"The Rock Hyrax (Procavia capensis), known in Southern Africa as the dassie, belongs to the superorder Afrotheria — a group of mammals that diversified on the African continent during its period of isolation and includes, among others, the elephant, the manatee, the aardvark, and the elephant shrew. The dassie's closest living relative is the elephant. The author had written, in the margin of a previous entry, 'rodent family, details to follow,' which he acknowledges as incorrect on both counts. The feet are rubber-soled with moisture-secreting glands that function as suction cups on near-vertical rock faces. The body temperature varies considerably and must be regulated by basking in the morning sun, which is unusual for a mammal. Fossil hyraxes the size of horses have been found. The Book of Proverbs describes them as 'a feeble folk, yet they make their homes in the crags.' The author now considers this assessment incomplete."
The notation had been there since the Drakensberg.
Dassie — rodent family, details to follow. He had written it in a margin, between the secretary bird entry and a water temperature observation, with the intention of following up, and had not followed up, and had carried it through the crocodile and the wild dog and the hyena and the secretary bird and the buffalo and the elephant — through twenty stories of increasingly attentive fieldwork — without once returning to the marginal notation and its promise of further detail.
He was returning to it now, in rocky country with the dassie colony visible on the koppie above camp, and finding that the details he had promised himself were considerably more interesting than the two words he had provisionally assigned them.
He had been watching the colony for forty minutes when the incident with the leg occurred.
A male was sitting on the flat rock above the Colonel's position — the specific flat rock the colony used for morning basking, which the Colonel had established was a thermoregulation requirement rather than preference, dassies being mammals with the body temperature management of something that has not yet fully committed to the arrangement. The male was scratching behind his ear with his back leg in the manner of dogs and cats and various other species that have found this satisfactory.
The Colonel's boot found a loose stone.
The dassie froze.
Not completed the scratch and then froze. Froze mid-scratch — the back leg suspended in the air at the precise angle it had occupied when the sound reached him, the rest of the body motionless, both eyes at maximum diameter.
The Colonel also froze, for different reasons.
They regarded each other.
The leg remained in the air for, by the Colonel's count, approximately fifty seconds. Then the dassie lowered it with the careful deliberateness of something that is pretending the leg was never up, that no scratch had been occurring, that the Colonel had not observed anything that could be considered undignified, and resumed its basking posture.
The Colonel wrote: "Freeze response: complete and immediate. Holds position regardless of position at time of trigger. The author notes that the dignity of the recovery is impressive given the circumstances."
The alarm came from the upper koppie at mid-morning — the full colony alarm, the shrill carrying call that the Colonel had learned to associate with genuine threat. He noted it and looked for the predator.
The colony had evacuated. Animals were streaming into the rock crevices with the organised chaos of something that has done this many times and is not enjoying it.
One male remained on a rock at the colony's edge, calling continuously.