278 Unexplored Spain 
hunting-dog, Frascuelo by name, after a straight-away run of 
five or six miles over the sun-dried plain, we fairly rode bold 
Reynard down and killed him. 
Six months after the publication of Wild Spain we received 
the following letter from H.R.H. the late Phillippe, Comte de 
Paris, the owner of the adjoining Coto del Rey :— 
June 17, 1893. 
Having read with the greatest pleasure and interest your description 
of the wild camels, it struck me that you may appreciate a photograph 
taken from nature of one of these independent inhabitants of the 
shores of Guadalquivir. I found that one could only look at them 
from a distance, and therefore the enclosed photographs may be of 
interest. They were taken three months ago by my nephew, Prince 
Henry of Orleans. My keepers had in the early morning separated this 
single animal from the herd, but it escaped from them about Marilopez at 
noon, and when we met with him near the Laguna de la Madre, and 
about a mile from the Coto del Rey, we had only to give him a last 
gallop to catch him. These camels spend great part of the year on ground 
of which I am either the owner or the tenant, and I do my best to 
protect them from the terrible poachers coming from Trebujena. In 
order to be able to do this more effectually, I bought yesterday from the 
heirs of the landowners who turned them out some seventy years ago, I 
think, all the claims they can have on these animals. 
We have recently been favoured by the present Comte de 
Paris with the latest details respecting the camels. In a note 
dated August 1910, H.R.H. writes :— 
For some time their numbers have been decreasing, and we no longer 
see great troops of them as we used to do eighteen years ago. The cause 
of their diminution is certainly the bitter war waged against them by 
poachers. The parts of the marisma frequented by the wild camels lie 
between the Coto del Rey on the north, the Coto Dofiana on the west, 
and the Guadalquivir on the south-east. The long deep channels of 
La Madre, however, interfere with their reaching the Coto Dofiana, and 
they chiefly graze in the marismas of Hinojos and Almonte. The plan 
pursued by the poachers is as follows :—Coming down from some of the 
little villages, they cross the river in small flat-bottomed boats in which 
they can creep along the shores to points where they have seen either the 
spoor or the animals themselves during the day. Then drawing near to 
the camels, under cover of the waning light, they are able to kill one or 
sometimes two, which they skin and disembowel on the spot. The flesh 
is cut up into pieces, sewn up in the skin, and, on returning to the river- 
bank, secreted beneath the flat bottom-boards of the boat, thereby evading 
