FRANCE
Goiat is a bear — a big bear, weighing 250kg at least — and he’s close by. He’s also hungry.
The day aſter tomorrow, news will break that he’s attacked and killed two sheep on the forested ridge to our right. He’s probably liſting his snout in our direction at this very moment, sniffing the air with a nose seven times more sensitive than a bloodhound’s. Yes, he’ll be aware of us. But we know none of this. We’re just walking a mountain path in southwest France on our way to meet a shepherd. The pitted track writhes up Montagne d’Areng from
the tiny village of Jézeau, and it’s not hard to imagine bears among the pine trees of this lonely woodland in the Pyrenees. “This is a very pure forest,” says Éric, our guide, who lives in Jézeau. “Some of the trees are 300 years old.” “The sounds are lovely,” adds Penny, my walking companion. As we move over mossy banks and across clearings edged with bracken, I tune in to the lazy summer buzz from hidden bees’ nests, the rattle of the grasshoppers and the wing beats of a black woodpecker as it breaks from a dead tree. “There are just 50 bears in the French Pyrenees,” Penny
says. “The word is that a large one called Goiat has been somewhere in this region for the past week or so — it’s exciting!” Penny’s heart has been stitched into the fabric of this place since she moved here from the Lake District 13 years ago. She arranges low-impact tours that take visitors beyond the thrills and spills of the ski resorts, introducing them to nature and the pleasures of the pastoral life. One such pleasure is known as transhumance, a time-
honoured tradition at the start of each summer when the farmers’ animals are driven up this pass from the foothills — cattle, sheep, goats, even native Pyrenean horses — on a migration to their mountain pastures. “All the locals take part,” Penny tells me, “and there’s a real festival atmosphere.” “We drink a lot of wine!” Éric declares with relish.
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nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel That was several months ago, and few people have
walked the track since. It’s leſt to the shepherds now. We turn a corner, and ahead is a stone shelter, set like a toy in a rolling landscape of yellowing grassland. Nicolas has spotted us from a distance and is picking his way down a steep slope. He’s been checking on his ewes (perhaps the very ewes that will soon fall prey to Goiat). “This is the hottest year I have seen,” he says, shaking his head. ‘The sheep must go high to find good grass, but some of them are pregnant and they lose their lambs in the strain of getting up there.” Nicolas isn’t what you’d expect of a shepherd, in his
snowboarder sunglasses and a Rip Curl T-shirt. But his two sheepdogs give him away, each slumping into a patch of shade. They’re collies, but many other shepherds here prefer a muscular Pyrenean breed called the patou. “Those dogs have a bark to put the fear of god into you,” says Penny. In years past, every French mountain shepherd had a patou, but in the 19th century, with wolves and bears becoming increasingly scarce, shepherds no longer required such fierce dogs to guard their flocks. Now the apex predators are back, the patous are back, too. “Hunters shot brown bears until quite recently,” Penny
explains. “As late as the 1980s, cubs were taken to be trained as dancing bears at fairs or in bars.” There are no pure-bred Pyrenean bears leſt. However, since 1996 a reintroduction programme has brought bears like Goiat from Slovenia, and the population is growing in the central Pyrenees. “Wolves are coming too, spreading from Spain and
Italy,” says Éric. “Bears might take one or two sheep, but wolves will kill sheep aſter sheep aſter sheep.” Whole flocks have fallen off cliffs as they run from predators in panic, and tensions are growing between those who want to see such magnificent species restored to the
FROM TOP: Walking with huskies from Base Nordique Sherpa in Peyradgudes; sheep and the Chapelle des Templiers in the background, near Piau-Engaly PREVIOUS PAGES FROM LEFT: Pyrenees glimpsed through the forest near Pont du Prat, Loudenvielle; a husky from Base Nordique Sherpa
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