To the Island

I’ve looked at the island from the first day we arrived here, set like a dark stone in a band of glittering blue water. It seems to float within reasonable reach, catching the eye with ease when you walk along the shore, but it’s remained steadfastly remote all that time. The island of Golem Grad is anchored to another country, over the invisible line in the lake that forms the border with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and the consequent difficulty in getting to it has lent it a magnetic and dreamlike cast.

Islands can alter us; unmoor us from the mainland of our minds. A span of shimmering spring water separates me from the bold, uninhabited rock, and as we stream away from shore I start to feel that the crossing is where any island begins. The water skimming past is a prelude, like a door swinging wide onto an unseen room. The air riffles through my hair; cool on my skin. A few pelicans glide away from us, sheering the lake into rivulets of silver. The island nears, looms large over the water, distinct in its mood to the rest of the basin.

Stepping ashore, I see a venomous horned viper slither between rocks, its zigzagged tail disappearing like the last of a rope being hauled up into a boat. It’s the first sign, in a place known as the island of snakes, that we’ve entered a different order of experience. White blossom loosens its perfume into the air, so that it hovers over the island like the dust of winter rugs shaken out in a spring clean. The scent is so dense that it seems the very air is forged from the fragrance, sweet and impossible to ignore, like the pressing attentions of a youthful affair. Alpine swifts swirl and scream overhead, circling always above us, as if each bird were a balloon that had been tethered to the island. Nightingale song swells from deep in the trees, an excited flight of sound, a musical scale to be climbed into air. The island quivers with a ceaseless, creaturely murmur; it’s the sound of an arriving season, and all the pulse and hum of wild profusion.

There is a dazzling warmth about us, the island being the beneficiary of a micro-climate peculiar to its shores. Such heat and humidity leads to a startlingly lush surface: the ancient junipers clad in an extravagant wardrobe of lichens and mosses; the forest floor an emerald weave. Euphorbia spokes from the coast like a protective green moat and birds nest across the island in the dense shroud of trees. Golem Grad is small, though, measuring merely two square kilometres in total. Yet it supports an astonishing wealth of wildlife for such a miniature realm; its tally of certain species unfathomable at first glance: 1,700 Hermann’s tortoises; 1,200 pairs of nesting cormorants; 120 horned vipers; and more than 10,000 dice snakes. Wherever you walk you are in the presence of a snake, somewhere close by, a slithering or sunning shape that’s laid claim to the island.

The wild has made this island its world, but like most places in the region it’s also traced by an antique human history, recording more than two millennia of tenure. Centuries worth of ruins break the surface of a sea of moss. Relict churches and monasteries cling on in the absence of parishioners, and the walls of a Roman villa and cistern dating from the 5^th century hold fast to this solitary citadel of stone. The rocky white coast is festooned by a blaze of purple and yellow blooms, where a cross was chiselled above the water line long ago. All the sunlight of a wakening spring bathes the water and stones, until the refracted, glimmering light touches even the shade.

Sea-dazzle sparkles off the spray of the boat. The air is thick with the dark forms of cormorants launching from the canopy of the trees as the boatman picks up speed. We slide through the still and graceful lake, moving out of the sway of the island, and I wonder how it would have felt to have lived there over the centuries, like the Roman owners of the villa or the monks kneeling at prayer, peering out at the mainland as though that were an island. As if the place apart was over there, the strange, unvisited shore in the distance. As the boat crosses the blue beneath a tracery of whirling birds, I sense that each of us harbours an island inside, whether real or in the mind, and we leave this one behind with the brimming light, to its saints and swifts and snakes.

With many thanks to Oliver Avramoski and Dejan Dimidjijevski from the Galicica National Park, of which Golem Grad is a part, for their gracious hospitality in showing us around, and their willingness to share their intimate knowledge of this remarkable island. 

Across the Sky

In the pale light of a February morning, a meteor flared unforeseen across the Russian sky. The fireball burned through the cloudless blue, weeping a contrail of smoke in its wake, before eventually crashing into the Ural Mountains and leaving hundreds of people injured by shattered glass from its shockwave. Recorded on myriad photographs and video clips instantly uploaded to the ether, the sharp, blinding light of the meteor’s trajectory was made visible around the world. The footage is startling, like seeing a rocket in the moments before its explosive, murderous impact, or some returning space vessel disintegrating upon re-entry. But those comparisons are of our world, our creations. Some footage revealed the winter morning being swept aside by blazing light, as if the sun had passed out of eclipse, or a door had suddenly swung open onto summer. Soaring over the city of Chelyabinsk at a speed of thirty kilometres a second, that incandescent rock brought us, if only for a moment, into touch with a universe beyond our usual experience, the vast and unfathomable space we sit inside. It was a visitor from afar.

