"The Warthog (Phacochoerus africanus) is an animal the author has, on previous acquaintance, treated primarily as a subject of comic interest. He records here that this was a misreading."
The Colonel was up with the birds.
Not intentionally. He had simply woken at that particular hour when the dark is thinning but the light has not yet committed to anything, and had found, as he occasionally did, that going back to sleep was less interesting than going outside.
He made and took his tea and his notebook to the camp's edge and sat.
The clearing was grey and still. The fever trees held the last of the dark in their upper branches. Somewhere behind the camp the insect chorus was completing its night's work, handing the morning back by degrees. The Colonel did not write anything. He sat with his tea and waited for the light.
The warthog family came in from the east at first grey.
A female with four piglets, a male at a distance behind — moving into the clearing with the purposeful informality of animals arriving somewhere they have always arrived. The female went to her knees without ceremony. The knees, the Colonel noted, had thick calloused pads developed specifically for this — the animal's legs too long, its neck too short to reach the ground standing, the kneeling posture the elegant solution to an apparent problem. He had always known this. He was seeing it now differently.
The piglets attempted to kneel.
What followed was not kneeling exactly. It was an aspiration toward kneeling, approached through a series of intermediary states involving sideways momentum, collisions, and at least one piglet who appeared to have forgotten, mid-approach, what it had been attempting. They sorted themselves out. They knelt. They began to eat with the focused energy of animals that have decided this is what is happening now and are committed to it.
One of them tipped over.
Not dramatically. It simply leaned, incrementally, further than the available geometry supported, and arrived on its side in the grass. It continued eating from this position without any alteration in pace or expression, its legs working in the air with a patient persistence, as though the orientation were a detail rather than a development.
The Colonel looked at this for a moment.
He wrote: Piglet. Lateral. Grazing continues.
He looked at what he had written. He did not cross it out.
The male stood at the clearing's edge, facing outward, his tusks curved upward in the early light. They were not decorative. They had the quality of tools that know their purpose — the lower pair the cutting weapons, the upper pair the defence, the whole arrangement refined over time to exactly what was needed and nothing more. An oxpecker worked along his flank with the systematic attention of a professional, and the male bore this with the tolerance of an animal that has assessed the arrangement and found it broadly acceptable. At one point the oxpecker exceeded its brief. The male produced a single full-body shudder that launched the bird into a brief, surprised arc. The oxpecker returned immediately to the same position and resumed its work. The male appeared to consider this response satisfactory.