Sacred Sierra

by Jason Webster

  Thankfully, the speakers pitched their talks at the relatively ignorant, which seemed to be most of us in the hall. In France, we were told, truffi-culture was far more advanced. The French had set up websites selling this ‘black gold’, allowing them a huge mark-up on the wholesale price. They even had fluffy truffle toys for the kids of truffle-scoffing parents. Oohs and aahs of respect emanated from the huddled farmers around. Those Frenchies always were a clever, sophisticated lot. Trust them to have thought of something like that.

  With that, and a couple more mini-talks on technical aspects of truffle cultivation that sailed right over my head, the conference came to an end. In that sleepy lull that comes immediately after a talk or lecture, I discovered that Vicente was no longer sitting beside me and was already barraging Santiago enthusiastically with questions. I picked up the pack of leaflets that had been handed out and made my way to the door, curious but far from convinced that truffi-culture was something I wanted to get into.

  It was lunchtime by now, and we traipsed through the freezing air towards a local bar. Shadowy specks flew into vision from above, and looking up I saw snowflakes like dinner plates – the largest I had ever seen – falling from a blanket-sky. I held out my hand as one fell into my palm, then watched it quickly dissolve and fade into a tiny drop of water. Vicente slapped me on the back as he came running up from behind, sending the droplet flying.

  ‘Time to eat!’ he cried. ‘See yourself as a truffle farmer, then?’

  The bar had laid on a special seven-course truffle-laden meal in our honour. A good thing too, I thought, for people like me who weren’t even totally sure what truffles tasted like. We were, after all, at a truffle conference. It would have been absurd to have learned nothing more than its scientific name and a few suggestions about marketing it on the web. This being a Spanish group lunch on a weekend in a tiny mountain village in late autumn, the wine flowed liberally and we were two bottles in before the first dish was served – salad with shaved black stuff on it.

  ‘That’s truffle,’ one of the professors intoned, and we all nodded. That was truffle? We piled in and I was one of the lucky few to find a piece of this exotic tuber stimulating my taste buds along with a slice of tomato and some lettuce. At first I assumed the professor, despite his obvious advantage over us in these matters, had got it wrong. The gritty substance grinding between my teeth bore an uncanny resemblance to ordinary common-or-garden soil. I was certain because it wasn’t the first time soil had made it into my food. Indeed, in my early twenties, before I realised you had to wash vegetables before cooking them, it used to make quite a regular appearance.

  I paused, though, before dismissing the whole truffle business out of hand as I noticed that the others around the table were in raptures, while some were digging around the communal salad plate for more of this rare delicacy. It was then that the initially hostile flavour trigger in my mind was switched off and something of the real flavour began to register. There was more to this, although quite what was difficult to say. Something about the smell of it, perhaps. I noticed my mouth salivating unusually as I brought another forkful of the stuff up to swallow. But why? Chewing on, I started to detect something, an earthy tang – not just soil: far more – that was at once exciting and almost dream-like. In fact, I realised with surprise, it was curiously erotic: my hormones seemed to be reacting in ways I didn’t normally associate with food. Diving in for more, I decided this was indeed a strange and wondrous thing, both delicate and appetising. I could see now why the first reaction was to think ‘soil’, but beyond that I was amazed to discover a whole range of other tasting notes, from ‘nut’ to ‘fruit’ to ‘mushroom’ and much more.

