The wolf grabs me in his jaws and ...

 

DAY 2 (of three)

I more or less sleep through – waking only once – and am woken by a dog barking. I look at my phone: 7.13. Longer than I expected to sleep. I sit up and peek out the window.  A mountain shepherd, two collies and about 100 sheep mixed with a few black goats boil over the brow. Ah. He’ll just pass through, won’t he. He doesn’t – I can see him standing just below the steps up to my hideout on the berm, leaning on his two sticks and puffing on his pipe. The guy is not exactly in the first flush of rosy-cheeked youth. Quite the opposite, in fact. The quintessential ‘mountain shepherd’, battered old hat and all.

One of the collies comes up the steps and lies down directly outside my outside door. 'Er – am I supposed to be here?' I think. 'Well, first things first – better get some clothes on. If the shepherd’s confronted by a stark-naked foreigner halfway up a mountain in a building he’d thought was empty he’ll probably have an immediate heart attack and, then there's the fact that I don’t actually know how to use the defibrillator, the reason for my being able to be in the building at all … and his dog’s’ll probably eat me alive, too … I really should...'

I stealthily slide into my trousers and slip a shirt on, watching the dog carefully to see if he notices. He pricks up his ears a few times and shifts a bit, but hasn’t yet associated the stealthy noises with any sort of danger to his flock. Then I fling open the shutters with a loud clatter. The shepherd starts, but doesn’t fall over, thank God. ‘Buongiorno!’ I shout cheerily, as if me being there is the most normal thing in the world. He peers at this apparition which has magically appeared, then nods and mutters. Good, my presence is validated. I pull back the bed from the door – loud screeches - and go out, taking my breakfast stuff with me. The old dog on top of the steps is actually OK with that and just pulls back a bit. Son-of-a-dog, though – the younger collie - is not at all sure what to do about the alien apparition, and looks to daddy-dog and the shepherd for a lead. ‘Er, what do I do now? Should I bite him, chomp his bollocks off?’ The shepherd whistles him off and gives me a good looking over, now he can see all of me. He’s cool, but I can’t have a conversation about the state of the economy or the weather with him as I no parle Italiano and he definitely no parle Inglese. I content myself with smiling and looking friendly and non-confrontational.

I go and sit on the same bench with the view as last night and have breakfast. Yes: full-corn-bread, stinky cheese, salami, peaches and cherries – except that the stinky cheese is now well beyond stinky. In fact so well beyond that it’s developed little bendy legs and is trying to scuttle off the table of its own accord and head for the hills. It goes the way of the cherry stones and the pee. But the salami’s still OK.

Bucolic bliss – the sheep contentedly graze the lush grass on the slopes of Monte Palazone behind the Rifugio along with their companion evil-horned black goats; ye Olde Shepherd leans on his two sticks puffing on his pipe as he regards his flock; the wide-open view to the lake 3000ft below. Young-Dog is still prancing around: ‘can we eat him Dad, can we, can we, or at least give him a good old bite, see how he tastes, you know? What's he doing here, anyway?’, but old dog inveigles himself under the picnic table where I’m sitting and snuffles for breakfast droppings, his tail slowly wagging.

It doesn’t take much to strip off a veneer, does it: for how many hundred, may, thousands of years has this scene replicated itself? The shepherd and his flock on the mountain pastures? But when the old guy goes, what then? But maybe I’m projecting the wrong line forwards: trekking around Perledo above Varenna Esino on the opposite side of the lake (where I was last week), I bumped across 3 or 4, what to call them? ‘Off-grid clusters’, maybe: one directly below Perledo where a single guy was obviously constructing his own ‘I want to live this way – not the way you all out there seem to be saying I should live’ lifestyle based around a broken-down old farmhouse. And the fact that almost everywhere I looked – along the railway tracks coming out of Bergamo towards Lecco in the most grafitti’d-up, slowest, most useless excuse for ‘a train’ I’ve ever been in; or along the tracks on the way to Como in the express from Cortana, people have planted strips of vegetables in whatever cramped and even industrial spaces offer themselves, even if only a few cabbages and two or three tomato plants. It’s as if something irrepressible in the Italian psyche is forcing itself out: I want to live THIS way, I want to grow MY OWN food, I want to allow the soil of my native country to nurture me, to be connected to MY earth.

