Days in the Pyrenees

Location:
France

france mountains pyrenees

By Haley Malm

In mountains where livestock are raised, they are kept in different pastures depending on the season. In the summer, herds fleck the mountaintops, and as snow encroaches on grazing terrain, they are forced down to the foothills. In France the seasonal trek from one pasture to the other is called la transhumance. For my sheep raising friends Catherine and Gilbert in the Pyrenees, the trip was sixty kilometers (thirty-seven miles) over the course of two days, and we started at four in the morning because the beasts got too warm in the afternoon heat. They had pooled their animals with those of eleven other farmers, making 2000 sheep to be kept in together for the summer.

The tale begins on the second and final day. We kept the sheep on the roadway, protected from traffic by a van leading and one following. The work began when we encountered vehicles in our path, which thankfully didn’t happen often on these country roads. If the car were going against the tide, the procedure was quite simple: it stopped, and the passengers watched with amusement as we flowed around them. But when a car came from behind it was tricky. We had to herd the sheep into one lane, running forward with arms and staffs outstretched in a kind of loose human chain, pushing them to the side as the car passed, while trying not to create too much panic in either sheep or driver. It was a strange sequence of events that made either the sheep or the cars seem out of place and time.

We, Catherine’s crew, worked from the tail end of the stampede, and as dawn broke we were witness to the destruction wrought by the wooly masses. Passing through villages not a window box or front garden was spared. Stalks that once held pansy or geranium blossoms stood gawky and leafless, in comical contrast with the lush spring landscape full of dewy growing things. But the early rising villagers that we encountered, poking their heads out of doorways and windows, smiled at us despite the havoc. “Bonne route!” they called.

By mid morning we finally quit the asphalt and the ascent began in earnest. We swapped sneakers for hiking boots and extracted rucksacks filled with food and water from the vans, which we abandoned at the trailhead. Sun dappled the path through spring leaves, birds sang, and the sheep got ornery in the building heat. Slowly we climbed, but steadily, ahead of the sheep now, lifting our feet in time with their clanging bells, and singing the French equivalent of ‘The Bear Went Over the Mountain”. There was a stream to be crossed, and on its banks a foot of snow, dirty and tired, like an ewe ready for the slaughterhouse. Around midday we broke through the tree line and mountain peaks surrounded us. “That’s Spain!” cried Catherine, pointing. She was at home now, in her mountains, and relaxed.

It wasn’t long before we arrived at the shepherd’s cabin, a simple, log, two-room affair. Ravenous, we feasted on roasted chicken, good charcuterie, cheese, bread, fruit, chocolate, and wine. There were easily forty people scattered on the grass around the cabin, eating, drinking, rolling cigarettes and their r’s. A particularly ancient and toothless retired shepherd named Jean was curious as to where Catherine had found the blonde girl, and when people learned I was American they were astonished and had volleys of questions for me. My French was decent, but it took all my powers of concentration to separate their words from the melody of their mountain accent and we laughed together at my struggle.

At that precise moment I thought maybe I could stay in these mountains. The shepherd would teach me the flora and fauna and how to tend the sheep, and I would start wearing suspenders and a beret. Eventually my friends and family would come to visit me after receiving letters scented with pressed flowers and altitude, and they too would fall in love with this place. But this was just one of those daydreaming moments that one encounters when traveling in beautiful places. When it was time to descend I followed the fold of humans, leaving sheep and shepherd preserved perfectly in my mind, and only partially admitting to myself that I would never be a shepherdess.