From the recording FIVE - THE FIFTH SEASON
“Shepherd Without Snow” is a lament for vanishing winters and the fragile identity of those who once lived by them. The narrator—once a mountain guide and guardian of a snowy landscape—now survives as a storyteller in a warmed-up world, selling memories of a frozen past to curious tourists. Chairlifts stand like relics, folded piste maps become love letters to a lost climate, and the absent “flocks of skiers” turn the shepherd’s vocation into metaphor. Beneath the nostalgia lies quiet grief: a personal dislocation that mirrors global climate change, where the mountains still “call” but can no longer be answered because their icy voice has melted into “glacial ghosts in the summer sky.”
Lyrics
Verse 1
Once I walked where the white winds roared,
Carved my path on the frozen floor.
Led the strangers to the silver peaks,
Where the sky was sharp and the snow would speak.
Verse 2
Now I walk in the market square,
Point out statues, the bridges there.
They pay for stories of a colder time,
When the mountain sang and the bells would chime.
Chorus
I’m a shepherd without snow,
No flocks of skiers in the morning glow.
The herds have gone, the trails run dry,
Only glacial ghosts in the summer sky.
Verse 3
The chairlifts rust in the mountain shade,
The maps still show where the pistes were laid.
I keep them folded in my coat,
Like old love letters that no one wrote.
Chorus
I’m a shepherd without snow,
No flocks of skiers in the morning glow.
The herds have gone, the trails run dry,
Only glacial ghosts in the summer sky.
Bridge
I dream of frost beneath my feet,
Of rivers frozen, clean and sweet.
But the winters melted, year by year,
Till they vanished into air too clear.
Final Chorus
I’m a shepherd without snow,
My flock’s just stories the young don’t know.
The mountains call, but I can’t reply,
Only glacial ghosts in the summer sky.