Coliba life

Mid-September 2013.  I am back in the Southern Carpathians, staying with the D family at a coliba a couple of miles to the south-east of J.  It is my third time in this place, but the first that it has rained enough during the summer to turn the pastures green.  Since my earlier visit, things have changed in the family too.  The son, Ghiţa, has married his sweetheart, Andreea; they have a baby daughter, Georgiana, who is four months old.  

Not only this but Ghiţa has become a celebrity.  He has been signed up by Vodafone for a tv advertising campaign.  Dressed in his cojoc (or sarică, another word for the long, sheepskin cloaks with the fleece turned to the outside), and his tall, black, pot hat made of stiffened lambskin, Ghiţa is shown in a series of quickly changing vignettes: sitting with a fellow shepherd by an open fire, sampling a typical but untypically well-presented supper of onions, slănină (pork belly) and mămăligă (polenta made from sweetcorn flour), dancing with sheep, and exulting in his new role as a cool, switched-on dude, with his tablet, smartphone and facebook page.  

All of which has up-ended a common perception of shepherds as numbskulls.  Ghiţa's family is a bit bemused by all this: his parents still wake at 4am to milk 700 ewes, staggering in to the cabin for a bistro breakfast at 7; at least they only have to do this twice a day since the yield has started to dry up.  (When the ewes are first separated from their lambs, in June, they have so much milk that the shepherds have to collect it three times a day.)  There are daughters to help now, too: Ionela, while she is on school holiday, Maria when she's not at home looking after the house in J, and three or four hired shepherds, who may or may not stay from one day to the next.  At least Andrei is still there; this is his fifth year of working with the Ds.  (I have a special affection for Andrei because he was such a sympathetic companion when I spent five days following Ghiţa's flock in April 2012.) 

Changes in the climate are more abrupt than I anticipated: on the Transylvanian Plateau the temperature was much higher than here.  On my first day, on a three-hour hike down to Stănişoara from one of the higher folds with Dan and Bogdan, two of the hired men and some 300 lambs, I regret not bringing better insulation.  My rainjacket is fine for city storms (from which you can usually escape), but it isn't much of a match for the chilly winds which were a distant rumour when I was on the levels but have suddenly become real.  As I discovered the next day, the hi-tec coat lets in water under the kind of steady, relentless downpours which I was warned about but didn't really believe.  My trusty Swiss hiking boots, bought over 30 years ago and as comfortable as gloves, have started to leak as well.  Never mind: it's exhilarating to be out on the mountains, 2000 metres above sea level, in scintillating light, getting whiffs of wild thyme and sage, and being part of witty, down to earth company.  And that's only the sheep. 

When she has time and is in the mood, Ghiţa's mother, Paraschiva, tells me about her life.  I learn about her grandfather, the father of Evdochia, the 'Dochie' from whom Paraschiva gets her local name, Chiva lui Dochie.  Her grandfather left her grandmother and their children for a richer woman.  At first I assume he had abandoned his peasant bride without another thought but Paraschiva says he was good to his first family, gave them money for clothes and - if I heard aright - education, too.  

Paraschiva is as sparkling and sharp as the quartz in these mountains; even when laughing - and her merriment is volcanic - her manner inclines towards asperity rather than softness.  Her tirades are terrifying, so it's a surprise when she takes me into her confidence.  It feels like a privilege too. 

She is seldom free to chat and I am curiously gratified when she asks, or rather tells, me to do chores: take care of the lambs for a couple of hours while the other shepherds are milking, fetch water from the spring that lies in a half-hidden pool a hundred yards down the slope, lift the milk cauldron from the fire and haul it with her into the barn.  Then I watch fascinated as she adds cheag, a commercial thickening agent, that sets the liquid (thicker now at the end of the season) into a jelly.  

At a rough guess the daily milk yield contains 100 kilos.  (Is this crazy?  Writing here in a hurry, I'm not sure of my facts and will have to calculate more carefully.)   In any case, it only takes 20 minutes for the large tub of milk to solidify.  The next stage is to ladle the jelly into a stainless steel trough to drain off the whey, cut it into chunks that are roughly the same size (a kilo or two in each one) and press them together with wooden slats.  

