One Heck Of A Ride

136 My Introduction To European Hunting time a Partition had failed. It killed the chamois, but it should have shot through that small animal Author with Cantabrian chamois in 1996. It was collected near Spain’s northern border on his second trip to the country without coming apart. The gamekeeper packed the billy off the mountain and removed and salted its cape and skullcap at the house. He joined us for dinner that night, and when his plate of shrimp grilled in their shells arrived, everyone at the table except Juan was surprised to see him eat everything, including the shells as if they were potato chips. I declined when he said I should try it. We left early the next morning, driving south on the same roads we’d driven two days earlier. Everything had to be packed in the Range Rover just right to make everyone and everything fit. With three passengers in the back seat and two in front, plus all of our bags and my gun case, there wasn’t room for anything else. We were traveling on mountain roads when Lad urgently needed to get out of the truck at least twice in pouring rain. His stomach problems may have been caused by his breakfast of greasy deep- fried bread sticks. Nothing would keep him from hunting, though. Again, we left our wives at a hotel and drove to the end of a road in a canyon, this time with a different gamekeeper, and began hiking. It took us three hours to reach the top of one of the high ridges in the Gredos Mountains. Fog was drifting in and out when it parted slightly and we suddenly saw five ibex feeding below us. Two were males and one had long, heavy horns. Lad and I had flipped a coin earlier to determine who would shoot first and I’d won the toss. (I wasn’t surprised to win after finding a horseshoe and tossing it over my shoulder while we were hiking.) When Juan said, “Shoot it,” I already had my rifle resting on a rock and was starting to squeeze the trigger when the gamekeeper said something in Spanish. “Hold it. Wait!” Juan said. The billy was no more than ninety yards away and I had a dead-steady rest. A heated discussion in Spanish ensued between Juan and the gamekeeper over whether the ibex was on another estate. Juan was adamant that the animal was on our side of the boundary. It didn’t matter, because the ibex drifted out of range while they argued. I was frustrated but I didn’t want to jeopardize Juan’s position by shooting it. There was nothing to do but find a place to eat the lunches we were carrying in our packs and then try to find another billy on our side of the boundary. After lunch, the fog kept moving in and out with only brief breaks when we could see to shoot a few hundred yards. When we reached a canyon where the gamekeeper believed there would be ibex, the fog obscured everything around us. Determined to beat the weather, we used the fog to climb another four hundred yards higher undetected by anything that might be on our side of the mountain, and it paid off. When the rain came and the fog lifted, Juan and the gamekeeper found a herd of ibex with a dozen billys about 150 yards away and they had no idea we were above them. For close to an hour, whenever the fog lifted, we watched that herd and tried to determine which billy had the largest horns. When we finally agreed which animal I