"The Wahlberg's Epauletted Fruit Bat (Epomophorus wahlbergi) and related species are the primary pollinators of the Baobab (Adansonia digitata). The baobab flower opens at dusk — a thirty-second unfurling documented by researchers — and closes before dawn. It is white, large, pendulous, positioned at the ends of branches for hovering access, and produces a scent of fermenting fruit and faint sweetness detectable to bats at a distance of up to two kilometres. Without the bat, the baobab cannot set seed. Without the baobab, the bat loses one of its primary food sources. The arrangement has been running for longer than the record. The author's previous entries on baobabs in this volume number four. None of them mention pollination mechanism. The author was asleep at the relevant hour. This entry is the correction."
He stayed up.
After the vulture story — after twenty-one margin notes revised, after the chain from carcass to cattle to dog to people — he had made a decision that was not quite written anywhere but had the quality of a decision nonetheless: he would stop being asleep at the relevant hour. He did not know yet which hours were relevant and which were not. He was beginning to suspect the answer was most of them.
The baobab was forty metres from the tent. He had been noting it since his first morning at this camp — the barrel trunk, the enormous water reserve, the specific quality of its silhouette against the sky that belonged to nothing else in the landscape. He had written it in the margins of the rock hyrax entry. He had written it in the margins of the elephant entry. He had written "baobab, camp vicinity" so many times it had become a shorthand for permanence, for the thing that was simply there.
He had never looked at it after dark.
The bats emerged at dusk.
Not all at once — a gradual accumulation, the way the stars arrived, one becoming several becoming many. He watched the silhouettes against the sky: the small angular shapes of the insectivorous species, fast and jerky in their flight patterns, the echolocation working in the register above his hearing. And the larger ones — the fruit bats, heavier, more direct, moving through the air with a purposefulness that belonged to animals going somewhere specific rather than hunting whatever the air contains.
One came directly to the baobab.
It landed on a branch above the closed flowers. Not feeding — the flowers were not open. It clung and folded its wings and waited with the composed patience of something that has done this before and knows the schedule.
The Colonel watched it wait.
At seven minutes past the hour — he checked his watch, because he was the Colonel and he checked his watch — the nearest flower began to open.
He watched this because he had been at baobabs for three seasons and had never seen a baobab flower open. The closed flowers were unremarkable: small, greenish-white pouches in the daytime, noted and passed. The opening was not unremarkable. The petals separated in a sequence that was less a flower opening than something deciding to open — committed, swift, the whole form resolving in thirty seconds from bud to the full white pendant hanging in the dark.
The bat was in it before the petals finished moving.
"It knew," the Colonel wrote. "Not estimated. Not arrived in the general vicinity and investigated. It was on the branch before the flower opened and was in the flower as the flower opened. It has memorised this tree's schedule. A tree of perhaps one thousand years, in the Colonel's considered assessment, and a bat of perhaps two years, and the bat knows when the tree will open."
The scent reached him twenty minutes later.