Prespa is still shrouded in winter. Frost and snow clad the high hills and water wends through a palisade of icicles as it plunges downstream. Signs of the season’s turning are few and far between, and yet Dalmatian pelicans have been returning to their nesting sites on the lakes since January. Migrating from Turkey, the Middle East and other parts of Greece, the birds continually astound me by timing their arrival with falling snow, bitter mountain winds and a possibly frozen lake. They endure the ice and cold with commendable constancy, always homing in on the islands of reeds at the heart of the wetland before any other species. Over the years I’ve come to see the pelicans as having an inseparable connection to the lakes, gliding across the still waters or shoaling in the hazy summer light. They seem made for this life, floating in the blue bowl of the basin with an elegant and native ease, a part of the watery weave that holds this place together.

Dalmatian pelicans, by Steve Mills

Last summer, however, altered my perspective on their world. As wind turbines are being staked on the high surrounding mountains, our monitoring work consists of charting the passage of birds across the sky, trying to determine to what extent their existence is imperiled by the whirling white blades. Along with their migratory journeys, the Prespa pelicans – both Dalmatian and white – often travel great distances throughout the breeding season to feed in other wetlands before returning over the staggered peaks. Standing in mountain meadows, knee-deep in flaxen grasses swept slantwise by wind, I watched pelicans parade all summer. I would see them skim low over the adjacent plain, glide across the fields and scattered houses like stones sent sliding across a frozen pond until they reached the edge of the mountains. And then they would climb.

White pelican, by Steve Mills

As sunlight poured from the hot summer skies, I timed the rise of the white birds, their ancient, circling patience carrying them higher into the blue. Like many other large-winged birds, pelicans require thermals to carry them the tremendous distances they travel. I counted off the minutes as they rose like it was a choreographed dance, until I could barely see the birds at all. Just dim spots, flecks of paint on the high ceiling of a vault. From that cradle of warm air high above the earth they let go of the harness, beginning their long descending glide to the gleaming lakes beyond the peaks, like meteors stealing across the sky.

It was near midnight one summer when I saw a meteor cross the Prespa sky. The scent of night flowers had floated up like a net to catch pollinating moths. Fireflies sent their secret codes pulsing through the dark while cricket song swelled into a chorus from the grasses. I was sitting in the garden with friends, sharing stories and reminiscences, talking in the open and intimate way of long acquaintance, when the black skin of the sky suddenly split open, unzipped by a line of fire above the mountains. As the meteor sailed overhead our eyes lifted as one, like we were honouring the sky gods of old. The hurtling flame pulled a chariot of smoke across the black expanse, blazing over the lakes where pelicans huddled over young on their summer nests. We peered into the distance until the flickering light finally grew small and dim in our eyes. Wisps of smoke hung like banners over the night, and for a moment or two we were sealed inside a spell, a deep silence cast down from above, until we broke into giddy laughter. There are no words in any language to express the sheer depths of awe – sometimes laughter is all we have in the midst of such mystery.

Dalmatian pelican, by Steve Mills

The mountains are cloaked with cold, and the return of the pelicans means we’re monitoring them from the ridge again. But a day after the Russian meteor filled the flat sky of our screens we arrived to find our vantage point hazed by winter cloud. Our breaths pillowed ahead of us with each step. Hoping for a better view farther along, we climbed through a beech forest deep with drifted snow, each twig and branch sealed in the glass of a hoar frost. We’d entered a crystal mountain palace, an ice-world veiled in mist. Cloud sifted across the slopes, and all about us the silence and snow ensnared us.

It’s not easy remembering to look up. Standing amidst cloud and snow brought home to me the forgetful tendencies of the eyes. Our lives are lived primarily on the ground, in the here and now of our immediate concerns and surrounds. We’re so used to keeping our eyes ahead of us, focused on the next step – on work and worries, our daily routines – that whatever glimmers about the edges, or passes high above, can easily slip unnoticed through our days. As far as the human mind can fathom, what arches above the clouds is virtually endless, a universe of other worlds and stars and galaxies beyond reach. Comparatively few things pass into the narrow orbit of our experience, the tiny span of our sentient presence on this planet, and yet we’re part of something indescribably vaster all the time.

