At 8.00 am on the morning of 18th July, I left my campsite and walked 3km to the nearby village of Es Bordes, at about 900m. The plan was to hike, first on the road then off-piste, up to the rocky crest at 2450m that forms the border between France and Spain, looking for new colonies of Erebia on the way.
In Es Bordes I said '¡Holà!' to a scraggy little dog sitting on the pavement. That was a bad move. The dog refused to leave me from that moment onward. Nothing I could say or do, short of cruelty, could stop him coming on walkies with me. Here he is a couple of kilometres along the road from Es Bordes, just checking I was still there:
I decided to call him Pongo. Was he abandoned? Had he escaped from one of the many negligent Spanish dog-owners? What would I do with him when I got back to the campsite? I felt Pongo was now my responsibility.
I turned off the road and set off through 3km ofuphill woodland, without a track, using the streams and a compass to guide me. Tough going, and I was glad of Pongo's company, though as he turned out to be a female I renamed her Ponga. That was where we met the wild boars (Ponga was terrified). We carried on, scrabbling up scree and rocky outcrops and finally reached the true upland Erebiaville. Here is Ponga looking back down the hill at the boar wood:
And here is the boar wood we climbed through:
This is rather higher up, just above quite a promising patch with Erebia triaria, meolans, epiphron and oeme. Es Bordes is in the distant valley beyond the hills:
By this time I was treating Ponga as my own dog.
We crossed the ridge just into the French side and then followed it along. There were loads of Erebia sthennyo, but I couldn't get any pictures because Ponga kept coming up to see what I was doing and she didn't seem to understand Spanish, French or English.
Helped by Ponga, I met a couple of rather lovely French girls, one of whom turned out to be a vet. She examined Ponga and concluded she was probably not a stray, nor abandoned. She was most likely simply 15km away from her home, up a high mountain with a stranger. The vet gave her a little sausage and then another group of French passed, who also gave her food. As she was getting fed up with me standing around trying vainly to photograph Erebia, Ponga attached herself to the French group and trotted off down the other side of the mountain into France, encouraged by them. The vet said she was going to the same French refuge as that group so she would keep an eye on Ponga. At first I thought I was relieved of my responsibility and at last I was able to get some pictures of sthennyo, and a little later lefebvrei. I came down the mountain a different (easier but longer) way, photographing Pyrgus species and some blues on the way, and wandered home alone. In all I walked over 40km that day.
But I couldn't get Ponga out of my mind. The next night there was a ferocious storm and I wondered where she was. It would be all too easy for her to get stuck on a ledge or in a ravine trying to get home; or she might have been impounded in France or taken home by another complete stranger. The only lowland way home for her (if she had a home) was via the busy main road from France to Spain. I was really very worried for her. In fact, I could hardly keep my mind on the butterflies.
The next evening it was raining. I packed up my tent ready to go home but I couldn't leave without doing something about Ponga. So I walked back to Es Bordes to enquire about the dog and tell someone where she might be. It was an empty village and I met no one except a small group of children who didn't know Ponga. Then, just as I left the village, I heard a noise behind me, turned round, and ...
She leapt up at me, licked my face, then said, 'Right, so where are we going today?'
I walked up the hill a bit, down the hill, and still I couldn't get rid of her. She just wanted to go for another walkies.
In the end I gave her to the street children and told them to play with her for a while, while I ran off. Thank heavens I took the trouble to go back to Es Bordes, or I would still be wondering what became of little Ponga and whether I had abandoned her to die in the mountains.
I know some forum members get fed up with dogs, or more usually, with their owners (and most of those members probably haven't read this far) but they are remarkable creatures. Ponga must have covered at least 20km over the wildest terrain, without map or compass, to get back to her little village, where no one seemed to know her.
Guy
But don't, because he always makes me smile.
