From the Field Notes of Colonel Aubrey Fitch-Harrington, FRS

Observations Upon the Fauna of Southern Africa — Volume III (In Preparation)

“The African Penguin (Spheniscus demersus) is the only penguin species that breeds on the African continent and is, in this respect, distinguished from every other penguin alive. It is also called the Jackass Penguin, a designation the author had previously considered unkind until he heard the call, which is unkind. Population: approximately four million at the turn of the century. Population now: approximately fifty thousand. The author does not require a calculator for this arithmetic; it calculates itself. The spots on the breast are individual — no two penguins identical — a fact he had not previously noted because he had not previously written a dedicated entry. Previous entries on this species across two volumes: zero. He had entries on the Egyptian Goose. He had none on the penguin. This entry is the correction.”

He found the absence on the third morning.

He had been reorganising his field notes — the standard discipline of a man who keeps records and periodically requires them to be in order — when he arrived at the coastal section and found, in the slot where the penguin entry should have been, the Egyptian Goose entry. Substantial. Five pages. Two crossings-out. The taxonomy error thoroughly documented and thoroughly revised.

And nothing on the penguin.

He sat with his notes open on the camp table for some time.

He had been at Stony Point. He had been at Boulders. He had stood in the smell of a penguin colony — the specific, unmistakable, considerable smell of a penguin colony at low tide, which had arrived before he had and which the previous entry on the Egyptian Goose referred to only as strong maritime odour. He had watched penguins. He had counted penguins. He had taken three mornings to establish that the Egyptian Goose was not a goose in the conventional sense.

And he had not opened a page for the penguin.

He looked at this situation for some time.

“You wrote about the goose,” Cetshwayo said, appearing from the direction of the fire with the morning tea.

“Yes.”

“Not the penguin.”

“No.”

Cetshwayo set down the tea and said nothing further, which was Cetshwayo’s way of saying everything that needed to be said about the matter.

He went back to the coast.

The colony at Boulders was where it had always been — a hundred and sixty individuals, more or less, in the specific patch of granite boulders and fynbos that had been the colony since 1982, when the first pair had established here and the rest had followed. The fynbos smelled of its specific aromatic quality in the morning, clean and resinous, and underneath it the colony made itself known from some distance.