free download here - Michael Llewellyn-Smith

The Great Island
With flower of purple, bright and fair,
And leaf of softest down:
Well known that plant to mountain goat,
Should arrow pierce its shaggy coat.
Vergil was following Aristotle on the habits of the ibex. And it was
doubtless because of these great authorities, and Pliny, that the obscure
herb found its way into the mediaeval Bestiaries. ‘The WILD GOAT
(caprea)’ we read in T. H. White’s Book of Beasts, ‘has the following
peculiarities: that he moves higher and higher as he pastures; that he
chooses good herbs from bad ones by the sharpness of his eyes; that he
ruminates these herbs, and that, if wounded, he runs to the plant
dittany, after reaching which he is cured.’ But the bestiarist does not
mean by ‘wild goat’ specifically the Cretan ibex.
There is traditionally, then, a connection between those two Cretan
products, the ibex and the herb. Like the gorge itself, they are in the
process of being domesticated. Dittany which tends to grow in precipitous
and dangerous spots, used sometimes to cost the lives of Cretans
who climbed for it. But now there is enough easily accessible to deter
the foolhardy from risking their necks. The ibex, too, is accessible on
his preserves, the little islands of St Theodore and Dia, and in the
National Gardens at Athens. For only a short time ago he was in
danger of extinction. In the last century he was to be found as far west
as Mt Ida, and also on Antimelos in the Cyclades. But the assiduous
work of huntsmen drove him into the remotest ravines of the White
Mountains, so that during this century he has been found only in the
gorge of Samaria and the surrounding country and gorges.
The ibex is large, surprisingly heavily built for one so nimble, with a
reddish coat and horns that curve back in a long sweep over his
shoulders. The Cretans speak with awe of his surefooted course over
the mountain crags; but nimble as he is he could not escape the huntsmen,
who shot him not only for the tasty meat but also for the sport -
and went on shooting him after it was forbidden by law. The ibex is
now safe. Preservation has had its effect, and apart from those which
are kept on the island reserves, there are thought to be about 500 at
large in the gorge. The danger now is not that they should die out, but
rather that the race may degenerate through indiscriminate breeding
with ordinary domestic goats. There is no fear of the male goat mount-
ing the female ibex, for she runs too fast and escapes him. But the agrimi
can and does couple with the female goat.
The agrimi, an animal at once rapid, surefooted and unapproachable,
is monarch of the gorge of Samaria. Penned up in a small enclosure in
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