“We’re deep in the untouched part of Asturias here,” says Fernando Abarquero Zorilla, my guide. Specifically, we’re in the Fuentes del Narcea, Degaña e Ibias Natural Park, in northwestern Spain. We’re looking across a deep, narrow valley, to where a tangle of green beech, birch and oak trees rise steeply up from the Ibias River. The slopes are punctuated by huge slabs and sharp spikes of limestone rock.
It’s exactly the kind of landscape where the animal we’re here to track, the elusive Cantabrian brown bear, might be found. And when the scent of a dead boar rises through the trees, it seems we may be in luck. “It smells fresh,” says Zorilla. “That’s a good sign.” It’s not that a brown bear would kill a boar, he explains. A wolf may have seen to that. But although they are mostly vegetarian, when brown bears do eat meat, they tend to scavenge. Zorilla’s head jerks up as a flash of brown crosses a slope ahead of us, but it’s a false alarm. “A chamois,” he whispers, putting down his binoculars.