river, and then they shot up to the farm and in minutes were lost to view on the orange terraces.
‘Well, that wasn’t very difficult!’ said Domingo brightly, as we all sat down on a rock to look at the view and enjoy the smoke curling away from Antonio.
No sooner had the news reached Janet about the Serreta incident than she came striding across the valley to see us. ‘Out of my way! There’s a dog’s life at stake!’ she shouted at some hikers who coincided with her at the bridge.
‘I’ve found an excellent position for Barkis,’ she announced when she reached the house. ‘Good European family,’ she added, meaning they weren’t Spanish. ‘Now, how much does the dog weigh? The people I’ve found are very concerned that he should not weigh more than twenty kilos. They don’t want to be pulled over by him. How much? Thirty kilos? Well, that should be alright. He’s a beautiful boy, just right for them. I’ll ring them tonight. They’ll be down to collect him tomorrow.’
The dogs happened to be suffering from fleas at the time; there was an outbreak in the stable by the workshop where Bodger and Barkis had their quarters. We covered them all with flea-powder that night, in the hope that they might look more presentable the following day.
As Janet had promised, Barkis’s prospective owners turned up next morning, equipped with a pair of bathroom scales. The flea-powder had done its work and brought all the fleas biting furiously to the surface of the dogs’ coats. So the dogs were twisting and turning and scratching and gnawing at themselves in a frenzy of itching. You could actually see the wretched fleas hopping. Nevertheless, Barkis could turn on the charm when he thought it might be in his interest to do so. George and Alison were so delighted by him that they took him home with them that very night.
Barkis fell on his feet with his new owners. They have a rabbit farm and they supplemented his diet with dead rabbits. They also took him for walks on their mountain every day and to church with them on Sundays. He thrived under this tender regime and gave up chasing sheep altogether. Then he was poisoned by the hunters.
Hunters in the Alpujarras routinely put poisoned bait down to kill any beast that might disturb their birds. It’s a highly illegal as well as cruel practice and a lot of dogs die horrible deaths as a result. But few of the victims’ owners bother to make any sort of fuss. Not so George and Alison. They were wretched with misery when Mariano the shepherd brought them their dog, dead in his arms, and immediately launched a campaign to publicise the outrage. The mayor was petitioned, legal advice was sought regarding criminal proceedings, and together with the village pharmacist they produced an emetic to distribute free of charge to anyone whose dog was in danger. It was a shame that Barkis couldn’t have witnessed his ascension to cause célèbre.
If the truth be told, Barkis was not the only one of our dogs liable to kill sheep. All dogs will have a go at chasing sheep given the opportunity, but some more so than others. One summer morning the sheep strayed onto a terrace uncomfortably close to Ana’s vegetable patch. I ran down to move them off, and the dogs followed. Bonka stood eagerly by as I pushed the flock through the gate. Bodger, however, was not to be found. Fearing the worst I raced up to the far end of the terrace – and there came upon a grisly scene. A sheep was stuck in the mesh fence, and was struggling helplessly while Bodger was methodically tearing it to pieces.
I yelled at the dog, heaved a huge rock, and missed. Then I disentangled what was left of the poor creature from the fence. She stood, swayed a little and collapsed in a pool of blood. I rolled her over to have a look at her wounds, averting my eyes and sucking a long breath through my teeth until the spasm of horror passed. I didn’t know just what fearful wounds those teeth could inflict. The sheep’s legs, back and front, were torn apart, like cut meat on a butcher’s slab. Her belly was ripped deep and there were bloody toothmarks all over her.
I had never seen such a horrible savaging and ran up to the house to get a knife to finish her off. But when I got back she had heaved herself to her feet and was staggering towards the stable. ‘If she has that much will to live,’ said Ana, ‘then it would be wrong to put her down. We must try and treat her.’
‘Have you seen the wounds, Ana? They are appalling, she can’t possibly survive.’
‘We can try, anyway. I’ll consult Juliette.’ And so saying, she retreated to the house to pore over The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable by Juliette de Baïracli-Levy, which lay permanently to hand on the corner of our kitchen table.
