translated from the Italian by Marla Moffa and Oonagh Stransky

from Sentieri sotto la neve (Einaudi, 1998)

At the end of September,” an old shepherd used to say to me, “the mountain up high becomes wild and inhospitable. The frost burns away any grass left from the sheep’s grazing, and the chamois and roe deer descend to places by the woods where there’s still vegetation.” This was the time of year I most longed for: I’d climb the mountain to hunt for grouse, white partridge, and alpine hare. Last year, illness stopped me from going, and this year, for the first time in almost fifty years, I didn’t renew my hunting permit or my membership at the alpine preserve. And not because my passion has waned or for some late-in-life change of heart, but due to the laws of nature. 

Many things have changed, not just in my body but in the mountain habitat and in the behavior of humankind.

A dwindling in logging and the use of mountain pine, a notable reduction in herding, and the abandonment of mountain huts at high altitudes or in remote places have mutated the mountain’s appearance and influenced wild animals to a remarkable degree: roe deer have multiplied and now inhabit unfamiliar areas, chamois have reclaimed territories that they’d abandoned almost a century ago, deer are back and with them the occasional lynx, fox are on the rise, ruffed grouse are scarce, and rock partridges have almost completely disappeared. As for the wolves, only time will tell. 

Climate change alone is not responsible for affecting wildlife. Studies and international conferences confirm that certain species are prone to unexplainable periods of decline and recovery. To these phenomena, I believe we need to account for an “unnatural” anthropic presence. The shepherd, the hut keeper, the woodcutter, and the hunter coexisted in harmony, and their collective gathering of grasses, timber, and game had its own kind of balance; pastures and pine woods were not razed, game was not wiped out. If that had happened, then all grazing, logging, and hunting would have quickly come to an end. It’s a simple rule.

But it has also been noted that in areas where herbivores were left to reproduce freely without being hunted or captured, epizootic diseases appeared, as in Val Genova (Trentino), where people stopped hunting and, in a short span of time, hundreds of chamois died of papillomatosis. Similarly, terrible damage can occur to forests where the population of deer (in La Mandria and Salbertrand) or fallow deer (in San Rossore) are not controlled. In short, when there’s an overpopulation, there’s less food available to herbivores; this results in a deterioration of pastures and a lower quality of life for the animals, causing them to be less resistant to diseases, which in turn spread with greater ease and speed. Allowing animals to graze to excess can cause mass deaths. 

This is what I was thinking about the other day when—before the snow would impede it—I decided to go climbing in my mountains, in my season, as I do every year. The first snows of mid-October had turned into rain even at relatively high altitudes. Snow was only visible on the peaks, chutes, and ledges over three thousand meters. What silence! Not even an airplane in sight. I was with my son: we had left our car in the valley and set off from an old military road built in 1908 to transport two canons to Bocchetta di Portule.

The ground was frozen and hard—the shady areas were still covered with hoarfrost—and we proceeded in silence. My walking stick (Bergstock, not Alpenstock!, my son reminded me, bringing back memories of Walter Kumer, my Viennese friend and enthusiast of Italian literature who would now be more than one hundred years old) kept us company as we walked and remembered.

We arrived at a hut where I had once found refuge in the heart of winter. I was still a boy and had run away from home after receiving what I thought was an undeserved slap. It was probably twenty degrees below zero that night, and the wind and snow lashed the roof and weaseled their way through the beams. I lit a fire but could not sleep; the scant firewood finished quickly so I burned the bench and table to avoid freezing to death. In the dim light of that fire, I read Conrad’s Typhoon, which I had brought with me in my backpack. At dawn, the fire went out. That was the year of the great polar lights, and when the following evening while watching a hockey game I saw the northern skies ablaze, I thought I was guilty of setting fire to the hut and with it the woods in the valley behind the mountains. 

