Sometimes nothing happens – other times things move fast when you are hunting. John A. Laursen experienced the latter on a hunt in Spain for Beceite ibex.
The drive from Valencia up to the La Espadella hunting area takes less than two hours. A delicious but quick lunch is eaten in the dining room, which is mostly like a cross between a zoological museum and a hunting lodge, where there is hardly room on the walls for an extra buck mount on a stained wooden plate. Then it’s off. Pablo is impatient. The middle-aged, energetic hunting guide has many years of experience with ibex hunting, and he knows if anyone that if you only set aside a couple of days to shoot a Beceite Ibex on the Iberian Peninsula, you shouldn’t waste time.
Watch out!
The ibexes run up over the hill. Pablo has quickly seen that there is a good buck among the goats and kids. John is handed the rifle. Now it goes upwards between stinging bushes, oak trees and pine trees. The 49-year-old self-employed craftsman follows Pablo closely. It is important to put your feet right. You can’t avoid noise from the rolling stones, but just the thought of a sprained ankle is an almost unbearable horror scenario right now. John has long wanted an Ibex. Together with his good friend, Peter Fussing, he is now in the middle of the ibexes’ home range. 100,000 ha of hunting ground is available to hunters. It sounds like a lot – and it is!
Glimpse of a herd of ibexes
John is panting. So is Pablo. They have reached the top of the hill. The ibexes, they can hear, are in full gallop down the back of the mountainside. Then the sound stops. Pablo quickly throws his backpack on a stone. His modest English does not allow him to explain further, but John has understood the unmistakable hint. He kneels down, puts the rifle on the backpack and brings his eye up to the rifle scopes. Just like to mentally prepare himself. He has only seen the herd of ibexes in a glimpse. Where are they now. Pablo scouts, while sweat trickles down his forehead. There! Almost at the bottom of a valley, they stand and look up at the hunters. Then they start running up the opposite mountainside. The distance is between 150 and 200 meters. Pablo whistles. The animals run on but suddenly stop again to make sure.
Rutting
In seconds, the reticle finds the lone buck that is in the herd. The other eight to nine attentive animals are just extras right now. The buck is standing sideways. With a slightly lowered head. He is looking more forward than over at the hunters. The ibexes are in rut in November, and afterwards the hunters talk about the buck almost standing with his snout up the rear end of a goat, who was probably soon ready to mate. As long as the goats didn’t flee, he wouldn’t go anywhere either. To John’s great luck. His index finger has long moved slowly towards his own body in what he experiences as an eternity, when the shot thunders. The echo in the mountains is clear. The buck falls on its side, rolls once and lies completely still. John immediately repeats but can clearly see that bullet number two can take a day off.
Magnificent specimen of a trophy
A Spanish helper pulls the goat down the mountainside. Pablo’s black terrier suddenly becomes very possessive and has to be smacked a couple of times for not getting in the way of the hunters both during the photography and during the dragging down to the paved road. It is a magnificent specimen of a Beceite ibex. A strong and heavy male animal, which has exactly the age a trophy animal should have. The horns also have the backward bend that makes it as a trophy something close to the perfect and aesthetically most complete trophy you can imagine. John is happy, but he admits that it almost went too fast. Less than two hours after the hunt started, he is back in the dining room for a cold beer. It’s not that easy every time, but the very fact that the ibexes are in rut has clearly meant lots of animals on the move and thus a faster location of the coveted bucks. Just call it luck, but you don’t have to forsake it!
Would you also like to hunt Ibex or other game in Spain?
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Text and photo: Troels Romby Larsen