Higher Calling

by Max Leonard

  He talked of the disappearing heart of the village, a community where once every family would own a few cattle, or a herd of goats or sheep, but where now there were no pastoral farmers living permanently inside its limits. Of how, on the first of June every year, all the cattle used to be led to the high valleys above the village for the summer, to be cared for by lou pastre, as he was known in the ancient Provençal language, who would spend the next four months with them. He spoke of the woodsman who would supply the firewood to heat the milk that was produced in the dairies on high, and the cheese that was transported down; and of the different pastures on the mountain, each of which with its own cabin where the berger would stay while the livestock were there, and how the different landowners and livestock owners would work together to survive. ‘What remains of this co-operative system?’ he asked. He talked of the cowshed that had been destroyed by an avalanche two years ago and not rebuilt; of the four cabins that had fallen into disuse and disrepair, and how the state had intervened to help renovate one of the precious ones that still remained. Of the héliportage to the cabins which the state supported, but how the lowland infrastructure – the abattoirs and the local buyers – was disappearing. How all this threatened the shepherds’ way of life, despite modernisation and new initiatives to sell their artisanal produce to tourists and in the cities. He spoke of the evolving role of the shepherd in the local communities, of their contributions to sustainable development, their care for the environment and for the mountain landscapes they lived upon. He called them out by name – the dairy farmers, the cheese makers, the beef and the lamb producers, and even the beekeepers – and asked for a round of applause for each.

  But most urgently of all he spoke about wolves. How wolf attacks were up 20 per cent on the previous year: 406 attacks in the first seven months of 2015, killing or injuring 1,800 animals, which represented in just this one small département 50 per cent of the attacks in all of France. (The actual number may be much higher: farmers can report and are compensated for carcasses, but many are never found, and distressed ewes often lose the lambs they are carrying, which again are not taken into account.) He spoke of the single wolf killed by the authorities in all this time, despite a government mandate to cull more than a hundred. He talked passionately about how the farmers had the right to live from their land free from this terror, and how he would be calling on the prefect to authorise the shooting of wolves from helicopters. And he talked of the patous, an increasingly indispensable presence for the protection of the sheep, but which also sometimes frighten or even injure walkers – who don’t realise the white mountain dogs are there in the middle of the flock, or that walking through a herd and splitting it in two looks to the patous like a threat. For these dogs that live on the mountain and sleep within the flock have to stay aggressive, almost half wild, to face up to the attacks it is their job to confront.

  Then it was time for the bergers to stand together and take a bow, including those freshly descended from a summer on the mountain. They contrasted strongly with the officials in their uniforms and shiny suits. If they had modern technical clothing, it was a fleece, but it was more than likely holed; they wore old T-shirts and jeans, and well-worn walking shoes. One was still holding his staff. With a full beard and moustache, a woollen cape and an old-style hat with a feather in it, this man, not old but not young, caught the eye particularly. He seemed, more than the others, to find this new sociability, this village square packed with people, difficult after four months on the mountain with mainly animals for company. Although many of the cabins have been modernised, and often electrified with solar panels (and therefore have running water pumped in from a nearby spring), life up there is basic and hard, tiring and solitary. The guy seemed to be suffering from the culture shock and was, not to put too fine a point on it, simply pretty drunk. Later, he got involved in a long conversation with the policemen after an argument broke out. But that was not before another procession of animals, cows driven by the Corniglione brothers (introduced in the speech as beef and dairy farmers), and then a few sheep too, for good measure. Shouts and whistles and a lumbering through the village and the crowd parts, ripples out of the way and hides behind pillars, because oh-my-God the cows, which are Salers and bred for meat, look beefy enough in the fields but up close they’re bloody big and moving fast; and the sheep have their heads down and are running in a dense pack through the square into the narrow – almost too narrow for the cows, let alone a car – old streets, shepherded by a serious-looking boy of about 11 with a staff and a canary-yellow T-shirt. And then the rumble’s passed and there’s a lot of shit left behind, great piles of it, except where one old man, immediately they are through, pops out to hose the passageway in front of his door clean, and also offers to wash the animal muck off people’s shoes.

