The young are born in April and soon follow their dams--graceful creatures with unduly large hind-legs, like brown lambs. One is the usual number, though two are not infrequent. The kid remains with its dam upwards of a year--that is, till after a second family has been born. At that season (April to May) the ibex are changing their coats. The males lose the flowing beard and assume a hoary piebald colour, contrasting with the dark of legs and quarters. The muzzle is warm cream colour and the lower leg (below knee) prettily marked with black and white. On the knee is a callosity, or round patch of bare hardened skin. The horns of yearling males are thicker and heavier than those of adult females. Though the hill-shepherds in summer drive out their herds of goats to pasture on the higher sierra, where they may come in contact with their wild congeners, yet no interbreeding has ever been known; nor can the wild ibex be domesticated. Wild kids that are captured invariably die before attaining maturity. The horns of the herdsmen's goats differ in type from those of the ibex, which can never have been the progenitor of the race of goats now domesticated in Spain. Though the personal aroma of an ibex-ram is strong--rather more offensive than that of a vulture--yet no trace of this remains after cooking. The flesh is brown and tough, but devoid of any special flavour or individuality--that is, when subjected to the rude cookery of the camp. CHAPTER XIV SIERRA MORÉNA IBEX The tourist speeding along the Andalucian railways and surveying from his carriage-window the olive-clad and altogether mild-looking slopes of the Sierra Moréna, will form no adequate, much less a romantic, conception of that great mountain-system of which he sees but the southern fringe. Yet, in fact, the train hurries him past within a few leagues of perhaps the finest big-game country in Spain--of mountain-solitudes and a thousand jungled corries, wherein lurk fierce wolves and giant boars, together with one of the grandest races of red deer yet extant in Europe. True, the Sierra Moréna lacks both the altitudes and the stupendous rock-ridges that characterise all other Spanish sierras--from Neváda and Grédos to the Pyrenees. It consists rather of a congeries of jumbled mountain-ranges of no great elevations, but of infinite ramification, and lacking (save at two points only) those bolder features that most appeal to the eye. Were the Spanish ranges all of the contour of Moréna, the name "Sierra" would not have applied. It is, moreover, a unilateral range--a buttress, banked up on its northern side by the high-lands of La Mancha, resembling in that respect the well-known Drakensberg of the Transvaal.