CHAPTER VII THE SPANISH IBEX (CAPRA HISPANICA) I. THE SHADOW OF DEATH. THE SPANISH IBEX being a species peculiar to the Peninsula, and withal a strikingly handsome Game-animal-casily the First Prize to a hunter in all Spain (if not in all Europe)—it naturally formed a main objective of our earlier venatic ambitions in that country. The story of those strenuous efforts to secure a few trophies has already been lovingly told in our two books on Wilder Spain—(in 1893 and 1910). That was forty years ago; but among those ancient memories few remain more vivid than our surprise and disappointment to discover how perilously near to total extinction the Spanish ibex had already been reduced on several of those great mountain-ranges which, during the ages, had formed its ancestral strongholds. Nowhere, in those days, was Protection afforded it everywhere the lish-limbed mountaineers, who alone shared these alpine solitudes (themselves well-nigh as agile as the wild-goats), carried guns and shot the vanishing ibex-regardless of size, sex, or season-whenever opportunity offered. By the close of the nineteenth century the scant remnants of the race in the great Sierra de Grédos had been reduced literally to units; nor is it too much to say that another ten years would have witnessed the last of this noble gameanimal wiped off the face of the earth in its main haunts-a Fate which has, in melancholy fact, overtaken the ibex both in Portugal and the Pyrenees.1 1 There were other isolated colonies of ibex which had also suffered total extirpation-such as that on San Cristobal in the Serranía de Ronda, within sight of our Spanish home; besides, doubtless, various remnants on segregated mountain-ranges elsewhere throughout Spain. By supreme good fortune, ere the fatal hour had struck—as it were, at the eleventh hour-a Deus ex machinâ intervened. The co-authors of Wild Spain became associated in the Coto Doñana and elsewhere with Spanish friends in whose hands lay the power to save the situation. There thus occurred opportunity of pointing out the impending peril to some of those great Spanish land-owners within whose titles were included vast regions of the chief ibex-haunted Cordilleras; but who, at that time, were only vaguely conscious of the existence of ibex on their remote and ill-accessible domains: while none had then realised that the threatened race belonged to a species endemic to Spain-that it was confined to the Peninsula and known nowhere else on earth. At first sight the practical difficulties of affording any effective Protection to wild animals on such vast areas of mountain-solitudes-some extending to, say 60 to 80 miles in length and rising to over 8000 or even 10,000 feet in altitudemight well have been deemed insuperable, not to say appalling. At home we have no such fearsome propositions. These Grandees of Spain, nevertheless, rose to their occasion in the spirit that overwhelms difficulties—as it overpassed our utmost hopes the spirit that emphasises the traditional chivalry of their race, and of Spain. All honour to them. Spontaneously, they ceded in perpetuity the Rights-of-Chase to the King of Spain. His Majesty accepted the Trust and commissioned the Marqués de Villaviciosa de Asturias to organise the great Sierra de Grédos, as well as the Picos de Europa in the Cantabrian chain, as "Royal Reserves"; the identical goatherds (our old friends) who had hitherto been the most deadly enemies of the ibex, being now transformed into their Royal guardians! No happier selection could have been made for it is no exaggeration to describe these lithe mountaineers as a specialised human type-bred during generations (like the ibex themselves) lightly to traverse regions so terribly rugged and abrupt that even the strongest and most active of normal build can only crawl. [Appropriately may here be interpolated a remark of theirs which was so apposite as to remain graven on my memory after all these decades. The incident occurred on that supreme afternoon when at last, with hungry eyes, we marked half-ascore of ibex feeding beneath some beetling precipices where the game could obviously be approached from above. Bitter memories of labour in vain, of dozens of disappointments, vanished as a dream, with this vision of a final triumph. It was short-lived. Our wild men proposed that they alone should undertake the enterprise. "You alone, why?" "Because," came the reply, "Ustedes no tienen pies"="Your Excellencies have no feet. You could not reach that Risco before dark." Alas, they knew; but it came as a bit of a shock, for in these days we rather fancied ourselves!] The happy change occurred in 1905, and the results of Royal protection have been equally surprising and gratifying. From the start, the scant remnant of ibex increased and multiplied so rapidly that within the first few years of absolute "Sanctuary," their numbers were approximately estimated to have reached between 200 and 300 head, while shortly thereafter it was even deemed desirable to pick out some of the older and redundant rams. Within less than ten years the ibex on Grédos were reckoned at 500: and here it will be appropriate briefly to glance back at the tiny nucleus from which those hundreds had emanated. Forty years ago, or at the period of our earlier expeditions, there might still remain at the utmost one hundred head of ibex, all told. By 1896 that sorry remnant had been reduced by one-half-fifty was the estimate we gave in Unexplored Spain (p. 141), a figure which was confirmed by Dr Angel Cabrera, as cited in his standard work, Fauna Iberica, p. 320 (Madrid, 1914). 1914). So rapid, after that, was the process of extirpation that by 1905, when Royal Control was established, it was virtually all but an accomplished fact. Certainly at that date no more than a few units remained-indeed Dr Cabrera gives the census as "One old ram, seven females, and three or four kids." That, however, in view of the subsequent increase, may have been an under-estimate and, of |