Dalmatian pelican, by Steve Mills

Wrapped in the white shroud of the clouds, I found myself wondering whether pelicans were passing above us on their way to the lakes, beating snow from their feathers or effortlessly sailing. I thought about them following their ancient, millennial trajectories high across the granite peaks, or circling up into the deep summer blue like the sky was another sea, where they floated with the same elegant ease. These passing travellers are reminders: to be open to faint glimmers that appear in the distance; to look up and let wonder lift me from the surface of the earth; to let go and lean into the sky.

Dalmatian pelican, by Steve Mills

It’s a great pleasure to be able to feature some of the beautiful pelican images of Steve Mills with this Notes from Near and Far post. Steve is the winner of the 2011 Veolia Wildlife Photographer of the Year Award in the Bird Behaviour category for this stunning image of a merlin and a snipe. Together with his wife, Hilary Koll, Steve runs BirdWING, a tremendous non-profit organisation which aims to raise awareness of birds and work on behalf of their habitats in northern Greece. There’s plenty of information on their website, and if you’re interested in getting involved or receiving an occasional email newsletter with updates about their conservation work and details of the birds of Greece there’s a place to subscribe on the homepage. The photos in this post can be enlarged by clicking on them.

Embers

To listen to an audio version of ‘Embers’ please press the play button 

They appear out of the silence and snow without sound, without any sign of foretelling that I can decipher. Arriving as if by magic, they flare from reefs of pale and brittle reeds like they’d been pulled from a hat, or lance over the furrows and fields in a sudden, windswept whirl. The hen harriers ghost into view like fireflies at night, unseen until they glow so close. These winter months are marked by the wild signature of their flights. Breeding mostly in the far north of Europe, these raptors migrate from the bogs and taiga of their nesting grounds through the autumn to settle in the south until spring. Some winters we’ll see only a few take up the offer of tenure around the wetlands, patrolling the perimeter like lone sentries, but in other years, when fierce, chilling weather pushes the birds farther south, many more will come hurtling out of the cold skies to bracelet the lakes on the wing. But no matter how many pass the season in our midst, they always appear as if out of nowhere, falling out of the silence and snow, out of the weightless, misted air which settles like breath on a windowpane. As if these birds were shaped and gifted out of nothing.

The male hen harrier, or northern harrier as he’s known in North America, entrances me. As much as I marvel at the female that sweeps brown and tawny over the snows, parading the white ring that’s been thrown like a horseshoe around her tail, it’s her counterpart that I await with the excitement of a homecoming. Seeing one waver at the edge of the winter lake, pearl-white and grey with black fingers at the tip of his wings, pulls me deep into a pool of mystery. It took me some years to unravel my fascination for this particular bird, and when I finally did it was after waking to snow that fell densely across the valley. A low smouldering cloud lay draped across the mountains, pillowed above the village. Snow was banked against the dark stone like a frozen lean-to. The fields and slopes spread white into the distance, edged with pewter mist. The day carried the narrowest possible range of colour tones, like a sparse and simple etching. Dark trees were pinned to the bleached mountain ridges, grey haze clouded the sky, and chimney smoke corkscrewed though the drifting snow. They were the common tones of a mountain winter – white, black and grey – and it occurred to me then that the male hen harrier had made them his own. Ghosting over the snowfields strung with skeletal dark trees, the hen harrier appears as an aerial interpretation of the season, a spectral reflection, an amulet worn over the year’s cold, hibernal hours.

But seeing hen harriers haunt the white meadows reminds me that winter is alive, as well. Even amidst snow there are fires, sheltered flames kindled and coaxed from the frozen land, the murmurs of unseen sentience below the surface, locked up in the slowed and shallow breaths of hibernating butterflies and frogs, lizards and fish, all settled beneath or around us as we traverse the stark winter world. Black woodpeckers lower themselves from the high crystal forests to the relative shelter of the valley, their long, haunting cries curling through the chill air like smoke from the village chimneys. A dipper sculls through snow along the river. Moss fills with water to burst like a gleaming emerald meadow, secret lush crops in the cold, fallow fields. I follow the path of a bear leading her cub through the snow, chart the course of their dark foragings over stream and under bough, down the granite track that winds like a river towards the lake. A flock of goldcrests, one of the tiniest birds in Europe, takes up residence for a while in three stunted pines at the foot of the garden, their faint calls like long-forgotten school friends come back to whisper at the back of class. Whatever earthly presence is alive through winter is transfigured, made small by the vast silence of the season or concealed by dormancy, but it’s still there, glowing faintly as embers, or a light far out to sea.

