The Olive Harvest (The Olive Series Book 3) Page 20

  ‘What stone is that?’ I ask Michel. ‘I have never seen such a rock hue before.’

  He shakes his head. He, too, has been taken by surprise.

  On we climb, turning on sixpences, wondering if somewhere way back we might have taken a wrong turn, until we see a sign, followed soon after by a sighting, far ahead in the distance, of the village of Roubion. It is gliding high in the mountains, seemingly attached by a bootlace, flying in the face of gravity at 1,310 metres. A fairy tale, rising up out of nowhere like a lost city of grottos.

  ‘This is not going to be a touristy event,’ I say to Michel. ‘We have barely encountered a soul so we may be the only outsiders.’

  How I am to eat my words!

  When we eventually approach the village we are forced to a halt by a vanguard of cars and a mountain lass waving and sprinting from one vehicle to the next. Flushed and excited, she explains that the village is jammed solid and there are motors parked all along the kerbs. ‘The only solution available is to keep travelling, until you reach Roubion le Buisse. There are heaps of places there,’ she assures us with her peaches-and-cream smile and clear-as-running-brook eyes. ‘And there will be a navette to bring you back down.’

  I cannot imagine what kind of shuttle will be able to negotiate this chaos. In any case, if it is not too far, we would prefer to return on foot. It will be a pleasant stroll and surely swifter. The question is, how to get to the next village? This hive of surcharged activity is the only passage through. Because we are in France, bien sûr, several of the cars that were queuing behind us have grown impatient and attempted to overtake, thus cleverly blocking infiltration from every angle and leaving not so much as a patch of dried grass on which to turn or reverse. Angry words ensue from all directions. Arms are spinning like windmills. Cigarettes are carelessly tossed on to the ground as drivers and their passengers, swearing and huffing, march impatiently alongside their transport. We stand aside, contemplating this incongruous corridor of traffic. Where have all these vehicles appeared from?

  Peacefully, side by side, we take in the view and bask in the sunshine, while around us folk are getting themselves extraordinarily twisted and knotted. Our patience is soon rewarded. Within a quarter of an hour we are on our way, bypassing Roubion and moving on to the higher station.

  Hélas, because every other car has been given the same instructions, the parking up here is also complet. In fact, there are cars spilling out from everywhere. So much for fresh mountain air. Eventually, we find ourselves a steepish ridge of tufted bank and, with a fierce hit on the Merc’s throttle, or, as the French would say, a determined ‘crush of the mushroom’, I manage to get it parked.

  The navette turns out to be a clunky old pick-up truck. Departing now, with a load of twenty-five people aboard, all standing like cattle in its open rear. The passengers are to be deposited at the village entrance before the truck swings back for the next swarm. Evidently there are no traffic restrictions or police on duty or, perhaps, because today is a fête, all heads are turned towards the scenery. Whichever, it is no distance back to Roubion and we choose to stroll.

  Entering the village, we meet countless visitors milling to and fro and it is difficult to negotiate a path through the throng, but the buzz of expectation all about and the Sunday-afternoon bonhomie jolly the crush. Cherry trees and chestnuts adorn the squares and cobbled streets. Villagers mingle with and pass through this unexpected onslaught, bleating at one another, ‘Baa, baa, baa,’ and giggling senselessly as though they are keepers of a secret language. Hundreds of children are skipping and sliding like urchins in the dusty lanes. A loudspeaker blares out foggy incomprehensible messages. The air smells warm, of juniper, cooking and dung.

  We see nowhere for lunch. Signs point to a pizzeria but the likelihood of a table can only be a dream.

  ‘Ann! Ann!’ shriek the schools of kids in thick mountain accents, running in front of Michel’s camera, waving. Their cries bemuse us. Who is Ann, to cause such an uproar? It is only a little while later that we realise what they are actually yelling is ‘ne!’, the French for ‘donkey’.