When Paraschiva is satisfied that the chunks are consistent enough, she soaks them in salty water, called saramura, and packs them into plastic tubs for transportation down to the village.  This type of sheep's cheese is called telemea, and it's said that Romanian shepherds learned the technique from Greeks who settled in Dobrogea, at the time when that magnetic coastal region was still under Ottoman Turkish rule.  (Most of it now belongs to Romania although a southern portion lies in Bulgaria.)  Telemea is basically the same thing as feta.  It's the most popular type of sheep's cheese on the Romanian market because it keeps through the winter, and for that reason sells more easily.    

It's from Paraschiva that I hear there are more transhumant flocks in J than I thought.  According to her, some 30 sheep farming families still walk their sheep north in the autumn, and back again in the spring.  They mostly go to Salaj, a county of smaller hills, lower altitude and milder weather on the north-west edge of the Transylvanian plateau.  She rattled off a few names - far fewer than 30 - which I tried to jot down.     

I want to meet the other transhumant shepherds.  Paraschiva tells me one or two of the families live quite close by; why don't I go and talk to them?  Like the Ds, most of them rent the summer farms, the colibi or stâni as the Romanians call them, from private owners: the days when J controlled the majority of izlazuri - a huge area of common land that reached to the outer boundaries of the village, are gone.  (One of the statistics often mentioned in histories of J says that this remote mountain comuna encompasses the same area as Bucharest, Romania's capital city.  I once made a note of what the measurement actually was but have long since lost it; Bucharest is probably a bit larger by now!)

Closest of all is the A family.  Iancu A, known, like all respected elderly males, as moşu, will be able to tell me about many of the other transhumant farmers.  'Can I get there in a day?' I ask, rather naively.  Paraschiva looks baffled, as if I ought to know that they live barely a brisk half-hour hike from here.  All I need is to follow one of the many cart roads that criss cross J's outlying pastures like the ribs of a leaf.  

Taking a makeshift staff to ward off unfriendly sheepdogs - and possibly wolves - I set off past Simion and Dan, looking after the lambs which are due to be sold any day now.  Simion, Ghiţa's father, looks happy in his environment, if a little wizened.  It is beautiful today: very calm under a half-blue sky.  Rolling hilltops bar the horizon.  There are clusters of tiny yellow and white pansies in the taller, dying grasses.  Wild boar excavations have scarified patches of the open grazing.  Someone has been cutting down invasive birch trees, probably taking advantage of the current EU grants to aid sustainable farming in mountain areas.  

I sing to myself as I head into a clump of fir trees whose low-swinging branches obscure the exit, and make everything dark.  My walk brings me over the brows of several hills, into the dips between, fording streams and clambering up the other side.  The going is harder than I thought; after a summer of sitting at the computer I am unfit.  Half an hour becomes 45 minutes, and I wonder if I'm going in the right direction.  There is no-one to ask and my phone has no signal.  I feel singularly alone in the vastness and solitude of the mountains.  It all looks so peaceful, so bland, so almost-Home Counties, with the curves of the hillsides swooping down into valley bottoms, the decorous woods, the smooth grass - but that's an illusion: here, potentially, be dragons.  Telling myself I'm an idiot, my heart-rate rises.  

At last I see it: the rust-coloured corrugated iron roof of a coliba, nestling in a hollow behind some wire and palisade fencing.  Inside the perimeter, the grass has been mown to Home Counties perfection.  Nobody is playing tennis.  Mrs A is tending her cows, which have the freedom of the three or four well-groomed hectares which surround her shieling.  She is, I guess, in her 70s.  As soon as she realises I'm there, Mrs A points to the gate, round the other side of the corral.  Relief: a chance to sit and talk with other human beings.  Something I've taken for granted.  

Mrs A and her daughter, Maria, invite me into a little timber shed, a narrow rectangle with a sloping roof.  It stands a few yards away from the main coliba.  It is surprisingly comfortable and cheerful inside the shed: instead of a window, a section of wall is missing from the top of one of its longer walls, and this lets in a lot of light.  There is a stove in one corner, next to a large table which is being used to prepare food.  

Apart from seeing to the cows and their calves, they have been harvesting their cabbages, hoping to salt them for winter.  But the slugs have got there first, leaving shredded stumps instead of nice fat leaves.  Disappointing.  Mrs A sighs at the waste but is not cast down for long.  She sits me on the only chair and plies me with food: bread, slanina, telemea, tomatoes, peppers, coffee, creamy chocolate cake...  Maria comes in and out, checking on her mother, the cabbages, and her six month old baby Ioana who is in the house.  

