"The Egyptian Goose (Alopochen aegyptiaca), despite certain superficial characteristics which have misled less careful observers, is most properly understood as occupying a taxonomic position analogous to the larger grazing geese — the Canada, the Greylag — rather than the coastal and estuarine wildfowl with which it has on occasion been loosely compared. This classification, having been established to the author's satisfaction through careful examination of the literature, allows its behavioural range to be predicted accordingly. The author anticipates a straightforward observation at the Stony Point colony, where the primary research subject is, of course, the African Penguin."
The penguins were not the problem.
They were exactly where the Colonel expected them, doing exactly what he expected them to do — moving between their nesting burrows and the waterline with the unhurried certainty of creatures who have occupied this particular stretch of Atlantic coast since before anyone thought to have an opinion about it. At intervals, one would stop, draw itself up, and produce a sound of quite extraordinary volume — a full, unambiguous donkey bray, delivered from inside a bird wearing what appeared to be formal evening dress. The penguin was wholly unaware that this was funny. It was also wholly unaware of the Colonel, the Egyptian Geese, the Cape wind, and, in all probability, several other things occurring within ten feet of it. It had the sea, and the colony, and the fish. Everything else was, from its perspective, not happening.
The Egyptian Geese were not in the plan.
There were fifty-three of them. The Colonel had counted twice, in the hope that the second count would produce a more manageable number. It had not.
They were distributed across the shore with the unhurried authority of a species that has assessed an environment and found it adequate. Six stood in the surf between the rocks, their pink legs planted against the pull of cold Atlantic water. A dozen more worked the tide line where the kelp lay heavy and dark, pulling at the weed with deliberate, practised movements. The remainder moved through the penguin colony with the easy confidence of guests who cannot at present locate their host but have no particular anxiety about this.
The penguins were not paying the geese no attention. They were simply not receiving the geese as information. A goose walked through a cluster of three penguins at the waterline. The penguins did not step aside, did not register, did not pause. One of them brayed — sudden, enormous, completely unprovoked — and waddled toward the sea. The goose watched it go. The penguin did not watch the goose watching it. The penguin was already thinking about fish.
He opened his research notes on the African Penguin. He had prepared thoroughly. He knew the colony, the breeding cycle, the foraging patterns, the annual moult that grounded the birds on the rocks for several weeks looking, the Colonel had privately thought, rather put-upon. He had a chapter outline. He had allocated four days.
He had not, in four days of preparation, fully accounted for the call. He had read about it. The literature was clear on the subject. What the literature had not conveyed was the specific quality of hearing it at close range on a cold Cape morning — the absolute confidence of it, the complete absence of apology, the sensation of standing in a wildlife colony that was also, inexplicably, a farmyard. A second penguin brayed from somewhere to his left. A third answered from the rocks below. The Colonel wrote: Call: loud. Donkey-like. Then stopped, looked at what he had written, and felt that the morning had begun in a direction he had not anticipated.
He had not allocated a single line to fifty-three Egyptian Geese eating kelp in the surf.
He watched one wade deeper, to where the rocks dropped away and the water came to its body. It moved without apparent difficulty, adjusting to the swell with a matter-of-fact competence that sat poorly with everything he knew about it. Grazing geese did not do this. Canada Geese did not do this. Greylags did not do this. He had watched Greylags on the Somerset Levels for thirty years and not one of them had ever displayed the remotest interest in standing in the sea.
Something shifted at the edge of his attention.
The movement of the goose in the water — the ease of it, the way it held itself against the current — reminded him of something. He had seen this before, or something very like it. An estuary, somewhere. The Solent perhaps, or the Kent coast in winter. A grey morning and birds working the tideline with exactly this quality of unhurried competence. He almost had it.
Then he set it aside. The Egyptian Goose was filed. He knew what it was. He had the literature.
He opened a fresh page.
Cetshwayo sat on a flat rock above the tide line, his coat pulled against the Cape wind, watching the shore with the uncomplicated attention of a man who has never found it necessary to classify what he sees before he sees it. He watched the geese in the water. He watched the geese on the kelp. He watched the Colonel watching both and writing neither with any confidence.