The Bale Mountains hold the largest stretch of alpine moorland in Africa, and more than half of the Ethiopian wolves left alive hunt across it in the open. The range stands in southeast Ethiopia, and its heart is the Sanetti Plateau, crossed above 4,000 metres by the highest all-weather road on the continent and topping out at Tullu Dimtu, 4,377 metres. The ground up there is frost-hardened grass and giant lobelias, plants that spend decades as a low rosette folded shut against the nightly frost, then send up one flower spike several metres tall, bloom once and die. The dead stalks stand for months afterwards, and the birds perch on them. At first light the wolves come out onto this: slender, copper-coloured, white at the throat, noses down, trotting over open ground a short way from where you stand. It is the surest place in Africa to see one.
What holds them here is under the grass. The giant mole-rat, a fist-heavy burrowing rodent found only in these mountains, lives on the Sanetti in thousands to the square kilometre and makes up almost everything a wolf eats. Off the southern rim the road takes you down into the Harenna forest, one of the largest cloud forests in Ethiopia, where mist moves between moss-hung trees and Arabica coffee grows wild in the shade. These slopes lie inside the plant's original home, and families gather beans from stands nobody planted. The bamboo down there hides the Bale monkey, which you are unlikely to see. Near the park headquarters the Gaysay grasslands roll between stands of Hagenia, where herds of mountain nyala, a spiral-horned antelope found only in these highlands, graze in the early light with warthog and bushbuck. Blue-winged geese work the plateau pools and wattled ibis the marshes. A tent pitched on the Sanetti above 4,000 metres gives you hard frost by morning and total silence once the wind drops. Out on the moor a wolf sits motionless over a heap of fresh soil, waiting for the animal underneath to come up.