With intense delight, but splitting headaches, we left the plague-spot at earliest dawn and set out for the mountain-land. For thirty odd miles our route traversed a highland plateau; a group of five great bustard, gasping in the noon-day heat, lay asleep so near the track that we tried a shot with ball. Farther north, near Medina del Campo, we had also observed these grand game-birds feeding on the ripening grapes in the vineyards. Packs of sand-grouse (_Pterocles arenarius_) with musical croak flew close around. Spanish azure magpies abounded wherever our route passed through wooded stretches, and we also observed doves, bee-eaters, stonechats, crested and calandra larks, ravens, and over some cork-oaks wheeled a serpent-eagle showing very white below. 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? [Illustration: "MINOR GAME"]