Each step of the way held a memory: here a thunderstorm caught me by surprise, there I caught a grouse; under those larches, I stopped one day to rest with friends who are now gone; by those boulders above the pastures, I used to pick edelweiss for my sweethearts. And up there, on that spur, out of curiosity I once climbed a rope ladder and found myself in the remains of a shack that had probably been the refuge of an Austrian sniper or lookout. Inside I found a table, a bench, a cast-iron blue-enamel pot (the kind that used to be made in Czechoslovakia), telephone wires, a spoon, an observation peephole, and, in a recess in the rocks, some packs of cartridges for a Mauser. Looking through the peephole, I could see far and away: a part of my town and the neighborhoods south of it. 

Further ahead, in a lonely and sheltered hollow, amid the vast pastures and surrounded by the silent mountains that waited for snow to fall, was the hut where I spent my first vacation in the summer of 1953, after my first book had been published. I was hosted by an elementary school friend who had a lease on the hut, which was owned by the town council.

Early morning, at sunrise, I would go and look in the most inconceivable places for my shepherd friends who were out with their herds: they led the lambs and ewes to less rugged areas, the adult sheep, rams, and goats toward rougher ones. I asked them to explain their practices of grazing and transhumance, and to tell me ancient stories. They asked me to tell them war stories, both old and recent. Around ten I’d head back to the dairy to prepare food for the various hut keepers: grilled mutton, or rice and milk, or still-warm cheese fried in butter, or head cheese on the skillet, sometimes pasta with butter, but always and forever, polenta. Afterwards, we’d lie down on the pine fronds and sleep a good hour. In the afternoon, I’d make some notes in a journal or go for a hike in the mountains. And at night, we’d sit around the fire, smoking our strong shag tobacco, telling each other stories and anecdotes about life.

Barba Matío was the eldest. He wasn’t married and had always been a shepherd and cattle driver. He never cursed, spoke calmly and wisely, and was known to enjoy a pipeful of local tobacco in his cutty, which was almost as old as he. During the Great War he had been recalled to the Val Brenta battalion, the one for older folk. He had forgotten his age and never knew his father, but his goodness and discretion were evident in each and every one of his gestures. I realized just how much of an apprehensive and concerned soul he was the evening the boy who tended the calves did not return for dinner. At a certain point, we went out to look for him. Perhaps he had lost his way in the pine forest, or maybe the fog had confused his sense of direction, or he could have fallen into a ravine. Four of us went looking for him in different directions, and not all of us had a lantern or electric torch. Barba Matío anxiously waited for us on the doorstep, listening to the signals of night. 

I was the one who found the boy. After calling his name in the direction of Busa della Roia, I heard a frail reply. He was sitting on a boulder, in shock, as if paralyzed. I revived him, then helped him to his feet. I shouted toward the dairy that I had found him. The falling darkness, the rising fog, the shadows of the pine trees, and to an even greater degree the stories he had heard around the fire, triggered an emotional surge in him. Once on that boulder, he gave up facing the mountain at night, laden as it was with gloomy and dramatic stories of shepherds, hunters, soldiers, woodcutters, and smugglers.

I returned to town before the feast of the Assumption. I smelled of smoke, resin, manure, whey, and wild animals; my wife made me undress in the hallway. 

Oh, but how I used to walk back then! Neither hills, nor rock face, nor cliff could strike fear in me, so nimble and agile was my step.

There, up there, above that steep slope, I once killed a beautiful grouse that I gave as a gift to Elio Vittorini. And higher still, white partridges, which were served in the Euganean villa of Signora Niní to the likes of Diego Valeri, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Tristan Tzara. They too, that evening, must have sat around a fire of old vines, telling stories and anecdotes about life.

Up there, the mountain is silent and deserted now. No one is walking along the mule path that the Austrians built to reach Ortigara, where one day I picked up the Bergstock iron spike that sits on my bookshelf. The snow that has fallen heavily over the past few days has erased the shepherds’ paths, the lumbermen’s yards, the hunters’ adventures, and the trenches of the Great War. And under that snow, my memories live on. ■

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