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

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

“The Serval (Leptailurus serval) has the longest legs relative to body size of any cat. These legs evolved for one purpose in tall grass: the vertical leap from which the serval lands on prey it cannot see at the moment of leaving the ground. It locates its prey entirely by sound. The ears — the largest relative to skull size of any cat, independently mobile, rotating through one hundred and eighty degrees — triangulate the sound of a mouse or rat beneath thirty centimetres of dry grass with sufficient precision that the serval can jump to that location and land on it. The success rate is approximately fifty percent. The lion succeeds twenty to twenty-five percent of the time. The serval’s previous entry in the author’s field notes read: spotted medium cat, present. The entry did not contain the word ears. This was the entry’s primary failure.”

He heard nothing.

This was the relevant starting point: the Colonel was at the edge of the long grass section beside the drainage line, the morning was cool and specific-smelling of dew on dry grass and the faint animal warmth of small mammals’ overnight activity, and the serval was ten metres away and he heard nothing.

The serval heard something.

He could see the ears from his position — the large, independently mobile pair of them, rotating in the way of very sophisticated receiving equipment, one turned forward-left and the other moving slowly right, sampling different parts of the morning for information. The serval’s head was level. Its body was still. Its legs — the long legs, the legs that belonged to something taller than a cat of this torso had any business being — were slightly coiled in the way that legs coil when they are about to do something.

The Colonel had his notebook open.

The serval jumped straight up.

Not forward — up. Vertical, at a height the Colonel estimated at one and a half metres from a standing start, the body fully extended at the apex, and then down. It came down in a patch of grass approximately two metres from where it had left the ground, and when it came down something was under it that had been in the grass before and was not in the grass now.

The Colonel wrote: Serval: vertical leap. Height: estimated 1.5m. Target: not visible during jump. Prey location: established by sound prior to jump. Success: confirmed.

He looked at his previous field note on the serval: spotted medium cat, present.

He wrote: Previous note: insufficient.

He watched it for two hours.

It hunted four times in that period. Three successful. The failures were instructive — on one occasion the grass patch it landed on was empty, the mouse having moved in the interval between the sonic location and the jump, and the serval stood in the empty grass with the specific quality of something that has done the calculation correctly and found that a variable it could not account for had changed. It returned to its listening position and began again.

“It knows where the mouse is,” he said to Cetshwayo.

“Yes.”