The shepherd whistles and staggers off on his two sticks. Old Dog and Dancing Dog gather up their flock. Dancing Dog gives me a last look of disappointment that he wasn't allowed to eat me, and they all depart the way they came, leaving sundry ‘baaas’ lingering in the morning air. I make up the room, say a heartfelt ‘thanks’ to the Italian Alpine Club and stride off northwards.

Two donkeys just up the trail don’t shift as I approach, just looking at me out of their soft, brown-rimmed eyes, then reluctantly inching aside, tails swishing. The track leaves the wood and winds on to a small, meadowed plateau. I pass some outlaw’s hovel – a ramshackle old caravan under the shade of a few scrappy trees, a cleared area with a fire-blackened old oil drum used for cooking. There are about 4 or 5 really vicious-looking dogs tethered to trees around the site who bark aggressively as I pass, doing the tethered-dog-thing of running at you to attack, then being pulled up by their lead. Strikes me that I don’t much like dogs, actually: it takes absolutely nothing for them to return to their pack-animal instincts where they’ll quite happily disembowel anyone they get within reach of.

More donkeys. They’re clustered around a muddy pond in the shade of some spindly trees. I promptly dub it ‘The Place of The Donkeys’. I stop to video them and they come and nuzzle me. Then off up the trail to The Place of the Beeches.

The track winds up the hill towards an isolated circular group of 5 or six shrunken, weather-blasted beeches crowning the end of a high ridge, rooted in and among exposed rock strata. That’s one of those places you know is ‘a place’, if you know what I mean, firstly, the position, on high at the end of a ridge, then the fact that the trees form a circle, bent in among, sharing some hidden secret with each other. You can still sense the mulemen, having sweated up the steep mule-path from Sormano for mile after switchback mile sighting the secretly-whispering beeches far above them and knowing that when they got there, they could sit on the rocks in the shade, having a ciggy, spitting, drinking and talking.

The path follows the ridge a while, then descends towards the pass of Colma del Piano (otherwise known as La Colma di Sormano). Just short of the Colma there’s a hump which was once obviously a castle, built to control the pass, but now there’s nothing left – just a few bumps on a slight rise. The bar/restaurant looks staffed and open – yippee! I wander in and order a café lungho and, and … yes, why not, they look yummy – a marmalade croissant! It comes to 2.30 euros. The penny drops – don’t order canned fizzy drinks in a bar, they’ll add 300% on – order coffee! No self-respecting Italian, I’m told later, would dream of paying more than one euro for a coffee, it’s like enshrined in the Constitution; the government’d fall even quicker than it does already if you pay more than one euro for a coffee!

Ah – that first hit of coffee! Oh the wonders of civilization! I sit in the sun on a bench overlooking the road where it climbs out of the Sormano valley grinning and inanely chuckling to myself. Ah, coffee! Wondrous coffee! There’re a few road-gangs of cyclists also stopped off for a drink, all, of course, with highly expensive carbon-fibre roadbikes all be-stickered with the major brand and racing decals, as are the lycra-wrapped cyclists, the decals slapped over their well-tanned bums and wiry leg muscles. It’s at least as important to look the part as be the part. A sprinkling of bikers as well. Same story, different decals, even more expensive machinery all gleaming in the sun. Probably spend all week polishing the machine to show it off on the weekend. On the permanently-on plasma screen in the bar a rocket is blasting off from somewhere into space. Odd – yesterday a shepherd and his sheep, today lycra, carbon-fibre, thrusting machinery and rockets.

I deliberate over the map. Should be easy enough – I know exactly where I am, so I should know exactly where to go next. But the road after the pass descends, and I’d sort of thought it should ascend. Even after decades of reading maps it’s difficult to read contours – are they ascending, or descending? Then I know I want to go to the Alpetto di Torno – there’s a sign, yes, but it’s pointing in a different direction to the Route of the German. I hesitate, then decide to follow the sign. 100 yds up the road I think, ‘hang on, this doesn’t feel right!’ I retrace my steps to the Ristorante and ask a lycra-clad-cyclist which way it is to the Plan di Tivani. He points the opposite way to the way I’d gone – ‘that way’, he says. I shrug. That way, then. It seems strange to be descending – and on a proper metalled road, being passed by sparse traffic, and expensive bikes – but, after a mile or so, and a few switchbacks in the forest the road disgorges me onto a gently-shelving Alpine-meadow landscape, dotted with farmsteads. Ah –ski-resort territory, I think. It reminds me of the places we used to go to in Austria when we lived in Stuttgart, it’s the same farm/house construction: the front and upper floors for the people, the ground-floor and back for the cows.

