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15 THE SAME BLAZE of dawn that broke over the Painted Desert east of Cameron splashed over the wall of my room and brought me out of bed. I went to the window and looked out on the canyon of the Little Colorado. The wall opposite dropped from the rim sheer and straight, like the side of a red box. The distant horizon across the desert was still a dark line of cliffs against the rising sun. I dressed in a hurry and knocked on Brown's door. In minutes we joined Don Guadagni downstairs and went in for breakfast with the Richardsons . In the lobby we found our Hollywood friends ready to follow us to the field in their car, but Brown suggested they ride with one of us. With gassing up, checking tires, and unloading Don's car a bit to give him room to bounce around on a rough road, it seemed we'd never get off. With it all, we still got on the road by half past eight. Hubert led the way in his big Packard, with Brown as passenger. I followed with the company Buick, carrying Adelle Davis and her husband. Don in his little Ford came on all by himself. We negotiated the first bench and a series of ridges beyond and dropped into a big dry wash. Sand flew back from the Packard's wheels. The Buick's wheels churned the soft sand like paddle wheels. In the mirror I could see Don's little Ford chugging along behind. Don was grinning broadly; he had experienced this sort of driving in the Big Bend country and realized its trickiness. The wash swung around a bend, widened, narrowed, began to fork in the face of a rising bench. The going was neither better nor worse than on the day of my first wild ride here, but a good bit easier to handle than it had been with my old Harley and its cumbersome sidecar. Surviving 88 all hazards of rock and sand, the procession finally climbed out on one of the low benches below the cliffs near Dinosaur Canyon. The weathered rocks with their leering faces stood all around us as Hubert and Brown bumped to a stop. So stopped we all. Brown climbed out of Hubert's car, picked up his tools, and headed for a low hill of red sandy clay, followed by the rest of us. There were no signs of digging, but here, Brown said, was the place from which the original Protosuchus had come. He explained that we would work around the sides of the hill, in hope of finding another of the little eighteen-inch crocodiles. Our guests were given crooked awls and a paint brush each but cautioned to go slowly if they ran into any sign of fossils. "The bones will be quite small, chalky white, and soft," Brown told them. We all worked quietly for an hour or so. The sun got higher ... and hotter. But once, when I rested my eyes by turning them away from the glare, I noticed a tiny plume of cloud beginning to form around the highest peak of the San Francisco Mountains, sixty miles to the southwest. Brown and Hubert uncovered a few tiny bone fragments, Protosudzus ribs. The small discovery stirred everyone to fresh efforts. Brown carefully cleared an area around his find, but there was no more of the little fellow's skeleton to be seen. Presently he sighed, picked up his tools, and suggested we stop all this for a bit and prospect instead for sandwiches. "There's no use spending more time on this hill," he said. "Maybe we can find a better spot after we're fed." We got our lunch boxes from the cars and withdrew to the shade of one of the nearby rock formations, where a hideous grin etched across the face of an opposing pillar mocked our morning's efforts. As we found seats and leaned back against the rocks and started to eat, a mumed sound reverberated across the desert, like the rumble of a distant cannon. We looked toward the sound, toward the San Francisco peaks. A formidable thunderhead filled the western sky. It had built up around the mountains until they were completely hidden by the ominous black cloud. As we watched, it drifted eastward across the desert. We stared, fascinated, as a sheet of rain drew a curtain across the benches beyond the Little Colorado...

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