Sheep and soft skills

A mature and cheeky Roe

In these days, I am enjoying the fact of living in a tiny village. It is situated just behind the first row of hills facing the Mediterranean Sea (if you like geology: Tyrrhenian Ocean).

A Napoleonic fortress closes the pass. This grey old building, maintains its job as guardian: fog and snow remain inside covering the village.

Walking in the country

I am lucky enough to work from home for most of the time. To keep myself fit, I started to make, twice a day, a briskly walk. A ring reaches the hills’ top. Just a good try for glimpsing the sea, then sporting the next hours’ weather.

During these early morning errands, I made acquaintance with the shepherd, a “motorized” a nice person who introduced me to the art of dealing with those animals.

Different worlds

I had born in a city, only summers were spent in the country. This made myself stranger with the mysteries of the nature. Later, my first forays in the wild were directed to the sea.

There were little chances to meet different life’s forms. Just I and the primeval forces of the nature.

Smelling the wind, reading the sea’s colors were my text books for measuring myself.

I learned the pleasure of hard working, the conversation made of few words and many shared – unspeakable – sensations.

Seas, with their few, immense and changing values offered plenty of opportunities to start the understanding the physical world. After that, the huge amount of experiences written in different languages and focused on the same topic.

Today

In order to exploit the available time, my path includes some steep slopes. At the beginning, it was a simple choice of optimizing the exercise. Now it has begun a marvelous trip for discovering small and crowded worlds.

However, the bigger animals are still the most coveted preys. Until last month, encounters with young and unruly wild-boards (and their aggressive mothers) were quite common. Now it is the time of Roe deer, again another example of cheekiness.

Bucolic encounter

Sheep adores damsons. By chance, there is a tree in just in front of the entrance of farm where they live. There is a road to be crossed, no risk at all. People are informed of the presence by official and natural signs.

My friend, the shepherd leaves the small flock (about 20 animals) quite free in the early morning and in the evening. Few animals have a small bell; others just follow the “friends”.

This morning, I was late and the flock was on the move toward home. As soon as I passed the entrance, a bleat was chasing me. In order to avoid any confrontation, I quicken my pace; a sort of silly speed race. Faster my pace, stronger the bleat.

After a while, I turned to discover just a single sheep chasing me.

Few sweet words and some steps back toward the farm, and the young sheep found its way.
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