Past the laid–off for the summer drag-lift a higgledy-piggeldy conglomeration of hand-made signs heaves into view. First the red-and-white official waymarkings.  They point in various directions:  to the Buco della Niccolina, the Alpetto di Torno, the Casello del latte di Val di Sorello, then, in capitals (maybe they’re more important), to the ALPE GROSSA DI TORNO (0.40, it says), the ALPE SPESSOLA (1.0) and the M.S. PRIMO (2.10). It’s taken me a while to realise that the numbers denote time to get there, not distance! Some of us are a bit dim, you see. I did wonder why, if a place was, for example, '0.40' km away, it took me 45 minutes to get there. Doh…

To the right of the official waymarks there’s an obviously hand-made weather-beaten board which says ‘Alpetto di Torno – Ristorante, Bar, Camere’ – I prick up my ears at the promise of a camera – a room, wow! Under that, another piece of wood says ‘RIFUGIO’, and, hung with 2 pieces of rusty wire beneath that again, the magic words, APERTO! That’s some artistic sign – and, unless they’ve forgotten to turn the sign round, it’s open!

But we’re not finished with the sign-malarky yet, oh no. On the next extended fence post the saga continues: ‘Azienda Agrituristica LA CONCA D’ORO’ it says in bright yellow letters - with an arrow and ‘Allevamento Cavalli’ under that, also in yellow. That’s OK, I don’t have a cavallo, not even a donkey, mate. Two square signs with black writing inform me ‘Divieto di Caccia’ (Hunting Banned) – that’s OK, I came Ryan Air to Milano, so I couldn’t bring my Holland & Holland Royal Double shotgun with me on this occasion to blast away at the local cinghiale (wild boar). There’s another artistic impression of a sign in the shape of an arrow which says, ‘Museo Speleologico 2km’, and, to round things off, a square piece of board under that which says, ‘Un Amico Cavallo’ with two arrows in black and a smiley. Well I can’t complain of being under-informed anymore. I don’t need a horse-friend – a hikers- friend will do nicely, thank you: the ‘Alpetto di Torno’ with ‘camera’ and definitely ‘APERTO’ is where I’m headin’!

I wander, slowly, up the metalled track to the Alpetto. At first glance it seems to be just another large, solid, old farm building. As I draw abreast of the right of the farmhouse there’s a door open and a glimpse into what looks like a kitchen. There’s a young man and young woman at the door, so I ask him if this is the way to Bellagio. The guy responds in fluent English: up the track, bear left up the mountain (he points), will take me, say 1 ½ hrs; then over the mountain to Bellagio. Maybe 4 or 5 hours. 

On impulse – it seems a bit early, it’s only 12.00 midday, and I had been deliberating trying much further on for a room for the night – I asked him if they had a room free. ‘Oh yes,’ he says,  ‘certainly.’ ‘How much?’ ‘Do you want an evening meal?’ ‘Ma certo. Colazzione inklusiv?’ ‘Sure: 55 euros,’ he says. I nod agreement. His wife smiles at me. As I said, it is only mid-day – seems a bit early to be calling it a day, but I just like the two of them, and the feel of the place. It’s very quiet, the only sound is the bells of the sheep in the nearby alpine pastures. I’ve got time to get to Bellagio in time to catch a ferry to Como again tomorrow and I’m tired after yesterday. ‘I don’t have to have the room now,’ I say, ‘I can sit in the sun for a while.’ ‘No problem,’ he says, ‘you can have it now.’ He takes me up a ramp round the back, up some steps and into the main Ostello on the 1st floor – it’s obviously set up for large groups, it’s enormous, the dining-room he leads me past is airy and massive, with sliding door-windows looking out onto a balcony running the length of the upper storey and views down to the valley. He shows me into a two bunkbed room (for 4 people). ‘Fine,’ I say.