Maria is slight and wiry, with a sensitive face; physical work and winter winds have worn her lean with no extraneous flesh.  She and I have met before, at Ghiţa's wedding.  'I looked a bit different then', she jokes, pointing to her flat belly.  Both women have accepted me without reserve.  No wonder I feel so at home.  

A number of interesting objects hang from nails along the back wall.  The morning sun falls on them casting sharp shadows: a patterned cloth, turquoise plastic sheeting, enamel mugs and cooking pots, a rolling pin, a radio hanging from a wooden frame.  Set against the log walls, they look like a still life composition.  

Mr A is away down in the gully, chopping wood.  Would I like them to call him?  He is the only one who is supposed to know the other transhumant shepherds.  Of course I would, if it's not too much trouble...  

It never is: the clear atmosphere of the mountains makes its people clear and uncluttered too.  If you ask, they will say yes or no.  There is hardly ever any shilly-shallying.  (Later the same week, after I returned to J, Ileana told me that 'people here are hard, but they are sociable and communicative too.  When you live like us, sometimes never seeing another person for days on end, meeting someone is a real event.')

Maria and I walk down a steep slope into trees, climbing over fences.  Iancu, her father, is moving logs.  Like her, he is lithe and quick but when we get closer, I see with a shock how old he looks.  Would he be any better off sitting in an old folks' home?  I doubt it.  Bearded and bristly, he is at one with the timber.  Maria explains why I've come, and without complaint, her dad shoulders some branches and we clamber up the hill again.  I take photos of Iancu, who sits on a log beside the shed.  Mrs A kindly arranges a tol for me - this is a type of brown and white checker-patterned woven wool rug which shepherds from the Cindrel range of the Carpathian Mountains use as a rain coat - but I am afraid of missing anything, and squat on the ground as close as I can get to Iancu's face.  I ask him about transhumance.  His voice is fragile and hoarse with fatigue.  I can hardly make out what he says.   Dismayed, I ask if he'd mind if I make a recording.  

Iancu says that when he was growing up, in the 1930s, most of the villagers had animals, and transhumance was a normal way of life.  He had looked after sheep in Cluj county with someone called Nicolae, some forty years ago, but the words are so difficult for me to understand that I can't really make out what he's saying.  Odd bits do get through my language barrier.  

'How long have you had this land?'  At first I mishear him: 'Forty six years?'  'One hundred and forty six!' Iancu puts me right.   

I could insist on his repeating every sentence so that its meaning is clear to me, but I haven't got the heart.  Iancu is tired and this is not a good moment.  The conversation wanders.  We veer off course to the Second World War and the injustices which he and his family suffered under Ceauşescu.  He is vehement about this, and Mrs A chips in to smooth the waters, telling me, 'for some, they were better'.  I had heard, read, or assumed somehow that life was easier for the people of J and the neighbouring village of PS in the 1980s, because of their remoteness, and the advantages that some shepherds had in a system that guaranteed fixed prices for meat, milk and wool.  It is well known that some people in Marginimea Sibiului did do well: the tales of four-storey mansions with lifts, and marble-lined stables were not false.  But it seems the As were not so fortunate, and they do not agree with the opinion that is repeated often in these uncertain times that things were better for Romanians under Ceauşescu than they are now.  'They were hoţi (crooks)', says Iancu A, but he is more exercised by current inequalities, adding, 'Lady, the people who raise animals are not well paid; others (I assume he means middlemen) get the money; we are just the slaves.  What we have now is not democracy; it's daylight robbery'.  Tears fill his eyes.  

Maria shows me her baby.  She has been married before and has older children; this relatively late arrival is bonny, cheerful and cherished, surrounded by warmth and plastic toys.  Maria and her mother tell me I could stay with them overnight, but, although reluctant to leave their cheerful company, I'm also embarrassed by their generosity and decline.  At around 3pm, I take my leave, anxious to get back before dark.  I say I will send them copies of the photos, and keep in touch.  Outside the As corral, a sheep dog bounds up to me: another flock is moving ground; I see it in tight formation a quarter of a mile away, too far for me to yell.  

