Free Beast by Donna Jo Napoli

scent glands rise, creating a light spot. I stay perfectly still, and they return to feeding and intermittent playing.
    Now two adults come along, the size of rabbits. Their pelts are thick. I wonder how they manage inthis summer heat. My own hair is shorter and thinner than theirs by far. One of the adults sees me and stops. It waits, chin whiskers twitching. Then it comes several steps closer and stops again.
    Its curiosity delights me. But a sense of mischief enters me. I roar. The hyrax practically flips over itself backward and disappears. My roar grows as my mouth opens wider. It lasts a good thirty or forty seconds, rocking me sideways. When my jaw finally shuts, there is no trace of animal nearby. I would laugh if I could.
    That roar was powerful and majestic —and exceedingly loud. It carried far. I get to my feet and climb higher into the mountains. I don’t stop until morning.
    Days pass. Sleep alternates with short, erratic meanderings. The only consistency to my day is immersion in mountain pools at dawn and dusk followed by prayer, such as it is, and long drinks. No thirst I ever had as a human compares with my leonine thirst.
    Hunger finally comes again — and with it, ever-clearer thoughts. I try my luck at catching lizards; my luck is nonexistent. One day. Another. I look around and realize my hunger has led me back down to the foothills, where the game is more plentiful. Yet still I catch nothing.
    By daylight I hurry along, my head upright and high, my ears cocked forward. All my senses sharpen, as they do when I fast during Ramadhan. But I am not light-headed, as I am then. I am tight and ready. I am hungry.
    And I am a dreadfully poor hunter.
    I can hardly sleep anymore. I roll in water and pray and wander, disoriented.
    Think, Orasmyn.
    I stop, sit on my haunches, and watch.
    After a few hours, I see a large black bird rise to the sky. A second follows. Vultures. I am already trotting toward the spot they took off from. It takes a half hour to get there. The carcass of the mongoose has been ripped open. It’s a big one. Its bloody flesh glistens. My mouth drools for that flesh.
    A jackal slinks out of the bushes far ahead of me, close to the mongoose, tail bushy, stripes pale. Then three more. They rush at the carcass, which is barely enough for a small meal for me.
    I growl deep in my throat.
    The jackals face me in surprise. I remember how my lioness hunted upwind of the stag — how her strategy depended solely on sight and sound. Now these jackals have failed to even use sight — for they should have looked back over their shoulders before leaving the safety of the bush.
    But, then, they never expected a lion.
    They stand in a row, and one lets out a long, wavering howl. The others join, repeating four times, ending in a series of quick yelps. Its an eerie cry. If I didn’t see them for myself, I would have guessed there were many more of them.
    I roar.
    The jackals are gone by the time my jaw closes. Only now do I realize that the instant I first saw them I should have flattened myself and crept up on them. A jackal meal would have been much more hearty than this mongoose snack.
    The vultures have picked out the liver, the eyes, the entrails, but the skeletal frame is whole except for a split in the backbones, up high. I eat the flesh, cracking the bones and swallowing everything that will go down. The mongooses distended stomach remains intact. I rip it open with a claw. A barely digested snake curls there.
    I eat the snake, the stomach, the pointed head and long tail and grizzled fur of the mongoose, and reflect upon the probable drama. The mongoose surprised the snake. Then somehow it managed to break its own neck. Perhaps the snake had a part in it — causing indigestion with a toxin, or simply making the animal clumsy around its full belly. The vultures discovered the dead mongoose. And the jackals waited for thevultures to finish. Their fearsome howl is deceptive,