  The Cornigliones own the last farm on the road up to the valley where the Belle et Sébastien cabin is, I learn as I walk with them driving the herd out of town. They reach a small steep field and begin to set up a temporary pen. One brother closes the gate while the other secures the perimeter of the bottom of the holding space with rope from his knapsack that he measures and cuts with a knife. There is some temporary electric fence to be rigged (cows are curious but they’re not stupid, the Cornigliones tell me), and then a hose to be weighted with a rock, tied with string cut from a ball and then thrown into a bright blue plastic industrial barrel, which is left to fill with water. The Cornigliones in part sell their beef through their butcher’s on the Avenue des Diables Bleus in Nice, and actually, says Louis, the more voluble of the two, their cows will be going back up to pasture for a few weeks more, where they will be tended by his brother, the silent one, until the snows really threaten.

  But it was important, he says, to bring them down to participate in the driving through the streets, to keep the tradition alive.

  It is difficult to comprehend the wolf problem from afar, but all the more powerful and affecting for that when seen up close. The theory about the resurgence of European wolves – or at least one of the theories – is that all the factors contributing to rural depopulation have affected remote mountain areas most, and that small, marginal farms and their farmers are disappearing from the uplands. This, coupled with the entirely laudable focus of the past quarter-century on environmental and species conservation, means that large swathes of the continent are now becoming wolf territory once again. They are spreading back across Western Europe, pushing south into Greece and north into Norway, causing trouble in areas where they have not been seen for centuries. Murderous packs of wolves have naturally repopulated the Alpes-Maritimes from the Ligurian Alps over the Italian border, where isolated local populations remained. Certainly there is no need to suspect, as some locals whisper, they were deliberately reintroduced to the Mercantour National Park by environmentalists. The great wilderness was enough. And now they are spreading further down the mountains, south and west towards the lowlands and the coast. For an urban-living, mountain-visiting cyclist, this might seem a romantic notion. But if you’re one of the diminishing number of shepherds on this increasingly dangerous frontier between the cultivated and the wild, whose job is being made even more difficult by these predators returning to fill a vacuum, not so much. It is causing many shepherds, contrary to their instincts and wishes, to leave the vocation altogether.

  There is a powerful essay called ‘Thinking like a Mountain’ by Aldo Leopold, an American forester, writer and naturalist. It described his realisation, while working for the US Forest Service killing predators in the New Mexico mountains, that exterminating wolves had unexpected and unwelcome ramifications: ‘I suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer,’ he wrote, of the damaging overgrazing he sees caused by large herds. ‘And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.�
� He continued: ‘The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learnt to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea.’

  Take a system that has evolved over time and remove an element suddenly and something else will overspill. Leopold’s work was influential in the development of a modern environmental ethics, and ecologists now call this kind of imbalance caused by outside intervention a trophic cascade. Actually, the situation he describes is almost the opposite to the wolf problem in the Alps, which seems rather to be provoked by the curiously perverse and maybe defining conflict of our times: hypermodernity colliding with a kind of nostalgic atavism. Times have changed since 1949, when the essay was published, and maybe thinking like a mountain might now usefully (also) mean something else. For me, the shepherds’ festivals were a glimpse of the interconnectedness of things, how the culture and the economy of the valleys and mountains is a real living thing; how if you change one thing in one place, something else shifts too, and probably not how you would want it to.

  This is just one point of view on the wolf issue. There are many sane voices that support this rewilding. But on that first ascent up the Aspin, Aubisque and Tourmalet, in the Pyrenean ranges known as the Circle of Death, Desgrange’s riders feared the bears; perhaps we modern-day cyclists should worry about wolves.