  And, as if on cue, a pantomimically attired donkey is led out of a barriered mountain pass at the rear of the village by a very commanding fellow. Broad-shouldered and tall, he is a hirsute chappie with a large black beard and a rug of frizzy chest hair. He walks his docile ass, a bunch of plastic pink flowers adorning its forelock, from one set of excited youngsters to the next, smiling and engaging in chat with them, allowing them to stroke the beast’s muzzle as he answers their questions. At first I take him to be a gypsy, here to profit from the crowds by selling donkey rides, as is the custom at chilly seaside resorts in England, but it soon becomes clear that this fellow is the master shepherd and the donkey is part of his retinue. Further back, beyond the tunnelled rock, is the muster point where the sheep are assembled, waiting to get on the move. ‘Thierry!’ we hear someone call to the shepherd. Thierry’s skin is a very dark shade of plum and has the texture associated with living days and nights in the open, exposed to the extremes of high-altitude elements. His eyes are kindly, compassionate and a piercing shade of russet which makes a startling combination with his plummy complexion; the colours are as remarkable as the rock set against the autumn hues we have just driven through. He wears a brilliant red checked shirt with the sleeves rolled up, similar to that of the wine expert, Guillaume Laplaige, and a navy-blue knitted waistcoat. His clothes look as though he might have been rolling down the valleys in them. They are not dirty but crumpled, vaguely dusty and laced with grass stalks. He herds with his son-in-law, who is also a shepherd. Both sport flat, chocolate-brown velvety hats, scruffy and beaten. I ask the younger man if there is a name for this style of headdress and he stares at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Hat,’ he says.

  When the high-altitude days grow cold and frosty, before the snows arrive, Thierry drives his sheep south for l’hivernage, the wintering. The journey lands them, eventually, at his birthplace close by the old Roman encampment at Castellane, where the animals are housed in a serre d’hiver. This, in the olden days, would have been a capacious barn but today is much more likely to be a larger version of a plastic-covered greenhouse. Here the beasts are given health checks by the authorities, injections against diseases such as brucellosis and then, in the springtime, before setting off to their summer pastures once more, they are shorn. Thierry has never ventured further afield, never even visited the coast, he tells us. His only expeditions are into the high Alps, to watch over his flocks.

  ‘I own no property, no longer have a wife. I have no fixtures or responsibilities save for my sheep, my brebis. I have worked with them all my life because I love them. I love the look of them, too, and if I couldn’t travel to spend my summers with them it would break my heart.’

  Approximately five hundred people have converged on this isolated upland locale to participate in the transhumance. A bemused, red-faced man standing at his doorway tells us that this crowd is far bigger than they had been expecting or can realistically accommodate. The hordes are now queuing, in the usual French scrum manner, for the plastic tumblers of sangria offered free by the local council to all visitors. Every attempt Michel or I make to secure a couple of tumblers results in body blows, so we give up and decide to pay a visit to the church. Inside it is sombre and unadorned but what peace in comparison to the racket outside. Although it is Sunday, this house of God is deserted and not a candle burns anywhere. While Michel films the interior, I search about for one to light but see none. There are no signs of any recently celebrated service and I wonder how regularly it is used as a place of worship. In the olden days, shepherds frequently stabled their ewes in mountain churches and I ask Michel if he thinks this old stone building with its painted walls might ever have served such a purpose.

  ‘Possibly. The ewes might well have been milked in here, out of the harsh winds. A pottery or wooden vessel known as a piau would have served the purpose.’

  I am shiverin
g. The stone façade keeps the nave chilly. We return outside into the startling sunlight, to find the crowds massed in the square in preparation for the transfer. The loudspeaker is relaying garbled instructions. We have the choice of preceding the troupe or holding back and walking astern. Most choose to forge ahead. Michel suggests we bring up the rear.

  ‘Come with me.’ He offers his hand. I take it; it is icy. He guides me through the tunnel in the rock and out of its far exit. We have stepped beyond even minimal civilisation out into the vastness of pure mountains. A strip of a path leads away from the village and, here are penned possibly a thousand sheep. Watching over them are several dogs and the young flat-hatted shepherd. Because the creatures are bunched up tight together and cannot move forwards or backwards they have begun to scale the cliff face. Thirty or forty goats and sheep have strayed and congregated high above our heads, cleaving to the rock at right angles like geckos to walls. Bells are clunking as they negotiate the scraggy terrain.

