One Heck Of A Ride

133 Chapter 14 Spain My Introduction To European Hunting M y friend Jimmy Standley was president of SCI’s Arizona chapter when he asked me to represent the chapter at the First World Hunting Congress. SCI founder C.J. McElroy was interested in forming ties with the CIC (the International Council for Game and Wildlife Conservation, Europe’s oldest hunters organization) and had arranged meetings in Spain and the United States for delegates from the two organizations. The European meetings held in Madrid in December 1983 were opened by Spain’s King Juan Carlos and included presentations of scientific papers by wildlife biologists from across Europe and displays of European hunting gear and trophies. More meetings were held in Las Vegas a month later, when SCI’s annual January convention in Nevada was extended an additional three days for the congress. I found it interesting how the formal meetings in Madrid overcame the differences in languages. Because speakers delivered their speeches in French, Italian, German, Spanish or English, delegates were given headphones linked to interpreters who simultaneously translated the SCI founder C.J. McElroy and his wife, Kathy, set off for a day’s hunting on Ricardo Medem’s estate in Spain speeches into the language of each listener. However, I was more interested in the hunting program McElroy and his administrative director Holt Bodinson had arranged for SCI’s delegates. My first European hunting excursion would be for Spanish red deer and mouflon on properties owned by Ricardo Medem, a John Deere Iberica executive and one of SCI’s international directors. After the meetings in Madrid, the delegation was transported south to Medem’s two estates in the Toledo Mountains in small European cars driven by Spanish university students hired to interpret and guide us. We stopped for lunch and a tour of the historic moated city of Toledo before continuing. There were thirty-six of us, and half went to an estate called El Castano. I was among the group that went across the mountain to an estate called Las Arispe. A local guide was assigned to each hunter, and we hunted “safari style,” meaning we drove around the estate in trucks with high seats in their open backs and stopped often to glass openings on the brush-covered hillsides around us. When a suitable animal was spotted, we went after it on foot. The red deer “roar” (rut) had ended, but we sometimes could hear stags that hadn’t yet gotten the message. (Unlike elk, their close cousins that whistle and bugle, the roars of red deer sound like domestic bulls bawling.) There were lots of stags around, but they were easily spooked and would run off the instant they saw us peeking over a ridge two hundred yards away. After I shot a good stag the second day I could have hunted a wild boar (we found several places where they had been digging up roots as California’s feral boars do) but before leaving home I’d chosen to hunt a mouflon instead.