I sort out a bunk, have a shower and go for a look round the Ostello. Danny – the guy – I think he says his name is ‘Danny’ - is cutting logs with a loudly buzzing circular saw out the back. I wander round to the side. A little procession appears on the grass: Danny’s wife, followed by their toddler, followed by rheumy-eyed old dog who checks me out and decides I’m harmless (as if he could do anything about it if I wasn’t, but, hey, he has his duties). I go and talk to her. She also speaks good English. She – sorry, I did not get her name – says they’ve lived here for 20 years. Her brother lives in Milan, but she doesn’t like that lifestyle; they’ve got a very different one here in up the mountain. The two of them remind me of other young couples in other lands in places I’ve stayed, usually on Zen retreats: they buy an old farmhouse or Young Communist Venturers Country Facility, then do it up – slowly – and take groups, run courses. Danny says he’s also got a flat in Bellagio, which he lets out to the holiday trade. ‘Very good position,’ he says, ‘right on the water. They built 12 holiday-lets directly behind, and a Russian speculator immediately bought 10 of them, so now the place is flooded with Russians.’

Their cat jumps off the wall and casually boxes at something I can’t see. The something is now writhing on the ground: a lizard - either the whole lizard, or just its tail; I know lizards can drop their tail as a diversion when attacked; they used to do that back in Jamaica all the time. The cat ignores tail or lizard for a while, then turns back to it and casually eats it.

Er – I’ve just found the flyer for the Ostello: it gives two names: one mobile number for ‘Daniele’ and one for ‘Ugo’. So he must be Ugo and she must be Daniele. But he introduced himself to me, I’m sure, as something beginning with ‘Da…’ which sounded very much like ‘Danny’.  Some cognitive dissonance going on in my brain.

What to do for the rest of the day until the much-awaited dinner? Why, ‘tis obvious: go for a walk! I pootle off on the up-trail. It goes past a collection of barns with ripe-smelling swishy cows in. A vicious hound erupts from behind a small house belonging to the farm, but I’m past the entrance before anything happens. The farm-track winds gently up the meadows, through mixed woodland – mainly pine and silver birch – and before I know it, I’m at the Colma del Bosco (1235m). There’s an official red and white sign to ‘La Colma di Sormano’ pointing SW along the wooded ridge.

Ah ha! I like these ‘ah ha!’ moments: so THAT’S why there was a sign outside the restaurant at La Colma di Sormano pointing up a ridge to the Alpetto di Torno which seemed to be the opposite way to the way I wanted to go! You can, if you want, take that track from there, then wind down the track I’ve just come up and you’ll arrive at the very same Ostello. But then you’d have to double-back on yourself the next day, if you – like me – are heading north to Bellagio, and climb the hill again. I capito, I don’t like contradictory signs knocking around inside my head!

Having righted the 3D world in my brain I’m attracted to the rise breaking out of the trees due north of where I’m standing at the Pass. I’ll go up there and see if there’s a view, I think, following an obvious not-very-used footpath. I slog up the steep slope, the sky becoming ever more open the further I climb, break over the top – and gasp.

I am on a high ridge falling away precipitously to the north and east, and before me, laid out like a tablecloth set with a banquet from the gods is, to the north, the whole of the rest of Il Triangulo, all the way to Bellagio in the distance; then, on both sides both arms of the Lac du Como, sparkling in the sun. I can see where the lake ends and, ramp upon ramp, the snow-covered Central High Alps and Switzerland; I can see Varenna Esina and Perledo, where I was Air B&B-ing just a week ago, then, to the right, the east, the giant massif of Il Grupo delle Grigne, the Grigna Meridionale itself at 2184m sitting in the zazen position, his two gnarled arms, the Zucco Pertuso and the Zucco Pissavaca resting on the knees of the slopes above Mandello on the Lago di Lecco arm of Como.

I do likewise, sitting zazen with the mountain on the edge of the precipice, feeling honoured, tied-in to earth, stone, rock and meadow, at one with the earth. How many millennia, how many kalpas has the Grigna himself just sat there? He was sitting zazen there when this upstart, this Sakyamuni came along and re-discovered what we’ve known all along: This, Here. This. Here.

I have a few fantasies about a woman in a red dress I saw sitting on a bench in the park alongside the lake in Como, wondering what she was wearing under it (which was probably the point) and whether I should’ve asked her if I could check, then follow the ridge northwards for ½ mile or so till it descends to join the trail I’ll be taking tomorrow at the Alpe Spessola (1237m), the start of the ascent of Monte Ponciv (1453m). Yet another (hand-made) sign to the Ostello hangs slackly off a skewwhiff pole, this time pointing down an Alpine meadow with no discernible track.

