"The Bushbuck (Tragelaphus sylvaticus) occupies dense riverine bush and forest edge throughout Southern Africa and is, in the author's documented experience, considerably more present than it is visible. It is solitary — holding individual territories in the thicket, lying up through the hottest hours, moving at dawn and dusk in the specific quality of available light that makes it hardest to see. The male darkens with age to near-black, carrying spiralled horns and white spots whose pattern is individual — no two bushbuck alike. The primary defence is absolute stillness. The secondary defence is an alarm bark described here as loud and attributed to the animal; the author's own contribution to the acoustic record of that morning will not be transcribed. The connection between this species and the leopard is documented below."
Four days of field notes read, in their relevant sections: Absent.
The Colonel had been in good riverine bush — jackalberry and sycamore fig, a dense drainage line, exactly the habitat the literature specified — and had found nothing. He had walked the morning circuit carefully. He had sat at the waterhole edge. He had used the field glasses. He had checked the soft ground for prints, found them, confirmed the animal was present in the area, and then spent the remainder of the morning not finding it.
He showed Cetshwayo the prints on the second morning.
Cetshwayo looked at them. Then at the Colonel's survey route. Then back at the prints.
"You are looking where the other animals are," he said.
"The waterhole, yes. The drainage line—"
"The bushbuck is not where the other animals are."
The Colonel looked at his route notes. At the waterhole. At the open ground. At the gathering points he had been systematically covering.
"Where is it then?"
"Alone," Cetshwayo said. "Further in."
On the fifth morning the Colonel walked his circuit through the drainage line — the same path he had walked four mornings previously — and saw nothing in the dense thicket at the path's second bend. He noted this and continued. On the return pass, forty minutes later, he reached the same thicket.
The bushbuck erupted from it.
Not ran. Not moved. Erupted — from ground level, from the specific spot the Colonel had passed without event forty minutes previously, a large dark male coming out of nothing into motion with a speed that the Colonel's notes describe, with some restraint, as "considerable and without warning."
He had walked past it twice. It had been there the whole time.
The Colonel stood for a moment in the path.
He wrote: "Freeze protocol. Animal stationary in thicket during both passes of survey route. Distance at point of closest approach: estimated arm's reach. Not detected. Erupted on third pass. Previous entry for this location: 'absent.' Entry revised: present. Not located."