A couple of days after Antonia returned from Holland I met her on the road walking back from town. You can tell her from a distance by her slight frame crowned by a large floppy hat. She waved me down for a chat and asked with her eyes crinkled into a smile, ‘Have you seen Domingo?’
‘No, not today,’ I answered. Then, glancing across the river, ‘Isn’t that him on the rock beneath the canebreak, talking with Jesús?’ For the last two decades Jesús Carrasco has walked his three hundred goats down through the olive groves to graze in our valley, and on the odd occasion when their paths coincide, he and Domingo stop to fill one another in on local gossip.
‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘He’s got something to show you, a present I brought him from Holland. I’ve been plotting it for ages.’
‘I’ll go and inspect it right away,’ I promised, smiling back; not that I had a clue what Antonia was talking about, but she seemed so pleased with herself it was infectious.
By the time I reached Domingo, Jesús and his flock had begun to move up the hillside, the goats daintily skipping from rock to rock. Domingo’s horse, tethered to a clump of coarse grass, was contentedly munching on a bramble, and its master was sitting on a rock gazing at the hill above. He was listening to the sound of the bells of his flock, and picking it out from the orchestral bongling of Jesús’s departing goats; once you’re used to them, each set of bells is as clear and as subtly different as birdsong.
I sat down beside Domingo to pass the time of day. ‘Want to see something good?’ he asked, watching the hill.
‘I don’t mind,’ I responded, in the phlegmatic way of locals hereabouts. ‘Always nice to see something good. What did you have in mind?’
Domingo ignored this bit of playful banter and pointed up. The hill is steep and rocky and overgrown with the sort of maquis that grows in this part of Andalucía – low bushes of genista and anthyllis and tall wispy-fronded retama. It was quite hard to make out amongst this scrub Domingo’s enormous flock of sheep, spread far and high across the hillside. But I could hear the bells, busy with some concerted movement, and occasionally I could glimpse a gaggle of sheep, bobbing like rocking-horses as they scuttled down the serpentine path that led to the bridge. Soon the first few of them showed up, galloping down in a cloud of dust, then another sheep and then some more, until little by little the whole flock was gathered around us, smelling sweetly of hot wool and rosemary, coughing and farting copiously. Finally there came a few stragglers, followed by Domingo’s scurvy pack of dogs: mad-eyed Mora, three-legged Curro, and several curs without names… and then, something I’d never expected to see amongst Domingo’s menagerie, a beautiful, shiny black-and-white Border collie. The dog moved low and slow through the flock and came to a halt by our rock, where she looked up at Domingo.
‘This is what I meant,’ he said, tousling the dog’s head. ‘This is Chica.’
I was amazed, partly by the way he was showing affection towards the dog – Domingo had always seen his pack of dogs as more of a necessary evil than as potential pets – and partly because of the fact that, years before, unimpressed with the way his motley assortment of curs worked the sheep, I had offered to get him a proper sheepdog from Britain. But Domingo, as always fiercely independent, had declined the offer, saying that he could manage perfectly well with the existing pack. I resisted the temptation to remind him of this, and confined myself to asking where he had got his new dog from.
‘Antonia brought her from Holland,’ he explained. ‘She’d been planning to get her since meeting the mother the year before, but had kept it as a surprise.’ Chica put her forepaws on his knee and looked up at him adoringly. ‘I’m going to train her,’ he continued. ‘I’ve never seen a dog as intelligent and willing to work as this one. She’ll be wonderful with the sheep.’
‘Well, Domingo,’ I said. ‘Enhorabuena – congratulations – she’s a real little beauty.’
From then on I hardly saw Domingo without Chica trotting by his side. And around three months later, when I returned after a trip to London, I came across the pair of them, surrounded by sheep, sitting by the bridge. Domingo had seen my car and was waiting for me. He beckoned me over. ‘It’s still early days, and she hasn’t practised this much, but watch,’ he demanded.
