"The Aardvark (Orycteropus afer) is the only living member of the order Tubulidentata — a single species in a single genus in a single family in a single order. No close living relatives. It is nocturnal, solitary, and rarely seen. Its tongue reaches forty-five centimetres and is coated in sticky saliva. It consumes up to fifty thousand termites and ants in a single night. Its burrows are used by at least sixty-six documented species after the aardvark moves on. The author notes that he has been writing 'large burrow, origin uncertain' in the margins of other animals' field entries for the duration of this volume. The origin is not uncertain. He had not been awake at the right time."
The first dedicated field note on the aardvark began with an admission.
"The author has not written about the aardvark because the author has not seen the aardvark. The aardvark works at night. The author does not. This explains the gap in the record but does not justify it."
He had found the fresh earth at first light — a new excavation at the drainage line, the loose red soil still damp at its edges, the powerful claw marks in the wall of the opening that belonged to something that had been here an hour ago and had gone underground before the camp was awake. He crouched at the entrance for some time, reading what the marks told him, before turning to the burrow behind his tent that had been there since his first morning and had been attributed, in the margin of the baboon entry, to warthog.
He put his head torch into the baboon-entry burrow and looked.
Warthog scratches on the upper walls, yes. But the excavation itself — the dimensions, the depth, the angle of descent — was not warthog work. A warthog uses burrows it finds. The animal that dug this had different claws and different reasons. He found, at the entrance: a barn owl primary feather. Three metres in: the papery remains of a python shed, partial. At the edge of the entrance, in the soft soil where the moisture came up: the small paired prints of a mongoose that had been in and out several times.
He had been camped next to this burrow for eleven days. He had written "warthog" in the margin and moved on.
He wrote: "Burrow: aardvark construction. Current tenants: barn owl (upper chamber, confirmed feather). Python (shed, lower section, confirmed). Mongoose (entrance area, prints, multiple visits). Previous tenant: warthog (wall scratches). Builder: absent. Author's previous attribution: incorrect."
He made a list of the other species documented using aardvark burrows. The list reached sixty-six before the references became repetitive and he stopped. He read it back.
"The aardvark digs," he wrote. "It moves on. The neighbourhood moves in."
He was at the waterhole at dawn on the third morning when the aardvark came back.
Not to the burrow near camp — to the fresh excavation at the drainage line. He heard it before he saw it: a rhythmic displacement of soil, the sound of significant force applied with specific purpose. Then the shape of it in the early light — the long pig-like snout sweeping the ground, the powerful shoulders, the disproportionately large ears rotating independently, the tail thick at the base. It was moving along the termite trail that ran from the mound near the waterhole, and its nose was reading the ground the way the Colonel read field notes — quickly, completely, not missing anything.
It reached a section of the termite trail, stopped, and began to dig.
The Colonel watched it dig for twenty minutes without looking up. It did not look up because it was doing what it was doing and the Colonel's presence was, apparently, not a relevant variable in this calculation. He noted this. He noted the claw marks — four front toes with flat, spade-like nails that moved earth with a speed and efficiency that several men with shovels could not match. He noted the tongue when it appeared — briefly, impossibly long, returned to the excavation with the coated insects still adhering to it.
A lioness crossed the drainage line fifty metres away.
The aardvark continued digging.