On cloudless mornings after storms there’s a brief, but brilliant, span of time when the snow, a revelation of night’s creaturely happenings, is fired by the rising sun. It clips the mountains at such an angle that every crystal, unique in its tumbling and settled shape, burns with a glittering intensity, a cupped flame inside each one. I watch a harrier gleam like snowlight through the air. It could be winter itself that’s on the move, the white and grey ghost passing though, the ice and snow set to buckle and shift beneath it when it leaves for the north. I listen as the bird sweeps silent over a stone-walled meadow, over the blazing shards of snow, and hear the crackling of the fire to come.

Glimpsed, In Passing: 2012

November rains lashed the valley, slanting from first light across the withered mountain folds, sinking the garden until a few last salads floated like weeds cast up by the sea. As I worked at my desk the woodstove clicked and hummed behind me, sometimes hissing at a wet seam in the beech or releasing smoke like a bloom of grey pollen into the room when a wild wind ransacked the chimney. No matter how many times I lifted my eyes to look out the window the sky was always an unfathomable knot of clouds, lowered like a curtain over the valley. Only a solitary crow occasionally stole across its surface, a dark line etched like charcoal on paper.

The ceaseless thrum of rain quietened to a murmur towards the end of day. The sky above the village had splintered and cracked open, like the two halves of a shell. I looked up from my desk to see a kernel of light nested inside. Grabbing my camera, I raced out the door, squelching through the soaked garden to climb onto a stone wall at the side of our house. With a last surge before dusk, sunlight had found an opening, rising like a river through the clouds to flood whatever was left of the day. Rainbows vaulted the valley, two arched bridges shaped by water and light, each droplet given a place in the spectrum, annointed by the leaving sun. I could have been standing inside a palace of light, the glimmering stars in the far heavens inscribed on the ceiling.

Rain fell steadily, spattering the lens. A fleeting orange flare was sent up by the sun that fizzled and fell behind the mountains. As unexpectedly as it came, the glowing cascade began to fade. The halves of the shell were brought together again, sealing the light inside. Colour drained from the sky, vanishing like water into cracked earth. The rainbows dimmed like worn glitter, like all the stars you could ever imagine, falling as one across the night, dissolving into dark at their eventual end. I let the rain sweep over me, watching it all go – all the mystery of bent and reflected light that gave way to the dying day, let go like a sigh at the edge of sleep, at the rim of the lit world. All the mystery to be found in a moment, glimpsed, in passing, through a window in the rain.

This last post of the year borrows from the writer V.S. Pritchett, who once described the short story as “something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.” Earlier uses of his idea can be read for 2010 and 2011. I’d like to take this opportunity at the end of the year to thank the readers of Notes from Near and Far for your continued interest. I’m extremely grateful for the conversations and connections that have been made, for the sense of shared community. And I’m deeply honoured by the time you’ve given to reading these posts, for the thoughtful attention and expansion of ideas in the comments. With the last days of the year upon us, my very best wishes to all for a creative, inspiring and joyful 2013, wherever you may be.

The Shape of a Scent

I stand in the midst of the forest, beneath a shower of leaves. It’s as though a treasure chest has been tipped from the sky, spilling its glittering riches. The woodland surface is woven in a pattern of copper and gold, stitched with the sharp shadows of trees. Sunlight pours into the hollows as if they were bowls, filling them until they brim over, pooling about the woods in a deep and mellow glow. I look up into the canopy and it could be a chandelier of lit leaves, swaying from the ceiling with a breeze.

Mistle thrushes rattle through the high branches and a pair of delicate treecreepers climb adjacent trunks, racing each other to their tips. A deep silence takes their place when they’re gone. This solitude of mosses and frayed lichens, of beeches rising high into the sky and fungi fingering slowly through the earth, calls me back every autumn, beckons me from my desk to climb up into its arms and be held there. To be a part of the relinquishing, the letting go. To see the forest shed leaves like flakes of old paint – though a few of them will hang on, stubborn and tenacious as memories, to see out a cold and snowy season alone on the trees.

