Il pastore di stambecchi

Louis has spent all 84 years of his life listening to the mountains. His intense life, always lived at high altitude, is a collection of incredible experiences and enchanting stories.

For Louis Oreiller, mountains are neither a challenge nor a feat. They are his home of earth and sky, a horizon to which he belongs. Louis was born to poverty and grew up in the war. Originally from the Aosta Valley, he has spent his 84 years in Rhêmes-Notre-Dame – just twenty chimney tops at 1,7000 metres’ altitude, deep in the beautiful wilderness of a narrow valley.
As a boy with no other weapon but hunger, he is hunter, smuggler, labourer. His outlook changes when he becomes a gamekeeper. During his long, solitary days staking out poachers from behind the lenses of his monocular, he becomes the lord of the ledges, observes eagles flying and experiences something very similar to love. Season after season, he transforms trees into sculptures, “digs out” badgers and marmots, and speaks to dogs, cows and hens – to humans, too, sometimes.
Oreiller’s world is one that is now lost, trampled by a modernity without patience, by a stream of people who come back but never stay. And yet his eyes, his gnarled, powerful hands and his words, entrusted to those who, like anthropologist Irene Borgna, are able to hear them, can lead you far away, off the trail, to hidden passes – marking time, like the rings of a tree, like the rings on the antlers of an old ibex.