The photo reminds me of a painting by one of the old masters. The scene is Biblical. A shepherd hauls a bale of hay for his flock of terrified goats. Plumes of smoke drift across the land. There is a bush fire close by, and it is getting closer.

The situation was described by the man himself, Antonio Rodríguez, who has been grazing a herd of 150 goats in the high ground between the small towns of Portbou and Colera for more than 20 years. The mountains hereabouts — called L’Albera in Catalan, Les Albères in French — are the easternmost arm of the Pyrenees, as they descend towards the Mediterranean above the Bay of Roses. 

‘I’ve had a really bad time of it, but it’s what I had to do . . . save my goats. I was alone in all the danger’ he told the Diari de Girona.

When in the mountains with his flock, Antonio stays in a cabin that stands a mere 400 metres from ground zero of the forest fire that tore through almost 600 hectares of woodland during the fires here earlier this month. To save his flock, Antonio had to spend the night encircled by the advancing flames, high on the mountain. 

The Tramuntana, the Empordà wind, began to blow with gusts that exceeded 120 kilometres per hour. ‘There were people who told me to stay, others to leave . . . I thought I’d better stay here with my goats because if I didn’t they would die and I’d feel guilty all night thinking that I let them die. Only a shepherd understands this,’ he said.

I read Antonio’s story and consider its impact within the context of the hundreds of other stories doing the rounds right now, about climate change and our apparent inability or unwillingness to act in the face of impending catastrophe.

A week later, I was caught in a storm from the other end of the weather spectrum: a torrential downpour, hailstones the size of haricot beans, thunder and lighting directly overhead. 

I was not careless: it could have happened to anyone. I had set out early, and started my climb from the small town of Queralbs, inland from the Alberas, in the high Pyrenees, around 7.00 a.m. The forecast — which I always check before setting out — suggested there might be ‘light showers’ in the afternoon, but otherwise it would be a warm, clear day. The first four hours of my ascent went calmly enough. At the Coma de Vaca, where there is a mountain refuge, I took up another trail, the so-called Camí del enginyers, which runs along in peaks and troughs at over 2,000 metres, towards the Vall de Nùria. 

But people die up here. Near to Nùria stands a monument to nine monks who died in a storm way back in the 13th century — and every year someone gets caught out, someone dies on the mountain. I was lucky.  At the outbreak, when the heavens opened, and the temperature plummeted by about 25 degrees, and my hands turned blue and the hailstones started pinging onto my bare legs, I found some basic shelter beneath a large rock. A trickle of a stream behind me, from which I had struggled to fill my water bottle a few minutes before, had become, within seconds, a furious torrential flood. Thunder crashed and lightning scorched the air directly overhead. I was wearing shorts and a tee shirt, but fortunately I had a rain jacket with hood in my daypack, which I hastened to pull on. 

I sat out the worst of the storm by my rock, during which time I felt strangely protected by a power beyond myself — I have no idea why, but the words of an Irish traveller friend from years gone by, Anto Walker, kept running through my head: May the Lord keep you in the palm of his ridiculous hand — and for some reason that helped. When the worst had passed I set off and walked the remaining two hours to Nùria rather quicker than I might otherwise have managed. It continued to rain and hail, by turn and intermittently, all the way there. At Nùria I caught the little train that descends the mountain to Queralbs, where I had left my car. I was soaked through, and cold to the bone. I switched on the car heating full blast and dried out. Driving down the mountain road from Queralbs to Ribes, the next village, I was met by scenes of devastation: trees uprooted by the storm straddled the road; rockfall lay scattered about. The next day the newspapers reported on the ‘freak storm’, and I knew how lucky I had been. But I had left details of my hike with a friend in the village and he had been following the storm’s progress. He sent me a WhatsApp message as I waited it out beneath my rock, which miraculously I received and replied to. He told me later that if I hadn’t messaged him from Nùria he would have sent out for help. But that wasn’t necessary, fortunately. I was lucky. 

But people die up there. People die because of fire, and because of storms. They always have done, but these days it all seems to be getting worse, a lot worse.