CHAPTER XIII 
THE SPANISH IBEX 
In the Spanish ibex Spain possesses not only a species peculiar 
to the Peninsula, but a game-animal of the first rank. 
Fortunate it is that this sentence can be written in the present 
tense instead of (as but a few years ago appeared probable) in the 
past. 
Since we first wrote on this subject in 1893 the Spanish ibex 
has passed through a crisis that came perilously near extirpation. 
Up to the date named, and for several years later, none of the 
great landowners of Spain, within whose titles were included the 
vast sierras and mountain-ranges that form its home, had cherished 
either pride or interest in the Spanish wild-goat. Some were 
dimly conscious of its existence on their distant domains; but 
that was all. Not a scintilla of reproach is here inferred. For 
these mountain-ranges are so remote and so elevated as often to 
be almost inaccessible—or accessible only by organised expedition 
independent of local aid. Their sole human inhabitants are a 
segregated race of goat-herds, every man of them a born hunter, 
accustomed from time immemorial to kill whenever opportunity 
offered—and that regardless of size, sex, or season. That the 
ibex should have survived such persecution by hardy moun- 
taineers bespeaks their natural cunning. Their survival was due 
to two causes—first, the antiquated weapons employed, but, more 
important, the astuteness of the game and the “defence” it 
enjoyed in the stupendous precipices and snow-fields of those 
slerras, great areas of which remain inaccessible even to specialised 
goat-herds, save only for a limited period in summer. 
But no wild animal, however astute or whatever its “ de- 
fence,” can withstand for ever perpetual, skilled human persecu- 
tion. During the early years of the present century the Spanish 
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