I whoopee down it and am soon back on the original track. I tip-toe past the dog-house and get back to the Ostello. ‘Danny’ was still buzz-sawing logs for the winter but stopped when he saw me. ‘A beer, a beer!’ I croak at him. He smiles and goes and gets me one. A Franziskaner Weissbier naturtrueb brewed in Munich! Ah well. We’re – some of us just barely, granted – still in the EU. Prost prost Kamerad! Es lebe kaltes Bier of whatever origin! Hoch soll er leben!

Danny’s kids are helping him by putting the logs into a wheelbarrow which – I think it’s his father, or his wife’s father - is trundling to a low door in the bottom storey behind which there is the woodstore. Some things change, but some do not: in winter you need wood to keep warm, maybe even cook. That these realities are still there: in winter you need wood to keep warm and to eat. You get it from around you. It grows itself. His older son – 6 or 7 years old, was stacking logs when I left for my walk, He’s still stacking them when I get back. His little daughters are also now stacking logs. Even the toddler’s stacking logs, trying to lift one into the wheelbarrow. Urban kids helping their dad for the whole afternoon stacking logs? Nah – wouldn’t happen, or you’d have to bribe them with whatever the latest online SHMUP (shoot-em-up) is. Kids around where we live in urban Bristol’s parents used to bribe them with money to work hard to get good exam results, but we never would. Kid’s have to want to do it. It has to come from themselves. So it did.

The eagerly-awaited dinner inklusiv doesn’t quite match up to the dream. It’s all pre-made then heated up. OK for the Boy’s Scouts, maybe. And – polenta. I’m sorry, but I can’t stand the stuff. It’s polyfilla. Should be used for filling in cracks in the wall, or making into polenta balls dried in the sun and given to hikers to throw at nasty dogs along the way. But to actually EAT the stuff? Yucchh. But the actual dining room is very nice: gut burgerlich and gemutlich, definitely. Those untranslatable German words: gut burgerlich and gemutlich. There’s a fireplace and an inglenook. Now there’s a funny English word: inglenook. Just checked – ah, no, it’s Scottish. Awae the Scots!

I go for a constitutional afterwards to try and get the polenta moving somewhere else other than as a big lump in my stomach, up the track to the same farm as before. On the way back, the evil hound is dozing under a hopper. He wakes up with a start as I approach and immediately attacks, biting my right leg – well, he wraps his jaws around my right shin but doesn’t quite puncture the skin, though I can feel his very sharp teeth. I find myself quite coolly debating with myself: ‘um, a wolf is biting me. Problem is, if I attack him in turn he could – in fact I’m sure he will – get really vicious and probably try to get me on the ground and kill me, because that’s how ‘prey’ is supposed to react when attacked, according to The Manual For Dogs (laid down in pre-histeria by wolfkind). I can’t afford to do that.’ So I ignore the fact that a wolf is trying to eat me alive – and he does look very wolfish, he’s large, the size of a medium Alsatian, with a wolf’s-head, crazy yellow wolf’s eyes, a wolf’s jaws and a dirty fawn-spotted pelt – and just keep walking, sort of dragging him along with me, his jaws wrapped around my shin. And indeed, he does, shortly, let go, satisfied he’s given the intruder something to think about.

I walk slowly off down the track – there are no people around I can see and the farm house he’s protecting seems empty – thinking, sodding hell, must find a massive great staff so if that happens again I can beat its brains out. I’m not afraid of dogs, and they know it, but this one’s definitely pushing it.

Then I become conscious of a panting sound behind me. The wolf is following me. Ah. I stop and just look at him. He stops and looks at me. I walk on, ignoring him – dogs don’t normally know what to do if their victim ignores them, it’s not written up in The Manual - and he pads along next to me, taking the foreigner for a pleasant evening stroll. This continues all the way back to the Ostello. I go round the back, he goes round the front and ostentatiously craps on the front lawn, yawns and heads back up the track.

Later I tell Danny and he swears. ‘That’s completely not on!’ he says, ‘Did he really bite you?’ I affirm the case and he says he’ll go and have a word. Hopefully the Beast will now at least be chained – which won’t do it much good, granted, it’ll just make it more vicious. But that’s the thing. It’s dangerous. I’d worry it’d attack Danny and his wife’s children, who are always toddling around outside, often by themselves. Or other hikers, who may be afraid of dogs and react, in which case it’d have them down in a flash with their throat ripped out. Chain the Beast! Or shoot it. I check my leg after a shower – no, he hasn’t drawn blood. Rabies? Unlikely.

DAY 3 TO FOLLOW