The frost and fog continuing, on the third morning the men proposed we should move lower down the hill, to some cortijo they knew of, thereat to await milder weather.
By this time, however, the cold had penetrated deep into throat and chest, which felt raw and inflamed, leaving the writer almost speechless. We therefore decided to abandon the whole venture, and struck camp, still wrapt in that opaque shroud of driving sleet.
Crossing over the highest ridge of the sierra, between crags of which only the bases were visible, we descended on the south side; here we organised a “drive” amid the jungles that clothe the lower slopes. Two lynxes and three pigs were reported as seen by the beaters. Only one of the latter, however, came to the gun, and proved to be a sow, bigger by half than any wild-pig we had then seen in Spain. We regretted having no means of weighing this beast, which we estimated at well over 200 lbs. clean. A remarkable cast antler picked up at this spot carried four points on the main beam, as well as four on top—length 34⅛ inches, by 5¾ inches basal circumference.
The “defences” of the ibex in the Sierra Quintána lie among some fairly big crags forming the eastern and southern faces of the range. The shooting at that time was free; hence the goats were never left in peace by the mountaineers, who all carried guns, and used them whenever a chance presented itself. The result was that the few surviving goats had become severely nocturnal in habit, spending the entire day in caves and crevices in the faces of sheer and naked precipices.
Some of their eyries appeared absolutely inaccessible to any creature unendowed with wings. One cave, though it had no visible approach, was situate only some eight or ten feet above a ledge in the perpendicular rock-face. One morning at dawn two ibex having been seen to enter this cave, at once a couple of the wiry goat-herds thought to reach them from the ledge below, one lad actually climbing on to the other’s shoulders as he stood on that narrow shelf. In its rush to escape, however, the leading ibex upset the precarious balance, and the poor lad was precipitated among the tumbled rocks in the abyss below.
Riding homewards through inhospitable brush-clad hills towards the railway (forty miles away), we put up one night at a village named, with unconscious irony, Cardeña Real. In the small hours broke out another terrific disturbance—shrieks, squeals, barking—all the dogs gone mad. The night was pitch-dark with rain falling in torrents; but next morning we ascertained that a pack of wolves had carried off the landlord’s pigs from their stye, not fifteen yards away—indeed, three mangled porkers lay piled up against the wall of our hovel.
The contingency of pigs being worse off than ourselves had not previously occurred to us. Thus ended, in a cycle of catastrophe, our first wrestle with Capra hispánica in Moréna; but initial failure only served to stimulate further efforts later on. Winter, moreover, is no season for camping in these high sierras; May is more favourable, but the early autumn is best of all.
At this period (1901) the surviving ibex had fallen to a mere handful. Fortunately here, as elsewhere in Spain, there was aroused, within the next five years, the tardy interest of Spanish landowners to save them.
