THE BEAR HUNT OF SPAIN. 
195 
bear, announced by Yirgil, who will yet be one of these days found 
on some snowy mountain-top in the interior of this immense con- 
tinent, as we have already recovered in Algeria the African Stag, 
mentioned eighteen hundred years ago by the same Swan of Man- 
tua, and so long denied by official science. 
The kings of Spain, who have always honored and cultivated the 
chase, are the only hunters who have regular arrangements for bear 
hunting, and have chased this beast with horn and cry like the 
wild boar and the stag. Alphonso, the eleventh of the name, who 
has written a celebrated treatise on venery, declares that he pre- 
fers the bear hunt to all others. There is mention in this treatise 
of bears taken after five days and nights of uninterrupted chase. 
Th" ^ourse was managed like that of the ten-prong stag, by means 
of relays. The dogs of the royal pack had issued from a race of 
gray dogs of the mountain exclusive to the peninsula, the ances- 
tors probably of the present famous shepherd dogs of the Pyre- 
nees. 
The death fight of the bear is always a drama of moving pas- 
sages, and largely watered with blood. As the bear does not kill 
the dead, the man in ambush has the resource of abusing this gen- 
erosity of the animal by casting himself to the earth and counter- 
feiting death. It is only necessary in this case to hold one’s breath 
perfectly, and to play one’s part as a corpse to the end, for the 
bear is a beast of nice senses, to whom it is not sufficient for you to 
say that you are dead, to inspire him with faith in your assertions ; 
the bear will smell a body close so as to assure himself of the re- 
ality of the decease by his nose, by his eyes, by his hands. It has 
fared ill with some who were acquainted with the stratagem, for 
not showing enough malleability under the paw of the examiner — • 
for not allowing themselves to be turned and fumbled with gra- 
ciously. Another, on the contrary, once perished for having shown 
too much co-operation in the affair ; the bear having at his dispo- 
sition a human body which rolled so well, amused himself with 
very gently rolling it to the edge of a precipice, and giving it a 
plunge of 1200 feet. 
Argotes, of Molina, relates that in one of these august hunts, at 
which the Emperor of Germany and King Philip II. assisted, a 
