Davia was visiting her Nelson Sister, Jessie, in Los Angeles and telling her about our upcoming story about the hidden kitchen traditions of the Basque and discovered that her sister's landscape garderners who were there at the time were two Basque brothers, the Lasartes.

Davia grabbed her tape recorder, and out of the blue did an interview that is the center of our Sheepherders Ball story. "They spoke, they sang, they whistled. I heard all the calls they have for the sheep dogs that traveled with them over the long treks across the American West."

"You lonely, you by yourself," Francisco Lasarte said. "My God, you with 2,000 sheep and two dogs and you don't know what to do, where to go."

Each brother had his own flock, and they rarely saw each other or anyone else for months on end. Mostly they ate lamb and bread cooked in a Dutch oven in a hole they dug in the ground. You can still find these holes up in the mountains of Idaho, Montana, Nevada and California.

Espe was born in Ermua, Bizkaia, a small town of about 500 people. She emigrated to the United States to join her mother, who was working at a boarding house in Boise.

Espe's voice and personality lent themselves well to radio broadcasting. She started a radio program, the "Voice of the Basques," which she broadcast in Basque for over 25 years, providing music, news, stories, and announcements to listeners in the West. Sheep herders could hear their language and music, which eased their loneliness and kept them abreast of news in the Basque country and Boise.