  Thierry returns with his clip-clopping donkey. He and the younger man patiently contemplate their stock. A surprising number of goats litter these flocks. Several dozen would be my estimation. I ask Thierry, who is now waiting close by us, how many sheep he has in total and his answer momentarily confuses me: ‘Well, more than a good or so dozen thousand.’ It is his young relative who translates this as ‘nigh on fifteen hundred’.

  The two men wait in silence, speaking only when a tourist shoots them a question. Otherwise they stand surveying their beasts, shooing away flies with their handkerchieves or with a fan-like wave of their hats. Between them is the donkey, a docile, people-loving mule with its tail flicking at the flies on its rump and its upright ears twitching against the pink flowers. Strapped within its backpack this beast of burden is transporting metres of rolled orange netting, attached to slender iron pickets used, no doubt, for penning the sheep wherever the entourage chooses to bed down for the night. Do the men sleep in the open air? Or in stone huts similar to the cabanos seen on my recent hunting trip? I peer into the mule’s luggage but see no sleeping bags or tents.

  The mule’s name is Zamzong. Thierry repeats it twice, nodding his head proudly.

  ‘From the Bible.’

  ‘Zamzong? Ah, Samson.’

  ‘Oui, Zamzong.’ Thierry tells us that these days with good roads and even the possibility, in extreme cases, of helicopter patrol, the role of the donkey in the troupeau is more or less defunct but, he says, patting the ass, he wouldn’t travel without her. ‘Her strength is less necessary, but she’s my girl and my best friend. I’d hate to summer in the mountains without her.’ So Zamzong is a girl!

  We learn that the younger berger and his wife, Thierry’s daughter, have two small boys. During the mid-year school break mother and children travel to the shepherds’ camp to holiday with him. The hardest weeks of the year are ‘come September when the new term begins’ and the family returns without him to Castellane. Then he has six or seven weeks of work ahead before he can join his wife and little ’uns again.

  Aside from the sheep, goats and solitary Zamzong, there are two Pyrenean sheepdogs and one Doberman whose collar is also decorated with flowers; these complete the troupeau, which is now receiving its marching orders.

  ‘It’s time to get going!’ ‘Let’s head out!’ ‘Move on out!’

  I smile. It reminds me of Rawhide.

  ‘Hold back!’ ‘Attendez!’ ‘Nobody budges until the animals have been rounded up!’

  The lean, black and tan Doberman is set to the task. Up he goes, scaling the almost sheer cliff face with poise, barking at the fat fluffy sheep, nudging them into action. They scamper and two-step but then drop to the road, one after another, a snowstorm of clumsiness, while the goats clop down with haughty grace.

  The procession gets underway. Bells are jangling, hooves are trotting, sheep are bleating; a descant of livestock on the move.

  ‘Folks, stay back behind the last beast!’

  ‘Don’t mingle with the bêtes.’

  We are ordered, we are herded.

  Since most of the onlookers have chosen to head the column we find ourselves in the fortunate position of walking directly behind the last of the flock with only a handful of others. I smile at Michel. ‘Good idea to hang back.’ He squeezes my hand as we trail a battery of furry, swaying backsides, and I am delighted we have this day.

  Children from the lines behind us begin to worm their way through the ranks of grown-ups, eager to pat and slap the animals. As we pass through the tunnel, returning to the church square, hosts of new arrivals push and shove to pinch our places. Their assertiveness panics the beasts at the rear of the herd who, before we know it, begin to bolt. They are soon galloping at racing speed; the crowd behind matches their pace, thundering through the streets, out of the village, towards the mountain road. Everyone is desperate to keep abreast and in pursuit of the squad. Looked at from on high, we must be a hugely comical sight. Five hundred people pursuing fifteen hundred sheep, several dogs, a few dozen goats and a donkey decked in flowers, all dodging and bucking, bells clunking, clattering along at full tilt, charging as though from an avalanche through echoing cobbled streets, out to the mountain pass, in and around parked cars, whooping and giving chase. The sheep, of course, are completely mystified.

  Tinée, the Doberman, is barking manically, while the flocks are scurrying up the high banks and tumbling like skittles on to their fleeing, fleecy comrades. I cannot see beyond these muddy buttocks of mutton to the leaders of the procession, who surely must be Thierry with Zamzong and the two sheepdogs, but here at the rear all hell has broken loose. How must it feel to have this Light Brigade of humanity and stampeding wool bearing down upon them?