Some of the flock were heading across the bridge, probably with the idea of having a crack at Juan Barquero’s olive trees while Domingo wasn’t looking. He gave a low whistle and a click of the tongue and nodded his head in the direction of the recalcitrant sheep. Like a flash Chica was gone, round the edge of the flock, down the bank and across the river – which needed a bit of swimming. Then she slipped up the steps on the far side of the bridge and confronted the offenders. The sheep took one look and doubled back to the flock. Chica crept quietly over the bridge and lay down on it, and there she stayed, her head between her paws, eyeing the sheep with an occasional glance at Domingo for approval.
I was staggered – as much by Domingo’s skill as a trainer as by the dog herself. It also made me feel a little nostalgic for my previous life as a shepherd in England. To enter a huge field rolling across the downs, and with a quiet command send your dog racing low across to a distant flock of sheep and return, driving them before her, is a truly wonderful experience. Our own dogs, Big and Bumble, are both good and loyal pets, but they’re not worth a light when it comes to sheep work. There’s a lack of professionalism about them, an excitability that gets in the way. It’s not their fault: they weren’t designed for the job, and besides, with a little flock that’s used to going in and out of the stable morning and night, there’s not much call for the virtuoso stuff.
A TEENAGE FROG HUNT
MY DAUGHTER CHLOË IS A TEENAGER now, and this brings with it a whole new bag of puzzles and conundrums. My brain is constantly exercised thinking of ways to keep the lines of communication open. I don’t read to her any more, which is a thing I miss a lot. Neither do I make up stories. Made-up stories were what she once liked best – and she’d probably like them still, but it’s not easy to create a story for a teenager. It would, of course, be too much to expect her to like the same music as me, although there are odd bands we agree upon. Every now and then, though, something crops up in which I think we may be able to share an interest. I asked her very tentatively one summer morning what she thought of the idea of going on a frog hunt.
‘A what?’ she asked, looking up from the fantasy trilogy she had her nose in.
‘A frog hunt – you know, go down to the river and catch some frogs.’
‘Why would we want to do that?’ She frowned at me. After all, it was a hot morning and a trip down to the river meant that we would later have to climb back up from the river – and in the heat of the day.
‘We’re going to see John and Giuliana today and they need some frogs for their pond.’
‘And where are we going to find these frogs?’
‘Down in the lagoon behind the dam. It looks like a great place for a frog hunt.’
‘Okay, then,’ she said brightly. ‘I’ll just go and change.’
My heart swelled a little as I set about gathering appropriate equipment – a bucket and a pair of nets, a hat to keep the sun off, a bag to put some figs in – while Chloë improvised a frog-hunting outfit.
She led the way, and with Big doing excited pirouettes in the dust, we headed down to the river. It hadn’t rained for months and the Rio Trevélez was reduced to a red dribble: what little snow that had fallen in the mountains had melted long ago, so the river was running on deep aquifer-fed springs. But just below our farm the Trevélez River joins the Cádiar, and the Cádiar, curling along at the foot of the Contraviesa, still had a fair flow of clear water. We stood on a spit looking at the two streams, which run separate for a while, the red water of the high mountain river keeping aloof from the lowlier Cádiar, until eventually the rocks and rapids succeed in mingling their waters.
It put me in mind of a photo I’d seen in a National Geographic magazine showing
the Yangtze merging with the Min River at Chongqing. Reviving my paternal role I looked to share this knowledge. ‘This looks like a miniature version of the rivers at Chongqing, when the Min flows into the Yangtze,’ I announced. ‘The dam there is one of the biggest engine…’
‘Dad, there’s a frog! Quick, get it!’ cried Chloë. I lunged with my net, and missed.
I could tell that Chloë was not inspired by the rather nebulous connection I was making to Chinese hydro engineering, so I threw myself instead into the task at hand. The place was alive with our quarry, hopping and plopping and diving deep into the fast-moving water to escape the attention of us hunters. On land, you feel sorry for the poor things, with their laughably inadequate means of locomotion – imagine what it must be like, your every pace being an arc of about thirty feet in the air with an unpredictable outcome. Fortunately for the poor frog, though, he comes to his own in the water; they are amphibians, after all.
