Sacred Sierra by Jason Webster Read Free Book Online Page A

hadn’t realised in all this time that it had started to rain. Clouds of humidity were rising off my overheated body as, tired but happy, I turned to look over what I’d done and head back to the house to dry off. I switched the strimmer off and crunched my way over piles of dead gorse bushes. I was still quite amazed at how the machine pulped them like this. Rather than simply cutting them down, it reduced them to virtually nothing. I looked up above the wall running by my side to the next terrace to be dealt with: I would return here the following day and continue.
    The rain was falling quite hard now and I dropped my head to protect my eyes: the wind was blowing up and starting to whip the droplets into strange whorls which flew into my face. For a moment I lost my sense of direction as I turned my head away from the rain: if I could just get to the shelter of the nearest pine trees I would be all right.
    But suddenly my heart was in my mouth – the earth gave way beneath my feet and I was falling. Before I knew what had happened, I landed with a hard crack on my side, the strimmer crashing on top of me. I gave a low groan, the air kicked from my lungs. The helmet, still on my head, had bashed against a stone; the sound rang inside my brain like a bell. In the split second that followed I gave thanks I was still wearing it and that the strimmer blades, now resting gently against my shins, were mercilessly motionless.
    I picked myself up with a cough, quickly checking that everything was working. I was lucky to have got away with nothing worse than a shock. Looking up against the rain I could see that the dry-stone wall holding up the terrace I had been walking on had simply crumbled away, and pieces of it were now lying around me in a pile. The gap in the tract of land I had just cleared seemed to stare defiantly: one minute the terrace had been there, and now it was gone, its remains lying in a heap of rubble around my feet.
    With a sigh I trudged off back in the direction of the house, sore and getting wetter by the moment. The nagging thought in the back of my mind was that the very gorse bushes I’d been so happily chopping down had actually been holding the terrace up in place. And now, with the rain, in a moment a huge chunk of it had been washed away. At the very least it looked as though I was going to have to add dry-stone walling to the increasing list of skills I had to master if I was going to manage the land with any degree of success. Steps forward and steps back. I pushed it all from my mind, thoughts of hot showers and a cold beer leading me home.
    *
    Arcadio is coming round more regularly, popping over for an hour or so every few days. We are slowly getting used to each other, and he’s beginning to teach me the names of some of the trees here. He only knows them in Valencian, so I have to look up the Castilian and English names once he’s gone (and sometimes the Latin, while I’m at it). Slowly, very slowly, I feel the land is becoming less of a nameless, mysterious wilderness. But as is so often the case, the more I pick up, the more I realise how much there is to learn; knowledge, when it comes, only does so in small, less than satisfactory, bursts. I have bought a few books on plants and wildlife to help me along, but I find I can pick up a huge amount just by wandering around with Arcadio for half an hour. The mountainside is home to several types of oak tree, it appears: the ordinary type, such as the one overhanging the patio, and holm oaks, or holly oaks, which are evergreen and very well suited to the Mediterranean climate. They have small, round, prickly leaves, like holly, and were used for making ships, according to Arcadio. I told him I’m interested in planting trees, in trying to recover something of the forests that grew here before the fire. He mentioned the pine trees that had previously covered these hillsides.
    ‘But planting more pines is like planting matches,’ he said.