  I eventually caught up with the shepherd I had been chasing through the twilight on the Bonette; or rather, he more or less came to me. I had been spending a few days at the gîte d’étape in Bousiéyas halfway up the mountain, sharing the bunkroom with a revolving cast of walkers on their way up or down the Alps via the famous GR5 hiking route, and I was sitting outside reading a book about shepherds and watching the usual suspects trail in. Two skinny French guys with huge backpacks filling bottles up with water at the spring; a tall Australian smothered in an emulsion of sunblock, wearing a safari shirt and a floppy hat who, contrary to all regulations, seemed to be intent on camping on somebody’s vegetable patch that night; Spanish road cyclists in technical-looking kit, eating pasta; Italian bikers. And then some unusual suspects. A smartly dressed old woman who unsteadily gets out of the car that delivers her, and sits under a parasol. An oldish man, florid and pale, in black trousers and black shirt, a kind of rustic Johnny Cash, who kisses her on both cheeks in greeting and then disappears inside the refuge. He comes back out, trips over the step and opens the small church across the road with the keys he has just picked up. Then he rings the bell vigorously. Over the next 20 minutes more people join them. A woman in a wheelchair and a very old man, who leans in close to the man in black to talk in his ear. The man in black declines a coffee, decides on a beer instead, lights a cigarette and laughs as he greets more arrivals. These earthly pleasures done with, he gets up, trips over again, recovers, rings the bell and the congregation files in.

  It is 15 August, Assumption Day. A Catholic mass is held in Bousiéyas each year to celebrate the Virgin Mary being taken into heaven, but this year it is also a memorial service for Gérard Brun, a shepherd from the hamlet who died over the winter at the age of just 58. It turns out that ‘my’ guy, whose name is Jean-Pierre Benoit, is the deceased man’s nephew and is one of the churchgoers. Jean-Pierre is from a long line of shepherds and is also from Bousiéyas.fn7 It was his family’s sheep (and indeed his father checking up on them) that I had seen that night, from the panorama, in the bowl underneath the peak. Brun’s flocks also spent the summer on the upper slopes of the mountain and Jean-Pierre had watched over them each year for 15 years, while Brun spent time making hay, assuring food for the flock over the winter.

  Plainsong drifted from the open doors and mixed with the sound of spring water falling into its stone basin. After the service we were introduced, and I arranged to meet him the next day with the sheep.

  I found him in an idyllic meadow cradled between two peaks, just above the Camp des Fourches at around 2,300 metres altitude, on the edge of a sheer drop into a cirque, the source of the Salso Moreno river.fn8 While the lowlands were mostly privately owned, and the peaks were communal, grazing rights for each mountain pasture were rented from the village council. Jean-Pierre was standing on a bluff on the ridge at the northern limit of his lands, his binoculars trained on some chamois on the other side of the river as his sheep cropped gently below him and his two dogs lazed at his feet. He was wearing an old hat with a floppy brim to keep the sun off, a T-shirt and a rucksack in which he kept, among other things, a woolly jumper for cold evenings and mornings, and in his hand he held a wooden staff. He was sturdy and moved in measured steps, and he was quiet, and when he spoke his words were gentle. In the clear days of high summer the sheep would graze contentedly in the morning, then gather together to spend the midday hours resting, he told me. The trick, he said, was to let the sheep feel like they were doing what they wanted and not to police the herd too much with the dogs. They remembered where they’d been and moved towards the untouched grass of their own accord, each day pushing a little further on. When things were quiet and calm, it was good to savour the peace of the mountains, because the weather could quickly become foul at any time of year. Clouds could envelope the slopes in only minutes, reducing visibility to almost nothing and drop the temperature by 20 degrees. Then the sheep would become nervous, start running, scatter into the fog and get lost or injure themselves; worst of all they hated hail, which could strike even in midsummer. In the spring, perfect balmy periods alternated with days of bitter wind, when the sheep were agitated and quick to fright, and you wished you were still down below. No day was the same as the one before, but the best, he said, were often in September, when there was a freshness in the air, and the first night-time frosts were scorching the grass but the sun still shone; when the leaves were turning and the sheep, content after a summer’s grazing and increasingly heavily pregnant, were calm.