  An hour and a half later, having waded through truffle pasta, truffle pie, hake with truffle and wild boar with truffle sauce – and God knows how much wine – pudding arrived: vanilla ice cream topped with flaked truffle. I decided to skip that course and headed out into the snow and fading early afternoon light to clear my head, barely able to move after our truffle banquet. I leaned against a railing and took deep breaths, a truffle-flavoured mist streaming into the air from my open mouth as the abnormally large snowflakes settled on top of my head. I looked out over the fields beyond the village, across dry-stone walls to whitened oak forests barely visible in the distance. Right at that moment I might have killed anyone who offered me another truffle or dish laced with the damned things, but the meal – and the conference – had now set me thinking and the seed of an idea was germinating. There was something mysterious and powerful about the taste and flavour of truffles. It was surprising to realise that from virtual indifference I had rapidly shifted through mild curiosity to glowing enthusiasm. Perhaps Vicente was right after all. Perhaps the future – in part at least – did lie in truffles. I thought it through for a moment: a truffle forest would tie in well with our ideas for the farm, for planting trees – especially oaks – up there. It would be a long-term project and we wouldn’t get our first crop for years to come. More reason, then, to get going right away.

  I shivered and headed back inside the bar, snow crunching underfoot. It looked as if we weren’t going anywhere for the time being with weather like this. Which meant more wine, more food, more stories, more truffles. My stomach rumbled at the thought, but the image of that distant oak forest stays stubbornly in my mind.

  *

  Today I saw a scene repeated that I’ve come across time and again recently – a sparrowhawk chasing away an eagle six or seven times its size. I imagine the eagle is trying to pick up the sparrowhawk’s eggs or chicks. There is a slow arrogance about the way the eagle saunters in, but it is easily chased away – the sparrowhawk screams outrageously as it dives at it and harries it off – much like a fighter plane attacking a heavy bomber in a dogfight, perhaps. The eagle quickly gives up, the sparrowhawk goes back to its nest to protect its young, and the eagle, catching a thermal surging up from the mountainside, circles high into the sky before drifting off nonchalantly in search of easier prey.

  *

  Despite being disabled and having to move about mostly on crutches, El Clossa was difficult to keep up with. He skipped nimbly down a steep grassy bank to a ford in the stream below, jumping and hopping his way along. Within moments I had lost him amid all the mud and thick bushes lining the waterside and had to follow by listening out for the clattering of his crutches against stones and rock as he worked his way up the other bank.

  ‘This way,’ he called as he raced along. The sky overhead was grey and rumbling, great rolls and waves of pregnant cloud threatening the empty, windswept landscape. The earth felt scarred – a high plateau unprotected against the freezing air hurtling down from the north: austere, rocky, yet green and dramatic. It was hard to imagine the destruction that was about to be unleashed here.

  ‘The electricity company is going to build a massive new sub-station in a valley north of Penyagolosa for all the wind farms they’re putting up everywhere,’ Concha had told me over the telephone a couple of days earlier. ‘El Clossa’s found something there I think you’ll be interested in. You should go over with him and have a look.’

  El Clossa, it turned out, was a stonemason, but, ever a lover of mystery, Concha refused to give me any more clues. She’d arranged a place and a time for me to meet him and that was that.

  Our evening at Concha’s mas had continued until dawn, sitting out in the cold night air outside the front door looking up at the stars. A connection of sorts had been made, and, hesitantly, we allowed ourselves to be drawn in for a time, but always with a view to a possible exit.

  ‘They’re interesting – lots of crazy ideas,’ Salud said. ‘But there’s something a bit cultish about them.’

  Today, I’d come out on my own, Salud having to head down to Valencia for a couple of days.

  I managed to catch up with El Clossa as we passed a small medieval building set on the banks of the stream, with perfect semi-circular arches. It looked to have been a hermitage of
some sort, miles from the nearest village yet somehow suited to this romantic location. The poplars lining the stream and the small hillside rising up behind it gave it some protection from the strong winds. It was locked up, now, forgotten.

  I wanted to stop and find out more, but I had to hurry to keep up. There was a danger of being left behind.

  ‘Just up here. Not far now.’

  We pushed past more thick bushes and low-hanging branches. Whatever path we were following had fallen into disuse and been lost to the reclaiming forces of nature, but every now and again I caught a glimpse of what might be an ancient walkway.

  From odd scraps of conversation I was beginning to learn that this landscape was crisscrossed with traditional paths and routes dating back to at least the Bronze Age. Most had been lost now, but many had been in regular use until the previous century, employed mostly by migrant, or transhumance, farmers moving their cattle and sheep between summer and winter pastures.