I keep my cool and the dog hesitates, but Mrs A sees what's happening and runs to the fence with a stick for me.  It's one that she made for herself.  'Take it, don't worry', she says when I hesitate.  'Go that way, turn right by the tree over there, it's quicker'.  She points to the left of a memorial cross, and I see a direct line across one deep valley to Stănişoara, the Ds' fold.  The growling dog has retreated.  I would have liked to look at the memorial, wondering if it's the one that Mrs B had put up after her eldest son was struck by lightening in August 2010.  But discretion wins the day, and I head off into the wide expanse of grass where there are no signposts to direct my way.  

Half way down the hill, I meet yet another flock, outridden by five hairy Carpathian sheep dogs.  I stay very still and hold out a hand.  The leader sidles up and licks it.  The others follow, half cringeing, their back ends wagging, teeth bared in ridiculous, ingratiating grins.  Two shepherds are making their steady way up towards me, one middle-aged with an open friendly face, one young, hooded and startlingly handsome.  They walk steadily forwards, poles in hand, like pilgrims.  'Where are you going?' I ask.  To Alba, says the older shepherd.  'Are they your sheep?'  'No, they belong to a priest in...' and he mentions a village in the next county that I haven't heard of.  For all I know it could be several days' walk away.  They have been summering the sheep in the Cindrel's high pastures.  'How many have you got there?'  Five hundred head.  They move off with the same deliberate, unhurried, tread, like apparitions of antiquity.

Sean again, I'm afraid

Spring transhumance officially begins on 1st April, which this year fell two weeks before Orthodox Easter.  Most farmers want to get their lambs into the shops just before Easter because it is the only time during the year that Romanians eat lamb meat in large quantities.  Ghita delayed his spring walk because there was so little grass, but he didn't need to rush back home, because he had made his own arrangements with individual meat traders.  Ghita either did not know or would not tell me where his lambs went, but he was adamant that his methods of raising them were more humane than intensive farming.  

Going straight from the farm where lambing had only just finished, to Cluj where I celebrated Easter with friends, the connections between the two were unavoidable.  In Christian imagery, the lamb is a symbol of Christ's sacrifice and images of The Lamb of God abound.   Most of us are so used to the link that we don't bat an eyelid when it comes to eating the animals, no matter how or why they have been killed.  Contemplating silent paintings and carvings of The Lamb in the surroundings of an Orthodox or Reformed church is less devastating than spending time with the creatures themselves when you know that they have only been bred for the butcher's knife.  It took two days for me to start getting fond of an individual lamb - it was Sean, whose mother had rejected him at birth - and I wasn't the only one to have favourites. 

Of course all livestock farmers have to come to terms with the fact of death and do not see a paradox between caring for their animals and killing them.  Since spending time so close to the realities of raising animals for profit, I've got a lot more time for charities like Compassion in World Farming and campaigns to reduce the amount of time during which animals are transported live to abattoirs.  In Romania, small-holders who raised animals for their own food and for limited sales in local markets used to kill them at home.  I have never witnessed this at first hand but have been told that they did not stun them first, but surely it is better to slaughter an animal quickly, rather than subject it to the torture of travelling long distances in horrific conditions?  

In Romania and Poland, horses are often transported overland to abattoirs in southern Italy.  It takes up to three days, often without rests or water and if the horses kick each other or have other accidents, they are not treated.  Ironically since the 'financial crisis' Italian meat traders have been buying fewer horses because of the high cost of fuel.  World Horse Welfare reports that the numbers of horses driven live to abattoirs has halved during the past ten years, thanks in large part to its protests.  But that still leaves some 60,000 equines a year who undergo the unnecessary ordeal of being packed into transporters and driven to their deaths in a state of panic.  The numbers of other animals must be far higher.  Would it not be better to send them away when they are already dead?  If it is all a matter of refrigeration costs, surely there would be huge long-term benefits of killing animals close to where they were raised?  Ghita told me you can taste the difference in an animal that has been kept on limited grazing and killed when it is afraid - if only for the pleasure of gourmet carnivores, the meat is not nearly as good to taste (and therefore less nutritious) and it smells of adrenalin. 