  Jean-Pierre did not pass his summers in a cabin. His house in Bousiéyas was close enough that he could return home after nightfall for dinner, sleep in his own bed and then drive back up to the parc, where the sheep were enclosed for the night, in the morning. There, he would check the flock and attend to any sheep that needed care; then it was an hour or more to walk them up to pasture, where he would lay some salt out for them on a rock. His sheep were pure-breds, either Préalpes du Sud or Rouge de Guillaumes, two local breeds that were well adapted to life on the mountain. Lambing happened in late October or November, when they’d come off the mountain, with a second round being born in the spring to ewes that had missed out. It was in June, just before the estives, that the autumn lambs were sold. Most of the females went to other shepherds, who crossed them with other breeds to produce chunky lambs suitable for eating, and therefore needed fresh pure-bred sheep every year to maintain their flocks; others were kept, to renew the herd; still others (including almost all of the males, save for the most perfect specimens, which were kept as studs) went straight to the butcher.

  The sheep were intent on eating, the bells around their necks tinkling gently. It was a perfectly bucolic scene, but for Jean-Pierre it was tinged with sadness. The year was a strange one. For Jean-Pierre, 2,000 sheep were manageable in the summer, but after the hivernailles (the winter descent) he always returned to help his father with his own family’s flock, which wintered some 250 kilometres distant, at Saint Martin de Crau near Arles. And for Brun’s widow, Jean-Pierre’s aunt, 2,000 were too many to handle alone over the winter. It is difficult to hire good shepherds – if a young shepherd is talented then he quickly establishes his own flock – so, after Gérard Brun’s death, half of the herd had been sold and Brun’s 2,000 had become 950. The fact that Brun’s sheep had been handed down to him, and so were actually Jean-Pierre’s grandfather’s flock, made it all the more poignant. ‘I’ve got a lot of grass!’ Jean-Pierre said. ‘In other years, I’d have had to manage them, keep them tighter.’ Next year, he said, he would
look to take on the guardianship of another lowland farmer’s sheep, to add to the summer flock so that his aunt’s rented pastures weren’t wasted: ‘The same mountain and half the sheep, that’s expensive. It’s like buying three baguettes, eating one and then throwing away the other two. You’re still paying for them.’ With only half the flock, the pressure to move was less, and so he wasn’t up to the highest pastures yet. Normally, by 15 August the flock would be at its zenith; Assumption Day was the still point of this turning world, the tipping into autumn. The fogs would start to rise up the valleys, early in the morning and in the afternoon, and the sheep, which had been so eager to gain the high ground in the spring, would become reluctant, knowing, by the dwindling hours of daylight perhaps, that it was time to begin the arc downwards again.

  Jean-Pierre showed me the cliffs above the pasture where his father used to pick génépi, the local strain of wormwood that is made into a bright-green absinthe-style liqueur, and told me how the National Park authorities were only just now letting locals collect it again. The park had literally been created around the local residents, and they had found themselves subject to restrictions on renovating their houses, bans on hunting, and on mushroom and herb picking. (On the positive side, it also protected the pastures, banned 4 × 4s, and banned any dogs except working dogs within its perimeter.) The conversation inevitably came back round to wolves. They had long been on this high, remote sector, and were not more numerous these days, he said, but perhaps they were extending their territories down to where they were more of a noticeable blight. Yet he also described their increasing boldness and cunning: how they could take a straggling sheep in bad weather without the shepherd or even the rest of the flock realising. And how last year the local village mayor’s sheep were attacked by two wolves at once, one of them drawing the patous away while the other waited downwind for the dogs to chase into the distance and the flock to be vulnerable. Jean-Pierre was resisting getting patous. Although they protected the sheep they could also cause problems and stress within the flock, not to mention the occasional incident with unwary hikers. As long as the electrified enclosure at the parc was effective, he would not own such dogs, he said, but if the wolves got in, he’d have to think again.