The first bear, or rather its ghostly heat signature, appears almost as soon as we start looking through the thermal binoculars. It’s before dawn, and we’ve pulled up to the crash barrier on a high and lonely road above the Xunceras river valley. Without the expensive piece of kit, nature guide José García Gonzalez tells me, we’d never be able to see these creatures in the dark. But there one is, visible through the high-tech lenses: a brown bear showing white against the black of the steep mountain slope opposite us.
As the sun comes up, we no longer need electronic wizardry to make out the scene before us: a primeval forest of oak and chestnut, broken by grass and scree, rising towards peaks cloaked by low cloud. From somewhere up there, we hear a wolf howl. I gasp, and García holds a finger up to quiet me, then points in the direction of an answering howl. Then another, and another.
Five call-and-answer howls ring out in quick succession along the invisible ridge lines. Shortly after that, a wolf emerges from cover, just perceptible to the naked eye as a shifting grey-on-grey shape against the rocks. Using another pricey bit of gear — asniper-grade digital scope with x125 magnification — Iwatch this phantasmic figure sit and yawn, and sniff the wind, and shake the morning drizzle off its fur, much like a domestic dog would.
When it vanishes behind the tree line again, García assures me that such a gorgeous sight isn’t common, even up here in the wilds of wolf country, in the Cantabrian Mountains, deep in Fuentes del Narcea, Degaña e
