3i6 SPORT IN EUROPE 



and in the brushwood, and are very difficult to find ; often have I been disappointed, 

 and only once successful. On this occasion I had walked for days without seeing a 

 single ram, though I had come across forty or fifty ewes with their young. It was 

 a scorching hot day, and I was resting on a rock on one of the peaks, below which was 

 a deep ravine, so bare that I thought it impossible for ibex to be there and not be 

 seen. In the middle of the gully, about 300 yards or more below me, there were a 

 few bushes of thin gorse round a big rock. As I was moving away, my gnarda dropped 

 a stone, which went rolling down a water-channel, when suddenly, from below the 

 bushes, up jumped an old ram with a cJiivo. Both the guarda and I went down like 

 a shot, and, as luck would have it, they never saw us, but moved slowly away, looking 

 in all directions, and disappeared under a huge tajo (perpendicular cliff) which 1 knew 

 well. I told the giiarda to stop where he was, and hurried along as fast as I could go 

 to a pass I thought they would take on the other side of a deep corrie below that cliff. 

 The wind was in the right direction, but I had not got within 150 yards of the pass 

 when I saw the horns of the ram appear from under a rock. I went on my stomach, 

 and crept downhill for twenty or thirty yards to some small rocks, the only shelter near 

 me, which I was fortunate enough to reach without being seen. The two rams 

 kept slowly moving on, stopping to look round now and again. The big one was 

 now behind a thin bush, and I waited till he was clear. My hands and arms ached 

 dreadfully from creeping, and I could not steady my rifle, but at last he gave me a 

 fine chance of a broadside shot and I fired. Away he went at the rate of fifty miles 

 an hour, flying over the rocks, and, on firing my second barrel from behind him, he 

 dropped down dead. Upon examination, however, I found that the 450 solid bullet 

 from my first barrel had gone through his lungs, and that my second shot had clean 

 missed him. 



I afterwards found that, among the thin gorse where the ibex first appeared, there 

 was a small cave which it was quite impossible to see from a distance. This ram's 

 horns measured about 23 inches, and he weighed 120 lbs. clean. 



Another spring, after a hard week's walking without seeing a imicho (ram), I was 

 resting to lunch after having stalked a ewe and young, and got what I thought was a 

 splendid shot with a kodak at not more than six or eight yards off, but which I had not 

 the satisfaction of seeing developed, as the guarda unfortunately dropped the camera 

 and broke the plates. I had walked to a spring, low down on the north-east side of 

 the sierra, so low that ibex are seldom seen there, and, on my return, I climbed along 

 the side of a small hill partly covered with gorse, locust-bean trees, and a few lentisco, 

 when suddenly I heard a crash through the trees, and that familiar noise of the rolling 