  The assistant shepherds, bergers bénévoles, unpaid helpers brought in from as far afield as Grenoble, are predominantly women. They each tote a long-haired switch with which they thwack the ground when the sheep begin to stray. Now they are shouting to the crowds to keep back, rein in their children; to the kids to keep their distance; yelling at black and tan Tinée, named after the river fed from these mountain springs, who is haring up and down the banks like a yo-yo. All the while the shepherdesses are thwacking and whipping at the ground, but we never see them hit the animals.

  Eventually, all is back under control; the pace calms and we walk and chatter in the afternoon sunshine. The air is perfumed by the smell of untreated wool. I lean down and stroke several of the beasts’ backs and my hand sinks into their warm, fibrous coats. The walking is hot going and our rhythm is constantly interrupted because we are obliged to halt while the strays are gathered up, and there are plenty of them. The shepherds are yelling repeatedly, ‘Slow down! Keep behind the beasts!’ While the sheep romp up the steep banks and gorge themselves on the maquis, Tinée rushes after them, tongue lolling, barking and chivvying until the sheep leap and dodge and fall back to the road, tripping over themselves and their fellow travellers. Looking ahead towards the massed animals weaving in and around the cars, within this scenery of sky-high landscape, I am reminded of a flying carpet.

  ‘Why do you do this?’ I ask one of the young female helpers. The locals are French-speaking. No one converses in Provençal.

  ‘There are wolves in these hills,’ she tells us. ‘It partly accounts for the foundation of the association that brought me in. It was formed to create a bond between owners of livestock and those interested in pastoral life and willing to lend a hand. I am an agriculturalist – I studied at the University of Grenoble – but anyone can put their name forward if they fancy helping out. I take my vacations during the two seasons of transhumance. It is tough and tiring work for one shepherd alone or, if they are lucky, two to guard travelling flocks for weeks on end, throughout long nights, always on the lookout for wolves.’

  ‘What is the organisation?’ I ask. ‘Where is it based?’ But the blonde-haired shepherdess has been called back to duty and off she strides, elegantly swinging her whip.

  During this uph
ill passage – curiously, the village we are approaching is marginally higher than the one we are relocating from – the young shepherd is caring for a lamb that has been falling behind. It was growing anxious, unable to keep pace, and found itself trapped within hundreds of pairs of marching feet. Now the shepherd is carrying junior on his shoulders, little black hooves slung round his neck, as though this tired, unhappy lambkin were a collar.

  My boots are growing heavier. The soles are gunged up with the freshly fallen turds that are decking the lane. The sheep project their pellets into the air out of brown furry bottoms, whilst on the move, whilst falling over one another, bumping up against each other. It is as though they have no sense of direction or sight, yet when they lift their incurious heads, this dirty-cream sea exposes glimmering blue-black eyes.

  I love the sound of their bells. Everywhere, bells. Picorns. Some are extraordinarily resonant because they are worryingly large. A number of the goats’ picorns in particular are so enormous they brush the ground. Bearing the weight of these hefty metal instruments around their stalk-like necks cannot be comfortable.

  Roubion le Buisse: journey’s end. For today, this will be the shepherds’ resting place. The sheep are to be grazed here for a week. In winter, this higher Roubion is a skiing resort. How it copes with the influx of sporting addicts is beyond Michel and me because it is hardly more than a hamlet. We see no hotel. There is a prettyish auberge looking out across the street to the green-swathed Alps directly en face. Here drinks and plates of charcuterie and salad are served, rather in the style of bar snacks in an olde-worlde English pub, but there is precious little else on offer in this hinterland parish aside from clean nature and tranquillity. Today, however, the throngs are eddying and flowing up and down the hillsides, more multitudinous and disorderly than the sheep who are munching peacefully within their makeshift folds. A dozen or so wooden chalets dot the inclines but these appear to be privately owned. We stop for a noggin at the auberge, where they are advertising vin chaud, though we decide, because it is so warm outside, to order glasses of Côte de Provence red and settle ourselves crosslegged outside on the grass in the autumn sunshine to quaff them. Whiffs of the sheep droppings squashed into the grooves of my boot soles drift our way, but they are not unpleasant. It is all part of the excursion.