The Last Agrimi.

That is how many were left in 1960. Through the German occupation they were the only meat in these mountains, and the men hiding here ate what there was.

In 1962, the gorge was made a national park, mostly for the kri-kri. The village of Samaria stood inside it. Its last inhabitants left that year so the park could exist.

A village was emptied so an animal could survive. It worked. Today there are about 2,000.

Nothing hunts it anymore. But that is not the same as safe.

It is being bred out instead, hybridized with ordinary farm goats, inside the park itself. And underneath that, the oldest fact: the agrimi was never wild to begin with. The molecular evidence says it descends from the first domesticated goats of the eastern Mediterranean, stock that got loose around 8000 BC. It escaped the farm. It is being walked back in, one leaf at a time.

Its picture is on rental cars, hotel signs, bottle labels. There are more kri-kri on Crete’s packaging than on its mountains.

And this week, a village did the opposite of what Samaria did.

The gorge has been closed repeatedly these past weeks, most recently yesterday, when forecast rainfall crossed its limits. Agia Roumeli sits at the southern exit. It has no road. The gorge is its only way in and its whole income. So the residents voted to unlock the gate themselves and keep it open through October 3.

A village with no road and one season was told to choose between the rules and the year.

Everything in this gorge has learned the tourist economy. Even the animal it was built to protect.

The last wild one has probably already been born.

Mount Gigilos, 2,080 meters, directly above the gorge.

Many have walked Samaria. Almost nobody has stood on top of it. The trail leaves from the Omalos plateau: seven hours, 10 kilometers, 1,100 meters of climb, through cedar forest and out onto open limestone, the last stretch done with your hands. From the summit, the whole gorge lies underneath you.

As I write, Crete is under a red warning, the highest EMY issues, for heavy rain and thunderstorms over Chania and Rethymno, running to Sunday morning. Samaria closes at the end of October anyway. Gigilos sometimes holds into November. Not this year.

Nobody argues harder than I do that this island needs a season longer than 10 weeks. This is the exception, and the mountain decides. Go in May.

If you do see a kri-kri up there, do nothing. Do not close the distance. Do not offer it anything. Being allowed to watch from where you stand is the gift.

The Making of the Cretan Landscape by Oliver Rackham and Jennifer Moody, long out of print. A botanist and an archaeologist who walked this island for decades, then took apart the story everyone tells about it: that Crete is a ruined paradise, deforested and grazed to death. It is not, and they prove it. Their working rule is the finest sentence I know about this place: “One should not assert that goats eat everything without having watched goats.” For a century we blamed the goat. Now the goat is the one going, and not in any way that looks like damage.

When did you last see a wild animal that was afraid of you? Write and tell me. I am collecting what people have lost, and I reply.