One Heck Of A Ride

139 My Introduction To European Hunting Gredos ibex. When Juan measured them, he said I’d taken another silver medal animal, and he was almost correct. The official score lacked just five- eighths of an inch for a silver medal. FromGranada, we drove north past Barcelona to the village of Tirvia in the foothills of the Pyrenees, where I collected a Pyrenean chamois and had time to spare for catching my flight out of Barcelona. Juan said we’d been lucky to find a high silver medal chamois in less than a day. I replied that it had nothing to do with luck, it was his amazing organizational skills. Although the measurements of the horns on my animals were nice to know, what impressed me was how he was able to produce in less than a week everything I’d gone to Spain to hunt. All of my animals were taken in fair-chase hunts. We wasted no time and climbed every mountain we needed to climb. Looking back at that trip a dozen years later, it was more like a marathon than a hunt. In just five days, we drove more than 2,000 miles, stayed in several nice hotels, and shot three record-book ibex and a chamois. From Barcelona, I flew to London and met my wife who had traveled from California to join me. With her at the airport was Kevin Downer, the outfitter and guide for my hunts for Reeves muntjac and two types of sika deer. After lunch, Kevin drove us to our home for the next two days, Juan Toquero and Author with a Pyrenean Chamois the Copthorne Hotel in West Sussex near where I would hunt a Japanese sika deer. Marty and I were up early and were ready when Kevin arrived the next morning. All the farms and homes we saw as he drove us through the countryside were in the old English style, and we both were totally surprised when he drove up to a large, American-style log home and announced we had arrived at our destination. The residents of the log home owned the 3,000-acre high-fenced estate and were great people, and we enjoyed visiting and talking with them. After I shot my Japanese sika deer, they asked us to join them for a delicious lunch. Marty and I spent our second night at the Copthorne and were up even earlier the next morning for the drive to Woburn Abbey for a Manchurian sika deer. Kevin said we had to go onto the estate like undercover guys at first light, find our game, shoot it, clean up any blood, and get out before the tourists began arriving at 10:00 AM for touring and watching the game on the estate, and that’s what we did. It was more like a military operation than a hunt. When we sat down to a great lunch at the Woburn Estate’s dining room before checking into the Woburn Inn where Marty and I would spend our third night in England on this trip, Marty photographed me enjoying a v-e-d-d-y British tea. Seeing that photo still makes us smile. Over lunch, we talked about Woburn and its role in preserving the world’s rarest deer. (It began when the eleventh Duke of Bedford obtained eighteen Père David deer from various European zoos and released them on Woburn Abbey between 1894 and 1903. The Woburn herd saved the species from extinction when every Père David deer in China’s Imperial Hunting Preserve — the only survivors of the species in the wild — were killed and eaten during the 1901 Boxer Revolution. Since then, offspring from Woburn’s original eighteen Père David deer have