Towards evening the track began to ascend through the lower defiles of the great cordillera that now pierced the heavens ahead. Presently we entered pinewoods, resonant at dusk with the raucous voices of millions of wingless grasshoppers or locusts (we know not their precise name) that live high up in pines. Never before had we heard such strident voice in an insect.
At 4000 feet we encamped beneath the pines by a lovely trout-stream. This was the rendezvous whereat by arrangement we met with our old friends the ibex-hunters of Almanzór--savage perhaps to the eye, yet beyond all doubt radiantly glad to welcome back the foreigners after a lapse of years. No mere greed of dollars inspired that enthusiasm, but solely the bond of a common passion that bound us all--that of the hunter. It was, however, but sorry hearing to listen to the reports they told us around the camp-fire. Everywhere the ibex were yearly growing scarcer, dwindling to an inevitable vanishing-point, former haunts already abandoned--or, we should rather say, swept clean. Where but a score of years before, 150 ibex had been counted in a single _montería_, our friends reckoned that exactly a dozen survived. One remark especially struck us. "There remained," with glee our friends assured us, "one magnificent old goat, a ram of twelve years, out there on the crags of Almanzór." _ONE!_ To _one_ sole big head had it dwindled?
The valley of the Tagus divides two geological periods, and perhaps at one time divided Europe from a retiring Africa. Marked differences distinguish the fauna on either side of the river, and that of the north (with its 10,000 feet altitude) promised reward worthy the labours of investigation. Not a yard of that great mountain-land of Grédos has been trodden by British foot (save our own) since the days of Wellington. Hence it was an object with us to secure, not only ibex heads, but specimens of the smaller mammalia that dwell in those heights. Our mountain friends assembled round the camp-fire--twenty-five in all--each promised to take up this unaccustomed quest and to regard as game every hitherto unconsidered _bicho_ of the hills, whether feathered, furred, or scaled. If ibex failed us, at least a harvest in such minor game we meant to assure.[34]