"The Meerkat (Suricata suricatta) is, in the author's considered view, the most disciplined small mammal on the continent. Its sentinel system — a posted individual standing upright on elevated ground, scanning continuously, giving specific alarm calls for aerial and terrestrial threats respectively — represents a level of cooperative organisation that the author has encountered, in his considerable experience, only in one other context. The sentinel exposes itself entirely in service of the group. It seeks the highest available point. It makes itself the most visible thing in the landscape. It does this because the role demands it. The author finds this admirable without reservation."
The termite mound was perhaps three feet high, which in open Kalahari is sufficient.
The sentinel stood on its peak with the upright, squared posture of something that has considered its position and found it correct. It scanned left. It scanned right. Its eyes moved in the continuous, professional sweep of an animal for whom alertness is not a state but a vocation. Below it, the group moved across the red sand in the coordinated looseness of a foraging party that trusts its perimeter to be covered — which it was, which was why they could forage without looking up.
The Colonel had been watching for forty minutes and had not moved. He was very good at not moving when it mattered. The Kalahari light was sharp and flat and the sentinel's shadow fell behind it at a precise angle, as though the landscape had been arranged to show the animal to best effect.
He wrote: The sentinel is an animal defined by its willingness to be seen.
At eleven o'clock a leopard tortoise entered the colony's territory at the unhurried pace of something that has somewhere to be but no strong feelings about when it gets there.
A juvenile meerkat assessed it for perhaps four seconds. Then hopped onto the shell, arranged itself in the full upright sentinel posture, and began scanning the horizon.
The tortoise continued walking. The meerkat continued scanning. The sentinel post was now mobile, proceeding at tortoise speed in a south-southwesterly direction, and the meerkat on top of it was performing its function with complete seriousness, adjusting its balance with small, automatic corrections as the shell moved beneath it, not once suggesting by any gesture or expression that this was anything other than a perfectly conventional arrangement.
The Colonel stopped writing. He watched this for some time.
Then he wrote: Adaptable. Committed to the role regardless of the platform. Will find the high ground wherever it presents itself.
He underlined wherever it presents itself.
It was the camera that revealed the other thing.
The Colonel had set his field camera on a flat rock to check the lens, and a dominant male — returning from a foraging foray, moving with the purposeful directness of an animal that owns everything it stands on — noticed it. He stopped. He approached. He stood upright before the lens and examined the glass with the focused attention of a creature conducting a professional assessment.
Then he punched his reflection.
Not once. Twice. A third time, with increased authority. The lens did not respond in kind, which the male appeared to find suspicious rather than reassuring. He stood back. Assessed. Punched again. When the reflection continued to fail to engage on his terms, he straightened, turned, and walked away with the decisive bearing of a party that has made its point and considers the matter settled.