We continued walking down the river until we arrived at the curious plains of silt that the rivers have carried down from the mountains to deposit behind the dam. I recalled how bitterly we had opposed the building of this dam a few years before, convinced that it would result in the loss of our home and farm. Our fear had been fuelled by a diagram of an enormous construction, forty-five metres high, which would have buried our house, along with much of the valley, beneath the silt. Despite a groundswell of opposition, people power did not prevail, and the confederación went ahead and built the thing anyway. Fortunately for us, they only built it fifteen metres high and we, and our home and farm, remain on dry land; and to cap things off, they faced the dam tastefully in stone.
The big surprise, though, is the pleasure we now get from the wetland ecosystem that is developing above the dam. There’s a lot of dead vegetation – drowned dry-land plants sticking sadly out of the mud, sand and shingle – but, little by little, flood-resistant plants are moving in. Curious lagoons, green and red, coloured by their respective waterweeds, have formed, and have drawn a rich diversity of creatures: frogs and toads of various persuasions, the tiniest of turtles, schools of minnows, ferocious dragonflies of many hues, water-boatmen, pondskaters. And down the scale, I’m sure a jam jar and microscope would yield hosts of daphne, hydra, paramecium and the other microscopic monsters that people a healthy aquatic environment. As time passes, transient birds, too, are finding out about the place, and each year there are more herons and ducks – and a curious creature that nobody has ever seen, and which we only hear as night falls, when down in the riverbed it honks to itself in a humorous sort of a way.
But back to the frog hunt. We waded on down through the river until we arrived at the lagoons. Big and Bumble were clearly not going to be much help, as they got hysterically excited at a sniff of even the most infinitesimal creature and leapt, barking into the water, stirring up great clouds of evil-smelling black mud. This made it tricky to see the frogs, so we left the dogs to work one lagoon while Chloë and I concentrated on the other.
They are odd creatures, frogs. They sit on warm rocks beside the water, seemingly inscrutable because it’s hard to see which way their eyes are looking. They seem to ignore you, and then at the last moment leap into the water and scuttle down to lurk in the mud at the bottom. It’s difficult to catch them once they’ve made it down to the mud, so we hit on a method of creeping along the bank, fixing on a frog and lunging with the net just as he jumped, to catch him in mid-air. This was sport indeed, and soon we were shrieking with wild excitement and, as we both got our eye in, plopping frog after frog into the bucket.
Easier to catch are the tadpoles, and probably better, as they would be more likely to adapt to the high mountain environment where we were taking them. So we fished about in the frogspawn and soon we had dozens of eager young tadpoles in the bucket, too. It was hard to stop once the bloodlust was up. Not that we were killing the frogs, of course, but I think I got some understanding of what drives the hunter on to his gruesome excesses.
With reluctance, Chloë and I eventually tore ourselves away and splashed home up the river, catching minnows as we went, and then throwing them back, just for the fun of the thing. We had a whole bucket of frogs and tadpoles, which would gladden the nights of John and Giuliana with their croaking. But the real joy of it had been in sharing an hour of foolish exuberance.
As kids enter the teens, you can’t help but feel keenly the gentle but firm pressure with which the offspring shoves away from the nest in order to take off with their peers. Before we’d even dried the mud of the river from our shoes, Chloë was on the phone to her two best friends inviting them to join her in a frog-hunting expedition while the river was still low. Usually Chloë’s circle just send text messages to each other, but I’m not sure you could convey the full appeal of such an expedition in that particular format.
There was a time, an increasingly hard one to recall, when my daughter used to look up to me as something of an intellectual – or, at least, someone worth having in her corner when it came to tackling the homework. Not so any more; Chloë’s work has moved into a formidable dimension where I scarcely dare to tread. I know it sounds feeble, but not only am I unable to help my daughter out with matemática, física and química but I’ve learned to distrust the very questions they pose.
