"The Hadeda Ibis (Bostrychia hagedash) possesses a vocal apparatus of considerable interest. Preliminary observation suggests a communication system of some complexity, the full significance of which has not, to this author's knowledge, been systematically decoded. In the wild state the bird demonstrates a commendable wariness of human presence. It is the intention of the present volume to address the question of its vocalisation. A lexicon is proposed."
The hadeda does not need a lexicon. It has never needed a lexicon. This is something it has understood for considerably longer than the Colonel has been alive, though the Colonel had not yet been informed of it.
He had been woken by the call on his first morning in camp and had lain still for a moment, listening. In Johannesburg, three weeks earlier, he had witnessed a hotel guest at breakfast describe the same sound as an affliction requiring civic remedy. The Colonel had found this bewildering. It was, he had thought but not said, precisely the sound Africa should make. That some people found it otherwise struck him as a problem with the people rather than the sound.
He had risen, made notes, and proposed his lexicon.
He had been in camp four days. Each morning, at five-eleven — not approximately, but five-eleven, with the punctuality of a creature that has kept the same schedule since before the Colonel's regimental predecessors had learned to tell time — the first call came.
It came from the east. It was moving.
This was the detail the Colonel had not initially appreciated. He had expected the birds to be somewhere. Sitting in a tree, perhaps. Presenting themselves for study. What they were, in fact, was passing through — a procession of large, purposeful birds crossing the dawn sky on their way to feeding grounds, calling as they went with the cheerful indifference of creatures who have somewhere to be and no particular feelings about who hears them getting there.
He had attempted a phonetic transcription on day two. Ha, ha, ha, dee, da, he had written, and then sat looking at it for some time. It was accurate as far as it went. It went nowhere near far enough. The call, rendered in pencil on paper, looked like something a person might say. The call, arriving from forty feet overhead at five-eleven in the morning, was something else entirely. It was Africa announcing itself. You could write it down. You could not put it back.
He had written Call 1. Dawn. Directional. Presumed territorial announcement, and left the phonetics where they were.
Across the camp, things responded.
A pair of warthog grazing at the clearing's edge raised their heads as the calls swept over. A go-away bird in the far acacia went quiet, then relocated. From somewhere in the long grass beyond the camp perimeter came small, deliberate movements — things adjusting their morning on the basis of information the hadedas had provided and the Colonel had spent four days trying to categorise.
The hadedas themselves, having delivered whatever they had delivered, continued westward and were gone. Their calls diminished with distance and direction. In ten minutes the bush had received its instructions and settled back into its ordinary business.
The Colonel had three pages of notes and a lexicon that still contained one entry.