Those Accustomed To
The Stony Deserts Of Nearly All South European Mountain Districts Will
Find These Woodlands Intensely Refreshing.
Their inaccessibility has
proved their salvation - up to a short time ago.
Nearly all the cattle on the Sila, like the land itself, belongs to
large proprietors. These gentlemen are for the most part invisible; they
inhabit their palaces in the cities, and the very name of the Sila sends
a cold shudder through their bones; their revenues are collected from
the shepherds by agents who seem to do their work very conscientiously.
I once observed, in a hut, a small fragment of the skin of a newly
killed kid; the wolf had devoured the beast, and the shepherd was
keeping this corpus delicti to prove to his superior, the agent, that
he was innocent of the murder. There was something naive in his
honesty - as if a shepherd could not eat a kid as well as any wolf, and
keep a portion of its skin! The agent, no doubt, would hand it on to his
lord, by way of confirmation and verification. Another time I saw the
debris of a goat hanging from a tree; it was the wolf again; the boy had
attached these remains to the tree in order that all who passed that way
might be his witnesses, if necessary, that the animal had not been sold
underhand.
You may still find the legendary shepherds here - curly-haired
striplings, reclining sub tegmine fagi in the best Theocritean style,
and piping wondrous melodies to their flocks. These have generally come
up for the summer season from the Ionian lowlands. Or you may encounter
yet more primitive creatures, forest boys, clad in leather, with wild
eyes and matted locks, that take an elvish delight in misdirecting you.
These are the Lucanians of old. "They bring them up from childhood in
the woods among the shepherds," says Justinus, "without servants, and
even without any clothes to cover them, or to lie upon, that from their
early years they may become inured to hardiness and frugality, and have
no intercourse with the city. They live upon game, and drink nothing but
water or milk." But the majority of modern Sila shepherds are shrewd
fellows of middle age (many of them have been to America), who keep
strict business accounts for their masters of every ounce of cheese and
butter produced. The local cheese, which Cassiodorus praises in one of
his letters, is the cacciacavallo common all over South Italy; the
butter is of the kind which has been humorously, but quite wrongly,
described by various travellers.
Although the old wolves are shot and killed by spring guns and dynamite
while the young ones are caught alive in steel traps and other
appliances, their numbers are still formidable enough to perturb the
pastoral folks. One is therefore surprised to see what a poor breed of
dogs they keep; scraggy mongrels that run for their lives at the mere
sight of a wolf who can, and often does, bite them into two pieces with
one snap of his jaws.
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