I breathe in the wild autumn riches. All the smells of the wet and fallen leaves rise like mist off a lake, mingled with the rain-soaked earth, rotting wood slumped in a dell, a glade of dying ferns. They have such a particular and knowable aroma, these autumn woods. A persuasive odour that carries a distinct and melancholy edge. I’m reminded of other autumns by their scent, of heaped leaves and long smoky walks, a collection of unrelated impressions colliding into one. But scent has the capacity to call up stronger, more specific, associations as well.

Whenever I see them, I stop to smell roses, leaning forward to take in all that they hold. And with the first fragrant air that passes into me I’m in a garden with my grandfather. He’s risen from his chair in the house, where he would sit with a newspaper and magnifying glass, eventually pencilling a mysterious x on a grainy image of footballers playing without a ball. I don’t know if he ever won any of the ‘Spot the Ball’ competitions he used to mail in, having taken his time to judge from the position and angle of the players on the pitch the exact place he expected the invisible ball should be, but that didn’t stop him from trying, week after week, to divine the presence of an imperceptible thing. He taps ash from his pipe and shuffles to the garden, where the roses he’s tended and nurtured for years are in bloom, all compressed by the brief English summer into a wild explosion of scent. I stand beside him, and while cars and buses roll past on the busy road, the lingering scent of roses hangs heavy in the air, as invisible and elusive as the ball suspended somewhere in the photograph that my grandfather has folded and tucked in the wing of his arm.

Scents can trigger specific memories, to people and places, moments and events. They can elaborate a complex and immediate shape to distant happenings, sometimes long forgotten and deeply buried. The olfactory bulb, the structure responsible for the perception of odours, is a component of the limbic system, an area of the brain closely associated with memory and feeling. Along with having access to the amygdala, the brain structure which processes emotions, the olfactory bulb is also connected to the hippocampus which, in part, is concerned with associative learning, and crucial to the encoding of memories. In a sense, the olfactory bulb – our immediate cognitive connection to the world of scent – is nested beside the very structures that form the heart of our remembering. Our brains forge a link between a scent and the experience of it, often when we first encounter a particular aroma, a response which becomes conditioned and twined forever in our minds. Which is why so many of our most compelling scent memories return us to our childhoods.

I imagine this neural system as a map, traced with the routes of our remembering. It’s crisscrossed with rough tracks and roads that fan out across the past, the wild byways and overgrown lanes that led us here out of youth. We journey along these paths, spun backwards like a wheel over the accumulated tracery of our time on this planet. Scents bestowing memories; paths bringing our lives back to us.

When I breathe in a salt sea I’m suddenly on a shore with my uncle. Not the smooth and seductive coasts of the Mediterranean, whose scents pull other memories in nets from the depths, but the heaving North Sea, where the smells of seaweed and bladderwrack blend with the raw and briny wash. My brother and I are young, and back from Canada on summer holidays in the English port town where I was born. Uncle Harry has taken us crabbing, searching the vast archipelago of rocks at low tide. In the salt pools brim miniature marine worlds. Creatures caught out by the retreating sea find solace in these pockets of water left behind. There they bide their time, stowing away in remnant shelters to await the returning, rising rush.

We riddle the crabs from dark crevices with fire pokers, unveil them beneath a bloom of green seaweed, scooping them in gloved hands to drop in a bucket where they cluster and crowd at the bottom. Steadily our bucket grows heavier, and my brother and I haul it over the slippery rocks, led on through this exciting, watery world by our uncle, adding to our doomed hoard as we go. Ahead of us, past the next bank of barnacled rocks, we see a shark splayed grey on the sand. It’s still young, only a few feet in length, and bruised purple and blue about its head. Washed up and pounded by the sea against stone; the same sea that sustained it. I watch my Uncle Harry lower a hand to the shark’s side. He touches the creature with only a thumb and three fingers, just like my grandfather when he shows me the roses, both having lost their little fingers in accidents at work, so there’s just a nub at the edge of their hands. I touch the sleek grey skin after him, mimicking what he does, and stare into the shark’s bloody eye.

