Care for Magical Creatures
The magical creatures' class was on the first morning.
The instructor was a young man named Baraka, perhaps twenty-five, with the energy of someone who found his subject genuinely inexhaustible. He took the class — eight Uagadou students and Ron — to a section of the mountainside that had been enclosed with warding so old it had the quality of landscape rather than enchantment.
'We have a visitor today,' Baraka said, in English for Ron's benefit, though he switched into Luganda for the rest of the class and Ron followed without difficulty. 'He has been told to keep his camera ready.' He looked at Ron. 'Luna — your friend — she sent a letter.'
Ron looked at him.
'Last September,' Baraka said, with a quality that was not quite a smile. 'She wrote to our creatures' faculty asking about the Nundu. She said she had a friend who documented things and would be visiting.'
Ron filed this. Luna had known since September. He had learned to stop asking how.
The Fwooper was in a large open enclosure near the top of the warded section — a bird roughly the size of a large owl, with feathers in a specific impossible orange that had no equivalent in the natural palette. It made no sound — it was under a silencing charm, because the Fwooper's song induced madness over time, not dramatically but with the patient inexorability of water on stone.
Ron photographed it from three angles. Through the viewfinder the orange came through as something that made the camera want to look away. He held the camera steady and took the photograph.
'You did not look away,' Baraka observed.
'I noticed the impulse and decided not to follow it,' Ron said.
The Nundu was at the far end of the enclosure, behind additional warding that had the quality of something taken seriously. It was leopard-like in the general shape — large, low, moving with the specific economy of a predator that had never needed to hurry because nothing had ever successfully fled from it. Its breath was visible even in the warm air: a slight distortion, the quality of something poisonous at ambient temperature.
Ron kept the same distance as the Uagadou students and took three photographs.
'The Nundu has never been subdued by fewer than a hundred wizards working in concert,' Baraka said. 'In the recorded history of magical creatures, it is the most dangerous being on earth.'
Ron looked at the Nundu through the viewfinder. The Nundu looked back with the flat yellow attention of something that had assessed him as not worth the energy and returned to its own concerns.
He took the photograph at the moment it looked away.
The rest of the morning produced: a Graphorn, larger and more aggressive than the texts had described. A Biloko — small, hollow-bodied, with grass growing from its head and the quality of something that should not have been as alarming as it was. A creature Baraka called a Popobawa that was not precisely visible at any angle but was definitely present, registering as a kind of fold in the ambient light. Two Zouwu that moved with the spectacular impracticality of something that had evolved speed without consulting aerodynamics, striped in colours that had no right to exist on the same animal.
He photographed all of them.
That evening he developed the film in the darkroom Nalwanga had arranged in one of the school's unused store rooms — it had taken twenty minutes of conversation and one demonstration of the technique before she had said yes. The photographs came out in the red light of the darkroom with the quality he had been hoping for: the Fwooper's orange present and alarming, the Nundu captured in the moment of looking away which was somehow more alarming than the direct gaze, the Popobawa as a quality of light that made the photograph feel wrong in a way that was correct.
He made two sets of prints. One for his own record. One for Luna.
Herbology
The Herbology class covered plants he had only read about in texts — species unavailable in British wizarding cultivation, with properties that the European tradition had either not discovered or had classified as too complex to standardise. He took careful notes and asked specific questions and identified, over the course of the three sessions he attended, fourteen species he wanted to establish in the greenhouse he was planning for future use.
He arranged with Baraka and the Herbology instructor to take seeds and dried samples of the most promising ones. He packaged them carefully with the specific attention of someone who understood that living material required correct conditions to survive transport.
Neville, he thought, was going to find these extraordinary.