  ‘This area used to be incredibly rich hundreds of years ago,’ El Clossa called back. ‘Made their money on merino wool.’

  Merino wool, the source of so much of medieval Spain’s wealth, had been a closely guarded asset for centuries: it was forbidden to take the animals out of the country on pain of death. But eventually the outside world got hold of them and Spain’s monopoly was broken. Today most merino wool – named after the Merinids, a Berber group who settled in Spain during the Moorish period – comes from the southern hemisphere. During the late Middle Ages Tuscan merchants had been particularly keen to get their hands on this king of wools – warmer and more water-resistant than other varieties – and had set up offices in nearby towns to export it.

  ‘Sheep farming was big business round here from the fourteenth century onwards,’ El Clossa said. ‘All these big stone houses you see in the villages in this area?’ he said. ‘All built by wool merchants. Fifteenth, sixteenth century, that kind of time.’

  The routes the farmers had used to move their livestock around, and then to take their wool down to the coast, were the same paths we were now walking on ourselves, and the same you sometimes saw stretching over the hills and valleys.

  Man had been crossing this region for thousands of years, yet modern, tarmac roads were still relatively few and far between.

  We climbed over some boulders, El Clossa scaling them effortlessly, and came down to a rut in the hillside, shaded by a large oak. This seemed to be it.

  ‘There,’ El Clossa said triumphantly.

  He knew a lot about the local history, and his ability to race over the hills on his expertly managed crutches was astounding. Now, though, as I stared down into what appeared to be a puddle of mud, I wondered about him for the first time. Was this some kind of wild-goose chase?

  ‘Where?’ I asked.

  He looked annoyed: I was being slow. He crouched down, laying his crutches to one side, and pointed.

  ‘Here.’

  And then I saw it: over a yard and a half long, slender and straight, yet almost the same colour as the ground it was lying in. El Clossa saw the expression on my face.

  ‘That,’ he said with a smile, ‘is the perfectly preserved, ossified thigh bone of a sauropod.’

  For a moment I stood there open-mouthed. I had only ever seen dinosaur bones in museums – preserved, cleaned, assembled and out of reach. Here I had the real thing lying at my feet. I knelt down and touched 180 million years.

  ‘Reckon the whole animal’s here lying about,’ El Clossa said. ‘Probably just fell down one day and died.’

  ‘How did you know it was here? How did you find it?’ I asked. He pushed back his grey hair then got up and scuttled away. The question had made him uncomfortable.

  ‘Just knew,’ he said.

  I remembered Concha saying that he had a nose for these things. The man spent his life working with stone, walking through the countryside collecting and searching. He had a sixth sense for stone, she said. There was no other way to explain it.

  I knelt down and ran my fingers along the brown, dirty dinosaur bone once again. What else, I wondered, might be lying beneath our feet?

  ‘Up here!’ El Clossa was now further up the hillside and calling me. I got up and followed after him. Some thirty yards on he was resting against a large flat rock, waist-high. Below me, next to the stream, I caught sight again of the small hermitage.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said. I watched closely as he ran his finger over the lichen-covered stone, and as he did so, ancient carvings sprang to life in front of me. Circles and straight lines were etched in rows across the upper face, while deeper carvings, like channels for molten metal in a forge, stretched down the sides. Time and the weather had worn them almost smooth, yet they were clearly man-made and very ancient.

  ‘The archaeologists don’t know what they are,’ El Clossa said. ‘Reckon they must be Bronze Age. But look at these.’ He pointed to the rows of little circles and straight vertical lines, like digits. ‘That looks like writing, an alphabet of some sort. Yet writing was only supposed to be starting at that point in Mesopotamia.’

  I put my fingers into the grooves to trace their mysterious shapes. First the dinosaur, now this.

  There was a problem, though. El Clossa looked out on to the valley and sighed.