I helped the sheep to the stable, made her a pen bedded with fresh straw, and put her lamb in with her. Though she must have been suffering unimaginable pain, the first thing she did was to haul herself to her feet to let the lamb drink. This was definitely a sheep worth saving. I gave her an injection of antibiotics and a feed. Ana came down with some sort of natural cleansing solution, as recommended by Juliette, and bathed the wounds carefully as I held the sheep. She washed away every speck of dirt from every wound on the body, pulling away the wool where it had stuck to the meat.
I couldn’t bear to look at the wounds – the sight of that torn flesh made my blood crawl – but Ana set to work with patience and skill. It took two hours just to clean the wounds. Then we fitted loose bandages wherever possible to keep off the thousands of flies intent on debauching themselves on her blood. The next morning, as prescribed by Juliette, I had to urinate first thing in a bucket, the resultant liquid to be used for the bathing of wounds. Ana and I walked down to the stable (me rather self-consciously swinging the bucket) and tipped the sheep over to remove its bandages. The wounds were now covered in scabs and clots and bits of straw but the sheep munched contentedly while Ana doused them with my morning pee. And so we proceeded, for a week or so, administering one or other ghastly herbal drench from Juliette’s natural animal husbandry regime, as the ewe visibly recovered. It kept milking throughout, and its lamb thrived.
Apart from one tendon – whose tear would have needed microsurgery beyond Juliette’s primer and which left a bent forefoot – the sheep recovered completely. She has reared two sets of twins since and the long period of treatment made her quite tame.
It was a result that went beyond the benefits of a single sheep. Knowing that we had rescued the animal, and treated her with natural medicines, left me feeling quite different about my flock and indeed the whole style of farming we were able to practise. In a big efficient flock, sheep with a far better chance of survival than this one would have been knocked straight on the head.
As for Bodger, well – we kept a careful eye on him after that.
Over the years, Juliette de Baïracli-Levy has attained such an influence over our household that it’s hard not to think of her as a resident in-law, one of a triad of women who dictate the course of my life. She stayed down the road in Lanjarón during the 1950s, and was, or still is (for rumour has it that she lives today among a clump of pine trees on Mount Hermon, a somewhat contentious spot on the borders of Israel, Syria and Lebanon), a woman obsessed with herbs and natural ways of healing. One of her claims to fame is that, during her time in Spain, she nursed herself and her four-year-old son through typhus, pitting herself against the Lanjarón doctors by insisting on following her own prescriptions of herbs and fresh water.
A battered, second-hand copy of Spanish Mountain Life, Juliette’s wonderfully quirky and triumphant account of that year in Lanjarón, formed our introduction to her works. Then some friends sent us a copy of The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable. On the back were all sorts of testimonials from no-nonsense bodies like the British Horse Society and Farmers’ Weekly. Juliette was thus stamped with the mark of respectability.
On many an evening when I came home tired and dusty from the field or the hill, I would find Ana engrossed in the more worryingly entitled Illustrated Herbal Handbook for Everyone, soon to be dubbed ‘Towards a Healthier and More Wholes
ome Husband through Herbs’. Ana would regard me pensively as she looked up from the pages. Then, to her undisguised delight, I whacked the sharp point of a sickle into the side of my knee as I was clearing an acequia channel. This is a typical Alpujarran wound, by all accounts, all men having been born with a sickle in their hand and most of them subsequently going on one way or another to get it in their knee. Mine went in deep, and the knee swelled up like a football.
Ana consulted Juliette, then made a poultice of herbs and a vile potion that I was to drink. Comfrey was an ingredient of both poultice and potion, and the drink also featured coarse wormwood and garlic, just in case I should not find it sufficiently detestable. I’m more or less convinced that it worked, for the wound healed unusually fast. Meanwhile, Ana’s confidence in her powers as a herbal healer soared. She could hardly wait for another opportunity to test her new skill.
Not long after the business with the knee, I obliged her by being very sick indeed. Ana found me vomiting violently into the rosebushes one afternoon, wishing to die. She sat down on a stone beside me and leafed through the wretched book. ‘Juliette says here that it’s a wonder that man is so concerned to stop vomiting which is a natural and wholesome purge for all the ills of the body. What do you think of that, eh?’
‘BAAUUUGGHHH!’
‘But if you really do feel as bad as you look, then you can have some grated raw quince, some cloves, ginger and lemon juice. That’ll fix you up.’
Driving Over Lemons Page 19