Looking for figures to back up my arguments, I found this extract, reproduced on the British Texel Sheep Society's website from a French farming magazine:  "According to an article published in the French Pâtre magazine, Romanian sheep meat production could rise by 30% by 2015, of which 90% would be exported, mostly live (Greece, Italy, Spain, Middle East). It reckons there are 3 m. people owning sheep in Romania. There are 4.5 m. ha of natural pasture. The largest farm owns 10,000 ewes."

An on-line advertisement for the Carpatic Lamb Slaughter House which opened near Bucharest in 2006 tells us:  "Romania, although it has the third European sheep livestock in size (roughly 9,000,000 sheep), it hasn't had almost any sheep meat export activity. This was due to lack of slaughtering facilities able to fully comply with the European standards. Until recently, almost all the sheep meat export was done by exporting only living animals (roughly 2,000,000 sheep/year)."

And, looking at this link - http://www.airyolland.co.uk/story_romania_summer_trip.htm - it seems that some British farmers are keen to 'improve' Romania's sheep breeds, to make them heavier in meat, so that they can export British rams.  Romanian farms have already begun to introduce German rams.  This is from High Airyolland Farm and 'the sheep farmer who likes to write stories not a writer that likes to keep sheep': "A major part of the sheep industry in Romania revolves around the production of soft cheese made from the milk from their Turcana breed of sheep.  The Turcana is the most numerous sheep in the country numbering approximately six million.  It’s a hill type which has been bred for milk production so, as you would expect, the breed has taken on the physical characteristics of a dairy animal.  Now with the traditional on-farm methods of production and manufacture coming under pressure from Brussels a lurch towards meat production has started.  The professor of animal production at a major teaching university in the town of Timisoara told us.  'We must start to improve our sheep by hybridisation'.  The professor, who has seen attempts to make improvements like this fail in the past, still sees the future of the sheep meat industry in his country to be reliant on the benefit that the vigour and greater weight gain a cross of some sort will produce.'   

That's all very well except that the fatter animals are less well suited to Romania's alpine terrain.  Being less hardy may mean in the long run that they need more specialised and veterinary care.   At the moment, as Airyolland indicates, Romanians eat relatively little lamb and mutton and the sheep are bred mainly for milk to make cheese.  Efforts are being made to turn the various cheese types into speciality brands, and for example, you can buy cas (pronounced 'cash'), telemea, branza de burduf 'from Sibiu' (meaning it's from Marginimea Sibiului) in specialised cheese shops in Bucharest's Crangasi Market.

Since the 1989 revolution, the high prices which Ceausescu's regime had granted Romanian farmers for their milk, meat and wool disappeared.  As the country plunged into uncertainty all the emphases changed, few of us realising that the medieval farming methods which many British visitors find so entrancing to look at had come about relatively recently partly as a result of the fact that many of the country's tractors disappeared 'overnight' after Ceausescu's assassination.  I have been told many times that Romania's notoriously bad roads were in fine shape during the 1970s.  Not having been there before 1993, I saw the  horse-drawn, ox-drawn, and donkey-drawn carts as age-old fixtures.

To get a better picture of how Romanian farming has developed as it has, I've found the doctoral theses of researchers like Katy Fox and Michael Pearson very helpful.   Both have studied the effects of EU legislation and Romanian government application of that legislation on subsistence and semi-subsistence farms.  Katy Fox concentrated on farming villages in two adjacent valleys in the county of Arges, in Muntenia.  Michael Pearson, being a solicitor, looked closely at the legal aspects of EU policy-making and how translation from one language to another can pervert its original writers' intentions almost beyond recognition. 

Other facets of Romania's sheep farming business have floated to the surface of my research: shortly after the 1989 coup, Middle Eastern countries began buying live Romanian lambs, Syria being one of the largest importers; after 1989, Romanian sheep farmers began selling their fleeces to Turkish truck drivers who were on their way home from western Europe.   Apparently the wool was turned into building insulation, but the washing process, carried out with detergents in Romanian rivers and streams, has polluted the water. 

But to return to Airyolland, as he - or could it be a she? - says, a lot of younger Romanian sheep farmers have moved their animals to lowland areas such as the Banat and Dobrogea where they can graze all year round without moving long distances between pastures.  What this will mean for 'traditional' Carpathian mountain farms is anybody's guess - there are EU organisations and NGOs which exist to support the small (ie subsistence and semi-subsistence) hill farms because it's accepted wisdom that extensive grazing by animals such as sheep, goats, cows and horses promotes biodiversity which in turn is good for air and water quality.  You only have to look at the species-rich hay meadows of the Pogany Havas region and others to see that for yourself.  But the relationship between farming as a business, people's need for food, and the perception of environmental dangers is like a football being kicked about by thousands of different teams.  All I can do is try to understand the different pressures - and vested interests - to continue reading and looking, talking to farmers, researchers and, God love them, officials. 

