Amirhan desert mission, day 328
The power went out today. We went out to the solar panels to see what was wrong, but could find nothing, not even the usual dust settling on the panels is a problem now with the snow covering everything. It took us a while to figure out it was probably the cold. The equipment is designed to be fine even if the temperature drops this low in the night, because it sometimes might, but it has been a few degrees below freezing now for four days. We hadn't planned for that, because it is not a thing that should happen. Although since we did not see anything physically wrong with the solar panels, it may be we're wrong. Enembe has been working on them today but didn't get them to work yet, though he says if it is the cold, as he is now almost sure it is, he will get them back up tomorrow. We have an extra power source for situations like this, but it is not enough to keep all our equipment working all day, so we decided to use it for essentials: to keep the heat from dropping too low (though we keep it significantly cooler than usually), for cooking. I also figured I can use the computers long enough to make a log entry, simply writing takes so much less energy than the machines analyzing the data. As much as I don't like it, I can make it until tomorrow without having access to the electronically recorded data.
Despite our lack of power this has not been a lazy day. I began going through the new data from Floating Rocks in the morning, but in the few hours I had before the power went out I didn't have time to find anything significant. Not that that means anything, since there is loads more to go through. I am still hoping there will be something actually different now, and it is not all in my head.
While we were outside checking the solar panels after the power went out, we saw a desert badger. I had to stop inspecting the panels for a moment to make sure I saw right, because I didn't know there are desert badgers here. We haven't seen any during our time here, thought just because we haven't seen them doesn't mean there aren't any. The thing is, no one has ever seen a desert badger in Amirhan, so everyone has always believed there aren't any here. It has actually been believed desert badgers avoid the kind of perceptible weirdness that is continuously present in the Amirhan desert. Clearly they were wrong. Or maybe this is again a part of what is going on right now: snow where there is not supposed to be snow, rocks that are supposed to float that don't, and animals seen in places they are supposed to avoid. The more reasonable answer to me seems to be people have been wrong about desert badgers. People are wrong all the time. And them avoiding places like Amirhan could easily be a legend, passed down through generations and enforced by the fact no one has happened to see any of them here. They could well be rare enough in this area that people simply missed them. So unlike for the non-floating rocks, for this I have a sensible, possible explanation. It soothes my uneasiness with the current events a little to have something that could be reasonably explained, even if I am wrong.
Either way, finding an animal in an environment it has never been seen before is exciting. Once I made sure that the badger was leaving prints (can't be too sure with this snow), we finished inspecting the panels and went inside to get equipment. We left Enembe to work on the panels and went after the badger. We may not have power at the hub, but we have at all times at least one camera fully charged and a drone and a small rover to attach it to, in case of situations exactly like this, when we want to go out to the field with a short notice.
So we went after the badger. Its path was easy to follow, and I made sure to know at all times exactly where we were. There was blood with the tracks, so either it was injured or, more likely knowing desert badgers, it had been hunting and was now taking its pray somewhere to eat. We followed it on foot for about half an hour, until we found a place where it had clearly disappeared underground. The badger had clearly been active around the hole, the snow covered in tracks, and we could see lines of tracks both coming and going disappearing into the distance in multiple directions. Also it was clear the badger's hole had been there before the snow fell. Desert badgers always dig their holes in the sand themselves (from what we know), but there was no evidence of digging after the snow had fallen. The snow was undisturbed other than for the tracks. A place where an animal had recently dug would look very different.
We attached the camera to the rover and Ndali drove it into the hole after the badger. She piloted the rover down the tunnels with the help of feed from the camera. I was sure she would get it lost under the earth, but somehow she was able to find her way back to the surface after a couple of hours of searching the tunnels. The tunnels underground had been huge. I think we did not even see the whole tunnel system before we had to get the equipment out before they ran out of power. There must be more than one desert badger here, and they must have been here for a long time. For all the time our rover spent in those tunnels we only once glimpsed a single desert badger, though, and that made me wonder. We knew there was one of them down there, we had known it was there and had seen it, but where were all the others? It was hugely unlikely one desert badger had dug all these tunnels, but it was equally unlikely all others had disappeared, leaving this one here alone, and even more unlikely that this badger had moved into an old, abandoned colony, desert badgers always digging their own tunnels. The most likely explanation seems to again be we simply missed them. Maybe they kept moving so our camera was always at a different place from them, or the tunnel system they have built is even larger than we think.
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Oookkay.
Tomorrow's topic is Pull.
~matu
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