GREY on the Wing

Hands clutching the wheel of a large, lumbering vehicle whose vintage and purpose partially prompted the invention of "powering steering," disengaged the clutch and applied the brakes, bringing it to a stop.

- Jack Ballard

"We'd better give them a head start," he ," Carl muttered, squinting at the pickup truck ahead of us. "I need to get a run at it."

It consisted of a two-track trail, the likes of which are ubiquitous in the dry foothills of Idaho and Oregon favored by chukar partridge, though our wait took place many times zones and a hemisphere away in South Africa. The departing pickup clawed its way up a dusty trail littered with flinty stones, headed for a lofty plateau drooping with a broken escarpment of ledges and rimrocks. Yellowed tufts of grass jostled with occasional dots of fading green deciduous shrubs on the landscape. Above, blue sky stretched endlessly to each point of the compass, save for a line of thin, languid clouds barely visible on the faraway western horizon.

After a few moments, Carl released the clutch and pressed assertively on the accelerator. The singular carriage careened up the trail, jouncing its occupants and coupled to its rear bumper, a swaying trailer crammed with canines. Perhaps unique among hunting vehicles on earth, our transportation consisted of a very old military ambulance, a 1950's era Land Rover, converted for carrying would-be bird shooters and all the kit necessary for a properly civilized hunt.

The bouncing abated atop the Stormberg Plateau. It extends on a northeasterly axis from the interior of the Eastern Cape province in South Africa to Lesthoto and just beyond. Its elevation extends from 5,000 to 8,000 feet above sea level, a "mountain" range consisting of innumerable canted faces, thin valleys and lofty plateaus. The only dinosaur fossils ever discovered in South Africa were fetched from these flinty hills.