I’M ON A HIGH RACK built onto a 1985 Dodge pickup, glassing the desert country with a good view of the Davis Mountains, where I’ve hunted for aoudads and where the elk hunting is rumored to be good too. Neither of those critters is native to the area, but neither is the milk-white scimitar oryx I’m now hunting on the flats among the thorns and Spanish daggers.
In other words, I’m in Texas—West Texas, just south of Alpine, where in the 1970s local hunters and landowners learned that scimitar oryxes, which were declared extinct in their home range of North Africa in