"The Caracal (Caracal caracal) takes its name from the Turkish and Arabic karakulak — black ear. The long black ear tufts, reaching four and a half centimetres, are its defining visual characteristic and serve, in the current understanding, primarily as social signalling instruments. The animal is plain tawny-fawn in the adult — no spots. The author's previous field notations on this species read: 'small cat, possibly serval.' The serval is spotted. The caracal is not. The author notes this as a straightforward error. He also notes that the caracal can leap three metres vertically to catch birds in flight, that Mughal emperors kept trained caracals and bet on how many pigeons each could knock from the air in a single leap, that the phrase 'putting the cat among the pigeons' derives directly from this practice, and that the author has been using this phrase since school without knowing what the cat was."
He had been using the phrase since school.
He established this while reading, on the second morning at the pan, the section of the history of falconry that dealt with trained caracals — the Mughal courts, the betting on pigeon numbers, the specific phrase that had entered the English language through this practice and been used, since its entry, by people who had never seen the cat.
He put the reference down.
He had been writing small cat, possibly serval in the margins for two volumes. The serval had spots. He had been misidentifying, in his own field notes, the animal the Mughal emperors had considered worth betting on.
He opened a dedicated page.
The queleas arrived at the pan at mid-morning — the specific dense cloud of them, the collective movement that made a thousand individual birds look like one organism turning in the air. The caracal had been sitting in the low acacia at the pan's edge for forty minutes, which the Colonel had not registered because the caracal had not moved and the acacia's shadows were specific and the cat's plain tawny coat required no assistance from the shadows.
The queleas passed over the water.
The caracal launched.
Three metres. Vertical, without preamble, without the preliminary crouch the Colonel had expected — simply a sitting cat and then, in the space where the sitting cat had been, an ascending cat with its forepaw extended at the apex of the arc where the birds were. It came back down with one.
The queleas resettled.
The caracal ate the bird. It looked at the pan. It looked at the queleas.
It launched again.
"Again," the Colonel wrote. Then, after the third leap: "And again."
He sat with his notebook open and wrote nothing for some time, because what he was watching did not require description so much as witnessing. The guides at the pan had a name for this individual. They called it the flying cat. He noted this without editorial comment.
"Three metres vertical," he wrote eventually. "From a sitting position. The hind legs are disproportionately developed for this purpose. The ear tufts — which the Colonel had been noting as decorative — are the social instruments of an animal that has been conducting aerial ambushes of sufficient precision that the Mughal court considered them worth watching. The Colonel also considers them worth watching. He notes this is the first time he has watched."