I’m back in the forest, beneath a sky of leaves. They tumble and float like our experiences, some settling within reach, others rising on a wind to be carried off and never seen again. Summer’s green and unfolding promise is gathered about me in deep reefs, all faded and fallen. I’m reminded of other autumns while I’m here, whole seasons of scattered moments like these leaves in a beech wood, the myriad subtle notes that compose a life. We never know when any of them will be carried with us, catching a ride in an upturned cuff or on the bottom of a boot, taken unknowingly along on one of those paths that make up a map of remembered things. Years may pass before we find that leaf again, still clinging to our clothes. Only with time can we learn what memory will sift from these moments.

There are a few changes around here that some of you may be aware of. And for those who aren’t, just to let you know that I’ve changed the Notes from Near and Far URL address back to its original (julianhoffman.wordpress.com) if you’d like to update your bookmarks or blog links. The other address, julian-hoffman.com, is now being used for my new website, Words, Images, which I’ve recently put together. Along with a bit more information about my book, The Small Heart of Things, due out next year, there are some audio recordings and a gallery of landscape and wildlife images. There’s also a place to sign up for a newsletter for updates on the book as it makes its way towards publication. Please let me know if there’s anything else you’d like to see there. Thanks for reading!

A Last Dance

These days are cast like a spell, stretched taut and seamless across two seasons. Spun from sunlight and warm winds, they’re days with bright promise still inside them, nested there like pearls. The high vaulting sky might be the sea, as if by leaping into it you could float clear across the blue. Sailing without winds or wing. The days linger like lovers, lost in their slow unfolding.

Swallows skim south over the garden, called back to a season that’s just starting on a far continent, with mountains, sea and desert still ahead. A breeze carries seeds to a new beginning, and animals gather the wild harvest. We’re at the edge of the turning world, a part of the spinning but not yet ready to move on while the lake and hillsides are aglow. When light floods the valley we’re swept up in its spill, like tumbleweed in a wind. There’s no way of knowing when these days will end, and I have no memory of them ever beginning. It’s as though they’ve been with us all along, ancient and immutable. Radiance that’s been summoned to stay.

I climb through a net of pale grasses where lizards scatter across stones. Butterflies huddle on the rim of fading flowers, their wings on the very cusp as well, cracked and rubbed thin by lives scalded with sun. A warm wind finds my skin. I settle back on the slope to hear sheep bells sifting through the valley, a sweet meandering path carved from air. The stones are hot against my back, like they’ve hoarded a whole season inside. I listen to windsong in the grasses, a chorus of whistling stems that echo like the notes of gone summers, those that lingered and glimmered when we were young. Summers unfurling like a prairie against the sky, vast and burnished and without any end we could imagine. Summers that flooded us to the bone.

Three hawks circle the tawny ridge, their sharp calls falling like water. I watch them climb one after the other on a ladder of air being drawn up by the sun. Spiralling higher and higher, they look like dark spots on the surface of our star until the sky finally empties again. There’s just the deep blue sea that umbrellas me, and the kind of silence you hear inside water. It’s a rare and intimate quiet, enclosing and still. The insect hymn has finished, put back on a shelf like a musical box. Crops are cut and curing in the fields, and the roads are dusty and bare until harvest. Even the leaves that will soon rattle and drop are still stitched to trees, hanging on in a glow of amber and gold to see this blaze to its end. It’s the last dance of summer, and it sways to a song of its own. Even the sky seems too small to hold all of this longing.

Shared in the Sunlight

For Nina, whose mountain spirit inspires.

It’s rare that I meet people in the mountains. In all that space it’s not often that our slender human paths cross and twine at the exact same time. Instead there are wheeling raptors to fill the expanse, and ground-nesting birds to either side of me. Ravens darken the skies, their deep, guttural calls cast out of the blue to fall like shadows on the land. Skylarks cannon from the grasses with a flurry of wings, and clouds of ringlet butterflies, dark and rimmed in burnt orange, swirl densely around so that I’m never entirely sure if I’m being followed or being led. There are lizards basking on stones and plenty of infuriating flies, as well as the bear that materialised to eye me in the morning’s warm glow. Sometimes there’s just the wind to stir me, or the flooding southern light.