Wolves

After what has seemed like an eternity, last week I finally got out on the road with a flock of Romanian sheep.  I was in Salaj judet, also known by its traditional name of Tara Silvaniei, in the Eastern Carpathian foothills about 200 km north of the home farm. The ewes, rams and now their lambs had been over-wintering here since November.  They were about to start their six-week trek across the Transylvanian plateau back to the Cindrel Massif. 

Though it was not nearly as bad as in eastern Romania, there was a lot of snow here in January and February.  Apart from the rare treat of a shower and a change of clothes, the shepherds had lived outside day and night during most of that period.

My host was the 29 year old Ghita, a nickname for Gheorghe, and together with three hired shepherds and at least 1000 animals (including ten dogs, and six donkeys which carried our food and other equipment) I walked with him for six days at the start of his spring transhumance.

By the time I arrived on 30th March the snow had long gone; it had left no visible traces except deep cracks in the pastures, and was no help to the grass at all.  The hills were dun-coloured but during the week I was there, willows began to flower like ghosts materialising in a pale yellow mist.  Yellow, orange and red dogwood branches stood out against the brown and the apple trees were full of mistletoe.  It too was in flower; some of it glowing with acid yellow florets.  In the woods a solitary orchid known as The Monk poked beautiful pink and blue petals and toxic looking leaves above thick carpets of dead oak leaves.

The sky was often overcast but even then, the landscapes were magnificent: we wandered in large loops over land that varied from ploughed strips to burnt stubble, from marshy valley bottoms to sturdy young forests through which the sun, if it shone, made dappled shadows on the bronze coloured leaf mulch.  We walked on soil that varied from chalk white to dark chocolate with amazing shades of ochre, rust and pink in between.  No wonder they call Romania a land of milk and honey.  Pity about the guys at the top though.     

At night we slept around a campfire - or rather I did; the others took it in turns to keep watch throughout the night in case of wolves, robbers and other threats, and they got very little sleep at all.  Catnaps during the day were the only chance they had to catch up on shuteye. I began to understand the typical stance of a Romanian shepherd as he leans on his bata (staff); he may well be dozing on his feet. 

Having spent so much time trying to join a transhumant flock when the time came I wasn't ready for it.  Like a new army recruit, I had to fall in with the shepherds' routine or lump it: if I overslept my covers were yanked off me unceremoniously.  We set off at 6 or 6.30 am - later on it would be earlier - and kept walking with very short breaks until 8 or 9pm.  No breakfast, not even coffee.  A slurp of water if we had the chance.  We were lucky if we got a mid-day meal - don't expect room service on transhumance and do take hard rations!  But what did I expect: this was a serious enterprise and there was no room for slackers.  With Ghita, his sheep's needs came first, last, and much of the way in between. 

So much happened during the eight days I spent with Ghita and his crew that I haven't had time to absorb it. What follows is an extract from the end of my trip, which I was tempted to with the end of Hardy's The Return of the Native, which I read just before coming to Romania.  But Egdon Heath is a poor substitute for upland Salaj. 

After months without rain, on Friday, the fifth day of our walk, skies darkened.  It had been scorching since 10.30am but around 3pm scowling clouds gathered right overhead, promising a dramatic change.  I was grabbing a rest on a steep hillside while watching Ghita separate his flocks into two groups, so that the strongest animals would be in one lot and the weakest in another.  Catching sight of the black smudge overhead he gave a shout and did a little triumphal dance.  He was desperate for wet stuff.

