Mitjie is a young meerkat that is a pet at the AiAiba Lodge in Namibia. We first met him when we went into the lodge and saw him lying on his stomach on the gray concrete flooring of the lapa. Opposite of my mother’s directions, I sat down, and it came to me. Right as the employee said ‘Don’t worry, it doesn’t bite’ guess what, it came up and bit me on the leg. Not very hard of course, but still enough to be a surprise. As it turns out, its open mouth seems to go before everything that it does, and his little teeth bite into whatever moves. It never broke the skin, so it was pretty harmless. When my father sat down, it ran to him and sank its jaws into his skin, taking off maybe the first of seven layers of skin. We both played with him, before heading off on a walk to see the bushman drawings that the lodge is famous for. Right before we left, though, some warthogs went across the yard, and the meerkat, since it is a baby, started suckling on a warthog. When it bit the warthog on the nose, the all ran off, and we did too, but in a different direction, towards the hike.

When we came back, the meerkat was nowhere to be seen, but when we looked around after ice cream, there it was, digging holes in the ground. It came to us and we petted it, while it bit us. By the time we left, I wanted a meerkat for a pet.