So when I do meet another person there’s something of the unexpected about the encounter, like a gift received without occasion. There’s an intimacy bestowed upon the moment, a possibility for sharing that’s less common in places more peopled. As though encouraged by the empty space, and knowing we’re unlikely to see one another again, we open more surely, confidently, trading stories of our lives that might otherwise take time to be told; we go from being strangers to acquaintances, without ever leaving the hillside.

I’d noticed Samir’s flock long before I saw the shepherd. Keeping an eye on the inevitable accompanying dogs – whose bites are generally worse than their barks – I skirted my usual route, climbing higher up a slope to circle round and come out on the far side of the sheep. Regaining my path, I heard a voice behind me. I turned to see a man in the shade of a stone cleft, waving wildly and beginning to stand. And at the same time we began closing the gap between us.

We shook hands in the sunlight, and Samir asked me what I was doing in the mountains alone, clearly bewildered by my sudden appearance. As I explained my bird-monitoring work to him he asked questions about eagles which he’d seen, and how they might be affected by the wind turbines. “Anyways,” I said, eventually returning to the earlier question. “You’re alone here as well.” He laughed at the very idea. “How can I be alone?” he asked, pointing behind him. “With all these dogs and sheep I can never be alone!”

For the past seven years Samir has lived in the village at the foot of the mountains, but he’s originally from Tirana, the Albanian capital. Over the years I’ve met many men and women from Tirana, or other large Albanian cities, who were once lecturers, economists or chemists, among other things, but who, in having fled from poverty and hopelessness, now lead sheep across meadows, harvest fruit or dig ditches in Greece. It’s a transition that’s long troubled me; not for the relative value commonly accorded to the different work, but for what it signifies for the county’s future. All that promise that’s gone.

I told Samir that I might see him here again as we said our goodbyes. “Not in the next month you won’t.” His face brightened with his own words. “I haven’t been with my family for a long time and I’m going back home to Tirana to see them. We’ll spend a month together at the seaside.” We each went our way, an image of the blue Adriatic in tow.

Arriving at my vantage point for the morning shift, I could see a few horses and a handful of people scattered about the steep adjacent slope. Usually it’s an empty expanse, a tilting meadow where some weeks earlier the bear finally hurtled at full pace, leaving me alone with the aftershock of its sudden presence. But now the wild blueberries had ripened.

Drijan and Ritem were young, still in their teens at a guess. They came from over the other border, with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and were living in a Greek village for the summer doing whatever seasonal work they could find. They’d climbed the steep alpine folds on horseback, having saddled up at dawn. Working throughout the day, they were gathering the tiny wild blueberries clustered among the low-lying plants, filling bowls until full, then transferring the berries to sacks that were loaded onto the horses for the return journey.

“We get 2 Euros per kilo when we take them back to the village.” Drijan tilted the bowls for me to have a closer look. I wanted to scoop the dark fruit in my hands.

“And how much do you have here do you think?” I asked. “It might be two, two and a half kilos, but it takes a long time.” Ritem’s mouth had turned blue from eating the berries while he worked, and he smiled shyly each time I looked at him. I had a feeling I’d do the same – eat my way through a good part of my pay.

Employing close-tined hand rakes, the boys bent over the tangled mat of plants to rake the berries into their bowls, moving up and down the slopes. The berries came free remarkably easily, carrying with them only a small amount of leaf and stem. But it was slow work; the berries too small to amount to anything very quickly.

I asked the boys if I could take a few photos of them, and they immediately adopted a formal, brotherly stance more often associated with the early age of portraiture. But then they were from a rural part of a poor country, where easily produced images and digital cameras are far from common. It’s a response to the camera that I’ve witnessed before, in both Albania and FYR Macedonia, a mark of respect for what has become so casual for so many.

Originally from a small village at the northern edge of Great Prespa Lake, Drijan told me how much he enjoyed walking in the Pelister Mountains that flank the border with Greece. Having been there a few times myself, we talked about the towering pine trees that the mountains are synonymous with. “When you next go walking in Pelister, could you please bring one of the photos for us?” I thought of the alpine massif, its countless ridges, gorges and valleys, and I was touched by his innocence, his naive expectancy. But then, as I’m gratefully aware, our slender human paths do sometimes cross. In those moments, as unexpected as desert rain, the most simple of experiences are there to be savoured like the wild berries themselves: a few words shared in the sunlight; a brief glimpse into another’s life; the world nudged open just that little bit more.