Ghita wasn't disappointed.  Within 15 minutes the premature summer had vanished and we were in the midst of a tremendous storm.  We had the full works - thunder that rolled and crashed like Kudu drums and lightning that rent the heavens like tearing silk.  And with depressing speed everything I had on was drenched - it had been so hot in the morning that I'd packed my waterproofs deep in a donkey bag.  There was no time to dig them out: the shepherds couldn't take time off to dress and we had to keep moving for the sheep's sake.  And did they move.  I trudged after them in my squelching boots and the men in varying degrees of stoicism and misery, trying to help keep the seething mass of fleeces on legs to a path we could control without preventing them from getting the nutrition they wanted. Not for the first time I wondered what the hell I was doing here.  It was 9pm before Ghita found an appropriate place to camp.  We had to have water to cook with and although there was plenty falling on us, potable water wasn't easy to collect.  And still the rain came, interrupted every three or four minutes by drum rolls and flashes that forked the sky.  Some were so close they made our faces go as pink as blushing girls. 

After 'parking' the flock in a dell surrounded by oak and beech woods - squint at it, and it could have been in rural Leicestershire - all ten dogs exploded into paroxysms, and shot off into the dusk.  Iosif (40) and Andrei (22) were closest to me at the time, and they shouted one word, 'Lupi!' (Wolves).  Gripping their staffs they both disappeared in pursuit of the noise while I stayed close to the solitary oak tree we had chosen to sleep under.

The sheep, still divided into two separate groups were within 50 yards of each other, as close as they could be without getting mixed up.  They were remarkably unmoved, I thought, scanning them with my torch.  I was rewarded with the reflections of 1500 pairs of eyes fixed like green stars in the black night. But although they stayed put, their bleats showed that they were on red alert. 

Somehow, with all the alarms and excursions, someone managed to gather wood for a fire, get it going and make food in the smoke-blackened cauldron.

Wolves and rain apart, I was in turmoil over the animals' welfare.  I never knew how the men would react to the suffering of the creatures they had in their charge, fearing their cruelty but as often as not, witnessing deep and immediate compassion.  On one of his excursions away from the flock, Ghita had brought a cojoc for me because I had said I was cold at night.  Tonight the heavy sheepskin cloak was needed elsewhere: one of the ewes had lost nearly all her fleece during the winter and he carried her to the fireside in his arms, flung the cojoc around her and a plastic sheet on top of that.  For the next two hours she sat there, invisible in her tent except for her breathing which came steadily more easily; we could see she was still alive by the plastic rising and falling. 

Cries of 'wolf' continued for the next two to three hours and meanwhile it was still pouring.  Hugging the fire as though it were a lifebelt as well as the only way to dry my sodden clothes, at one point Iosif nudged my shoulder, 'Lup la deal' ('A wolf, up there on the hill.')  I searched the gloom in the direction he pointed to.  'Uita acolo, nu vezi?'  But I didn't see it.  My glasses were dripping - forget contact lenses! - and the only shape I could make out was a moving something a hundred yards away; it might have been a wolf or a figment.

The scare continued all night and I was the only with time to doss down: every few minutes the dogs broke out into another uproar and the night sky was bright with the crossbeams of four powerful head torches. They were like antiaircraft lights but no-one was going to sound an all clear.

For most of that night, Ghita was nowhere to be seen: he was rushing around, checking and rechecking the sheep. At 1.20 am while I was buried in my bivvi trying to be oblivious, Marcel, a 14 year old Rrom who had run away from school to become a shepherd, raced from the woods to the fire screaming, 'A luat un magar!' (It's taken a donkey!' It hadn't; one of the donkeys had either slipped over or was rolling.)  Ghita was furious; his stress levels were at breaking point.  That night more than any other we felt the lash of his tongue.  He was like a captain at sea in a hurricane. 

I might have dropped off peacefully after that but for the aforementioned Marcel who at 2.10 am yelled right in my ear, 'Tanti, tanti, umbla ursi!!!' ('Auntie, auntie, there are bears about!!!'). There weren't of course - we were too low down - but I didn't know that and his electrifying news got me out of bed in seconds flat. That was the last zizz I had till morning. 

No sheep were lost to wolves but during the downpour one of the ewes slipped down a steep bank into a stream and drowned.  Marcel and I found her in the morning by chance while taunting each other about wild beasts in the woods, when the rain had eased and we were off again on the quest for grass.  Ghita's anguish was palpable; he spoke little when upset, and after he and Marcel had hauled the corpse up onto the bank by its horns, and after Ghita had kicked it with his boot, wobbling her sides to see if there was really no life left, he cut off her yellow tag and turning away with his face turned down, he abandoned her for the crows, the wolves and the worms.  It meant another motherless lamb to feed and protect; another source of income gone; another living thing that he had nurtured, dead. 