  ‘The archaeologists will be here tomorrow to examine it and dig up what they can,’ he said. ‘They’ve been given three weeks. And that only after a fight.’

  He pointed at a flat piece of land just a few yards away at the bottom of the valley floor.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is going to be the site of a big new electricity station.’ He swept a crutch out in a wide arc with his powerful arm. ‘All this is going to be wiped out in less than a month.’

  He gave a cough, then snorted.

  ‘It’s all these wind farms they’re putting up,’ he went on. ‘They’ve got to send all that electricity somewhere. So they’re cabling it in here before sending it down to the cities on the coast.’

  Now I understood Concha’s insistence on the phone earlier on – it was the last chance to see this before it disappeared for good.

  ‘What will happen to the dinosaur bones?’

  ‘They’ll dig up what they can, clean them up, perhaps put them in a museum one day.’

  ‘And the valley? Can’t something be done?’ I said. The place was too beautiful, too magical to be destroyed so thoughtlessly.

  El Clossa shrugged before skipping away down the hillside. Time was running short.

  *

  I simply hadn’t thought through what a huge task it would be to plant a couple of hundred oaks. ‘I’m heading out to plant the truffle trees,’ I said to Salud one late November morning. ‘Probably be back by teatime.’

  Five trees in, the penny began to drop …

  Having thought it through a little more, I’d decided to plump for the truffle-forest option, and had picked up the mycorrhised oaks and holm oaks from a specialist nursery in the neighbouring province of Teruel. Firstly I had to get the trees, protectors and bamboo supports up to where we were planting – which meant driving the car, fully laden, along a precarious, overgrown mountain track I still hadn’t got round to clearing from the last rock fall. The tiny saplings all fitted into the back of my car. That accomplished, for each tree I had to dig a hole with a heavy, Spanish hoe, the traditional tool for the job. This was backbreaking stuff on such hard, rocky earth, although I’d recently managed to clear the land of all the gorse and weeds. According to Ibn al-Awam, holm oaks preferred this kind of environment, high in the mountains, with dry, sandy soil, although he did recommend watering them in the summer. After digging the hole, I had to crouch down, pull the protective plastic pot from around the roots of the oak sapling, place it in the hole without the root ball falling apart, and then cover it up again with soil, filtering out the stones. Once this was done I then placed the plastic protector around the tree and secured it to the bamboo support. Finally I placed larger rocks around the bas
e of the new tree, so that, when it rained, the water wouldn’t evaporate so quickly in the sun. At least that was the theory – and what Vicente had told me to do.

  It slowly became apparent that this was going to be a much lengthier operation than I’d anticipated. Two hundred very tiny trees might have fitted into the back of the car, but they seemed a hell of a lot more when you had to go through such a complicated process to plant each one. Allowing – on a very conservative estimate – about fifteen minutes for each tree, I was going to need, I realised after some time-consuming multiplication in my head, fifty hours to plant all of them. Straight. Screw all my ideas about getting it done by teatime, I was going to need weeks. And it was tough, physical work – something I was getting used to, but even so: the earth was very hard and still covered in the remains of all the weeds I had chopped. I cursed myself, the thought ‘I must be out of my fucking mind’ playing itself over and over under my breath.

  As I was getting my head round the scale of what I was trying to do, there was a loud shot. Crouching down to get my hands in the dark, blood-red soil (and I don’t like to think what might have happened if I hadn’t ducked just at that moment), I heard a cracking, or snap, like an enormous whip, immediately followed by a tumbling sound like quickly moving thunderclouds. As I stood up sharply to see what was going on, it was as if I could almost see the noise from the gunfire bellowing across the valley. We were getting used to hearing shotguns now. A modus vivendi of sorts between ourselves and the hunters had been established after the previous run-in. They no longer took over our garden on a Sunday morning, but they still popped up now and then. While they kept their distance I had been happy for things to continue this way. This, though, had been far too close.