The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society (5 page)

Domingo spends most of his time walking in the valley and hills with his sheep. That's what you have to do when your flock grows too large to graze on your farm, and at getting on for three-hundred-and-fifty sheep, he has built up one of the largest flocks in the area. On rare occasions – when he needs to drive to Málaga to pick up Antonia or drop off a sculpture at a gallery, for instance – he will let the sheep loose for a few hours in a field of sorghum and forage maize that he's fenced off specially for those occasions. But he has simply too many sheep to leave grazing in the same place for long.

Now, there's a certain romance in ranging the hills all day with one's flock, getting to know intimately every rock and tree, and Domingo takes a real pleasure in the beauty of the landscape. He loves to amble amongst the cliffs at the top of Campuzano, and on summer nights, when Antonia can join him, to sleep beneath the stars high in the wild
meadows
of El Picacho. But there are also serious drawbacks to having to graze sheep in this way. When you're out walking with the flock, that's more or less all you can do; you can't linger at home with your partner, or read, or finish a piece of sculpting, or mend your tractor. And although Domingo and Antonia rarely complain about their lot, I know that there are days – especially when Antonia is about to leave for Holland – when they long to spend more time together.

Antonia also worries that Domingo is neglecting his considerable artistic talent. She's convinced that he is a
gifted sculptor in his own right – he is certainly the only shepherd we know who exhibits bronzes in prestigious galleries in Granada and on the coast, but he insists that the flock must come first. ‘We don't own this piece of land we live on; these sheep are the only security we have,' he explains in his gentle but firm manner. ‘Maybe people want bronze sculptures, and maybe they won't, but they'll always need lamb.'

And there is an end of it.

Although I was the one who introduced sheep into our valley, I had always assumed that I would keep a modest flock and fence them in. There are, after all, only so many sheep a farm can sustain without being turned into a dusty desert and I knew I couldn't take them grazing – I don't have the sort of fortitude to stick with it and ignore all other temptations. Had I known, though, what a Herculean task the fencing of El Valero would become, I might well have shelved my pastoral plans altogether.

Our farm sits on a steep fold of mountainside that slopes down from a lower peak of the Sierra Nevada, through wild scrubland and almond groves; from there it drops into a river valley on one side and a sheer gorge on the other. This is an awful lot of perimeter to cover, so I limited myself to fencing the riverbed edge to stop the sheep from paddling across the ford and tucking into the orchards and vegetable crops of our neighbours. Few at the time would have bothered with fences other than to keep the wild boar out of their maize or alfalfa. The land at the bottom of the farm is flat, with a decent track
running alongside to transport wire and poles, so in just a few days I managed to string together a more or less
serviceable
fence and position some appropriately Alpujarran bedsteads as gates.

To my great surprise the sheep seemed impressed by the barrier and kept away from it. Too far away, in fact, because they upped and disappeared instead over the topmost part of our land to roam across the wild scrubland at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Time and again I'd have to slog all the way up to the lower peaks, aptly known as Los Peñones Tristes – The Sad Rocks – to try and coax them down. Eventually, I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to fence the hillside as well.

Now, the hillside above our farm is not just steep, but is made up of uneven and broken rock covered with barely an inch and a half of topsoil. It would be hard to imagine a worse place to try hammering in fence posts. But I was younger then, and full of enthusiasm about creating the first sheep enclosures in the Alpujarras. So I plunged myself into the work with a will, loading five thick steel rods onto my shoulder, trudging up the projected fence-line, and dropping a post off every half dozen paces.

It was heavy, back-breaking work that became significantly harder with each load. By the end of the third day I was scrabbling up an almost perpendicular quarter-mile with the rods before I could even begin to pace out the land and drop them off. At the end of the week both my
shoulders
were bleeding and raw, and my thigh muscles were as hard as bones.

Next there was the business of making holes and hammering in the posts, more often than not into solid rock. That took me a good day, and a bit of the next
morning. Then I decided I deserved a day off, before I got started with setting up the strainers and stringing the wires.

Including the day off, it took me two full weeks to fence from the slope by the house up to the top and then along the upper border of our land. On the fifteenth day, in order to admire my handiwork, I walked up the completed side and along the top and sat down in the scrub to contemplate the long run down to the river on the south side of the farm. It was the roughest, most tormented piece of hillside I had ever seen; it made the part I had already done seem like fencing a children's playground. I looked at it long and hard, thought about it for a bit… and decided to have nothing further to do with the job. Maybe the sheep wouldn't like the look of the land, either, and steer away from that side of the farm.

When Ana found out that I had fenced just two sides of the farm and left the third side to chance, she gave me a withering look. ‘Surely', she had the temerity to suggest, ‘an unfinished ring-fence is no fence at all?' She did have a point, but when I suggested that perhaps she herself might like to get up there and finish it off, she backed down.

The very next day the sheep ambled up the hill,
keeping
close to the fenceline, which they regarded with some curiosity. When they got to the top they turned around the last fence post and continued their inspection, this time ambling downhill on the other side. Then, after fifty metres or so, they dropped straight down into a steep
barranco
, and left the farm, spending the day ranging to and fro on the heights above the Trevélez River. Of course, when they returned in the evening they couldn't find their way back in. I had succeeded in fencing them out.

 So that was the reward for my labours: a hard day
rounding
up the flock and marching them back up the
mountainside
in order to guide them back around the fence. However, over the next few weeks and months, the sheep gradually got the measure of the farm's limits and a contentment to stay within it. These days, they very rarely take it into their heads to make a sortie far into the hills, and when they do they usually find the right way back, using the now rather slack pieces of wire as a half-hearted visual prompt. They have developed what hill farmers call ‘heft', a flock's communal knowledge of its grazing boundaries.

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.