My jeans, boots and socks were sopping and freezing even after the roasting they got over the camp fire; during the rest of the day I had to make a decision, if it was time to withdraw I had to leave now.  I wanted to rethink my equipment; I was afraid I was an extra responsibility; I didn't want to get ill.

A lot depended on the weather, and on how much food there was and how often.  When it was there it was wonderful: mamaliga, telemea and branza de burduf, delicious soups, and slanina all cooked in a cauldron or grilled on an open fire. Purple onions, coarse white bread, the occasional apple or piece of chocolate.   Water, when we had it, came from wells, in varying degrees of purity.  A great deal of grease and salt, no such thing as five fruit a day.  Not my usual fare, but at the time it tasted ambrosial.

Ghita can't afford to up sticks and leave though I'm sure he sometimes feels like it: he faces another four to five weeks on the road until he can reach the relative safety of his home village and enclosed fields.  Soon after that - when he has decided which of the lambs will be sold - there will be other dangers and hardships: he'll be off to the summer pastures 1000 metres above Jina in the Cindrel Massif.

 Gadina (monsters) are everywhere: as for the immediate future, he will often travel at night so as to avoid traffic in town centres; he will have to cross railway lines and main roads braving drivers who think they have priority; he will have to face angry farmers who don't want sheep on their land and keep his animals from trampling new crops.  And last but not least he'll have to rely on his hired men who may get fed up and leave him stranded. 

I stayed until my things got so soaked I could bear it no longer.  My bivvi bag, bought from eBay as almost new, ex-army Gortex and rainproof, wasn't.

It was an incredible, extraordinary experience, a huge test of human and animal endurance.  My strength - and sometimes my patience - were stretched to the limit and I never want to eat lamb again.

If I had time to sort my gear I would go back to the flock but my time has run out.  A return visit will have to wait for the autumn or next spring. Who knows if Ghita will go on the road again; if I were him I might shrink from the idea but he's made of stronger stuff, is much younger, has been doing this since he was a child and more importantly than all of the above, it's the way he makes his living. While I was with him and the other shepherds I saw how simply they live, how inadequate their gear is, how much responsibility they have.  Other people might despise shepherds for being uneducated - which some certainly are - but while I was with them, their courage, team work and stoicism struck me as little short of heroic.  They were also very courteous towards me, and it can't have been easy to nake allowances for an ignorant foreigner, let alone one from a different gender.  True, there were grumbles about pay, conditions and the rest.  There are no fixed pay rates and each man must negotiate his own fee. Iosif told me that depending on what experiience and responsibilities he has, a hired shepherd may get between 800 and 1200 lei per month.  Iosif said that a sterpar (who looks after the ewes without lambs) gets the most because he has the most responsibility and the hardest life.  Hired shepherds also receive their food, clothing and cigarettes.  The clothes include short wellie boots which most shepherds wear with obiele, thick wool wraps inside rather than socks; they may have anoraks and most have their own cojoace (which cost around 120 Euros new, and I don't know if they are provided).  Compared to my old Swiss hiking boots, their gumboots seemed woefully inadequate and the sight of Marcel lying down on the sopping earth in nothing but a thin wind-sheeter, thin slacks and a thin plastic sheet made me shudder.  But my sources tell me that Ghita pays well in comparison with other bosses.  

Ghita and his men - and his girlfriend who came to his rescue because Marcel went AWOL after I left - are still out there, dealing with the realities of shepherding life while I have retreated to a nice warm flat in Cluj.

My overall impression? A respect and liking for this courageous young man who undertakes an incredible journey twice a year so as to maintain his animals in the most natural conditions he can find, so that the milk and meat they provide will taste really good. Compassion both for him and his shepherds who were great, most of the time, and who had to put up with a lot of hardships and anxieties of their own.  As an animal lover and a carnivore my short walk with transhumant sheep threw my hypocrisy in my face.  Was it that rather than the physical discomfort which has, for the moment, driven me away?  Had Ghita not been the person he is, had the hired shepherds not been so considerate - and all of them were human, and often very funny, if not always humane - and had the landscape not been so breathtaking and the animals so charming, I might have thought the whole thing a waste of time.  But even though there were cons, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.