"The Klipspringer (Oreotragus oreotragus) walks on the tips of its cylindrical hooves — a contact area approximately the size of a small coin. The hooves have a rubbery outer rim and a harder inner core, functioning as natural crampons on rock surfaces. No other antelope uses this mechanism. The klipspringer lives exclusively on rocky terrain — koppies, cliff faces, boulder fields — and is not found on flat ground except when crossing briefly between outcrops. It mates for life. The pair is almost never separated: they move together, rest together, and groom each other. The male marks his mate's face with secretions from his preorbital glands. If one is alarmed, both whistle. The author had noted 'small antelope, rocky ground' in the margins of three previous entries. He now considers this insufficient."
He found the hoof print in the soft soil at the base of the koppie — the small, cylindrical impression of it, precise and clean as something made deliberately. He placed his little finger beside it. The contact area of the hoof that made this print was narrower.
He looked up at the rock face above him.
The klipspringer had been standing on a ledge approximately four metres up, on a surface that he now climbed to examine: granite, partially lichen-covered, with a visible sheen of overnight moisture still in the shaded sections. The ledge was perhaps eight centimetres wide. He stood on it briefly himself, with both boots, and did not feel comfortable.
He crouched and looked at the surface. At what a hoof the size of his little finger's tip had to work with.
"Rubbery outer rim," he wrote, back at camp, checking the reference. "Harder inner core. Natural crampon. Grip on wet lichen documented. The author stood on the same ledge with a boot of considerably larger contact area and found it adequate without enthusiasm."
He had been watching one klipspringer for twenty minutes when the second appeared.
They were not the same animal. The first was the ram — he could see the short upright horns. The second, arriving from the south face of the koppie, was the ewe. She came over the rock edge with the specific unhesitant movement of something that has done this route many times and knows every contact point, and went directly to where the ram was standing.
They stood together.
He tried to observe the ram's behaviour and found himself writing about the ewe. He tried to focus the field glasses on one and found the other always in the frame. They were, as a practical matter of observation, one unit with two sets of eyes.
He noted this.
He watched them groom — the ram's face presented to the ewe, her attention at his preorbital glands, the specific care of it. He watched them rest with their sides touching on a ledge that had room for both if neither moved excessively. He watched them scan the landscape together — heads up simultaneously, both turning in the same direction at the same moment toward something in the drainage line that the Colonel could not identify from his position.
"They appear to share a single alarm system," he wrote. "When one is alert, the other is already alert. When one relaxes, the other follows. The author has been attempting to write about one klipspringer and has been writing about two for the duration of the entry."
He was at the other koppie when the windmill incident occurred.
The ram had been moving along a narrow ledge — the specific sequence of hoof placements that had clearly been rehearsed, each foot finding its position in the same order it had found it before — when a section of lichen-covered rock presented a different surface than expected. The front right hoof lost contact. The recovery was immediate and extraordinary: both back legs compensating, the front leg finding the next available surface, the whole sequence complete in less time than the Colonel's pencil moved across the page.