‘Dad?,’ Chloë asked the other night, ‘D’you know what X is?’ From her tone I deduced that she was testing my credentials rather than just seeking the answer. It sounded simple but I’ve learnt that the simple ones are, in fact, the most fiendish, and not just in Maths. I’m routinely called upon to tackle apparently innocent queries like ‘What happens when we cough?’ or ‘Why do we see reflections in colour?’ or ‘Why is the sea so salty?’: those clever-dick conundrums that you never quite master enough to retain into adulthood.
I tried to front it out. ‘Well, for a start it’s the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet… and it sounds like “ks”…’ I could tell straight away that this wasn’t going to do.
‘No Dad, I mean the mathematical absolute. You can find its value by this equation,’ and off she went, tripping along with her pencil, filling the squared paper with a succession of numbers and letters to the square and to the root of whatnot that all seemed to slot neatly into place on either side of an equals sign. I watched in dumbfounded admiration.
‘Ah, I see,’ I said, when she finally came to a halt.
‘You don’t really understand it, do you, Dad?’
‘Er… no, I suppose not,’ I confessed, feeling nostalgic for the last time that I was of real use with the homework. I remembered it with absolute clarity, as it had been such fun. Supposedly, then too it had been matemática, but it had seemed more like art.
The task had been to draw a series of contiguous heptagons – seven-pointed stars – and then colour them in. But when Chloë got started on the project, she realised that there were about six hours of work involved. ‘Dad,’ she had commanded, ‘you’ve got to help me with my homework.’
‘“Got to” isn’t good,’ I said absently. ‘I’m busy.’
But I am nothing if not biddable, and so before I knew it I found myself with compass and pencil sitting beside my daughter as she explained the technique. It wasn’t long before I was captivated by the beauty of the task, so just in case you don’t know and fancy having a crack at it, I’m going to tell you how to draw an accurate seven-pointed star. You’ll need a decent compass, a pencil and a sheet of paper, at least A4 size. All equipped, then? Well, here goes.
First you draw a circle with your compass, nice and wide and note where the centre pin-prick is. That’s O. Then draw a line straight through O that cuts the circle in half, and call the intersections A and B. Next, set your compass to a little more than half the distance between O and A and, with the point at A, draw an arc inside the circle. Then move your compass point to O and draw the same size arc. The two arcs should intersect at two points, one on either side of the line A–B. Now draw a line connecting these two int
ersections (be very precise) and you’ll note that it crosses the line A–B at right angles exactly halfway between O and A: we’ll call that point R. Continue this line until it crosses the circumference at a point we’ll call C.
This last part is crucial, as the measure you’ve been trying to discover all along is the distance from R to C (or the distance from mid-point on the radius to its corresponding point on the circumference). Set your compass to this measure and mark it off at intervals around the circumference… and, miracle of miracles, it goes exactly seven times, if you’ve been accurate with your drawing. Now join each dot on the circumference to its two opposites and, like magic before your eyes, that most elusive and exquisite form, the seven-pointed star, will appear. If it looks more like a pig’s ear, start again.
Seven, according to the science of numerology, is the perfect number – but how on earth do you accurately divide a thing into seven? Now I know, and so do you. And if you, like me, have ever wondered why on earth people love mathematics, then this simple task might help you understand. For the business of producing these lovely stars was entrancing. Ana came and joined us, and for an hour or so we sat together, our tongues between our teeth, lost in rapt concentration on the pattern that was forming. Chloë, for whom it was homework rather than pleasure, was engaged on the colouring in on the far edge of the page.
Suddenly I realised what it was that was taking shape before us: it was a polychrome wooden ceiling that could have come from the Alhambra – except that those craftsmen had created their heptagons and stars nearly a thousand years ago, from accurately cut wood. The thought of doing what we’d been doing, but in wood, was quite staggering.
The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society Page 4