A summer job turns serious when a young woman takes the reins on a remote farm—and learns far more than how to herd sheep.

In May 1972, Liese Greensfelder arrived in the small Norwegian town of Øystese to startling news: Johannes, the farmer who had hired her for a summer job, had just been hospitalized after a stroke. Could she please watch over his place for a month or so, until he got back on his feet? Twenty years old and with no farming experience, Greensfelder was dropped off the next day at a centuries-old mountain farm at the end of a dirt road high above Norway’s magnificent Hardanger Fjord—with 115 sheep, two cows, one calf, a draft horse, and a Norwegian herding dog to care for.

 Accidental Shepherd is the story of her yearlong struggle for the survival of this place, even as she clashed with the owner himself. For she soon learned that Johannes was a heartless man who had alienated his neighbors and neglected his buildings and equipment for decades in favor of an obsessive hobby: a botanical garden bursting with ferns and alpine plants.

Even so, those very neighbors came to the rescue, teaching Greensfelder how to milk cows by hand, work with horse and wagon, and make hay in the rain. On weekends they led her on trails far into the mountains to check on their flocks, which ranged free among those wild peaks from June through September.

 By the time October rolled around, Greensfelder was feeling like master of the farm and a member of this tight-knit community. Yet a long winter ahead would be filled with surprises, and she dreaded the day when the farm’s true master would return, knowing that she would have to contend with his irrational behavior and volatile temper.

 Chronicling dangers and obstacles for which the young Californian was utterly unprepared, Accidental Shepherd tells a story of remarkable resilience and records the fascinating but rapidly vanishing traditions of the community that took her in.