Sacred Sierra Read Online Free PDF

into his mouth.
    ‘Ah,’ said Salud, ‘you’ve brought your
bota
with you.’
    ‘Only drink wine,’ Arcadio said. ‘Want some?’ And he thrust it into my hand.
    I’d seen Spanish men often enough drinking from a
bota
. There was a trick in squirting the liquid directly into your mouth and then timing it so that you pulled away and closed your mouth without spilling a drop. There were even some who could just keep pouring the stuff down their throats seemingly without pausing for breath, swallowing continuously with upturned head. Try as I might, it was a technique I had never quite mastered, but that morning I didn’t care: a shot of wine at eight in the morning seemed an eminently sensible way to start the day. So I squirted, and drank – and the working day began.
    Arcadio was all tuts and mumbling as we walked down from the
era
towards our almond trees. We had spent so much time working on the house, there’d been little time for doing anything yet on the land. Now, simply by walking beside him, I felt I was looking at it all with new eyes. Weeds were growing neck-high in places, while the almond trees, far from being neat and stunted like the ones on his land, were stretching branches high into the sky: too high, I now saw, to be able to reach for harvesting. I could see that pruning fruit trees was a skill I would have to master if things were going to move forwards up here. I looked over at Salud as we trotted behind Arcadio: from the expression on her face I could tell she was thinking the same thing.
    ‘We’ll just forget about those ones up there,’ Arcadio said pointing to some terraces climbing up the mountainside. With a shock I realised there were more almond trees up there as well – and I’d never even noticed. The path to them was completely blocked by a bramble bush that had spilled out from behind a pine tree and was threatening to take over most of the terrace itself. I quickly counted – there must have been around twenty trees up there, now out of reach. It seemed absurd that we should call this farm our own: our lack of knowledge about what was actually here, about the very crops and plants that had been cultivated, was embarrassing. There was a vast amount to learn.
    Arcadio was carrying a basket, while Salud had picked up a canvas sack. Seizing one of the branches roughly with his left hand, Arcadio pulled it down towards the ground and started grabbing handfuls of almonds, tossing them into his basket. His aim was fairly haphazard, with more than a few missing the target and getting lost in the weeds and grass around the base of the tree.
    I was expecting some kind of farmer’s insider knowledge on how best to harvest almonds, but all it seemed to involve was grabbing the things with your hands and pulling them off with a sharp tug. Salud gave me a look and we went off to a neighbouring tree to start harvesting ourselves. I waited for a moment, watching Arcadio just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, then went over to join Salud.
    The green skins wrapped around the nutshells were soft and velvety to the touch, with a coating of fine hair, but the branches of the tree were sharp and gnarled, with little thorns poking out at irregular intervals.
    ‘Wild boar love this,’ Arcadio called over as we started filling our sack. ‘Pull your trees down if they could to get the almonds. Already done some damage.’ And he pointed at another tree further down the terrace: one of the branches had fallen to the ground and was hanging by a thread from the main trunk; the leaves had died and the earth where it lay seemed to be scuffed.
    ‘Had a feast with that. Be back for more.’
    Until this point ‘wild boar’ had only been a concept for us. We knew there were some roaming around the mountains, and had heard that they might pop over our way occasionally, but this was the first time we had evidence of their actual presence – and it wasn’t a pretty sight.
    ‘The wild boar did