Stalking Land By Katherine Delany (E-mail: fevra@yahoo.com) August 2005 * * * * * Itikadi had ignored the stirrings and chitterings of the various small birds; she wasn't in a mode to be hunting prey, but was, rather, stalking suitable land, and this area of thickets and tight-twisted clumps of grass was much to her taste, especially so near to that river. That source of water--stone-bordered and rushing--wasn't one which would fail anytime within likelihood, to her assessment. The Serval crouched down to edge her muzzle into a patch of shadow under one of the woody bushes, but that wasn't a proper sized hole, and she withdrew, quartering the ground for suitable shelter. She had just emerged from one area of loosely-twining branches, too open for her liking, when she was startled to see a small black bird not even a body-length from her. She narrowed her green-gold eyes at the bird, a Drongo, debating making a leap just to startle it. "Hullo, Cat!" it yelled, after some incomprehensible twittering. Startled into answering, Itikadi corrected, "Serval," and found herself in communication for some minutes thereafter. She couldn't call it a conversation, if only because the bird seemed to have to work itself up to each utterance with a series of wing-rufflings and chattering sounds that sometimes lasted even longer than his words. The later were an excited staccato. "Lions!" it was saying, punctuating with little hops from one branch to the next. "Light ones, dark ones, big ones," a whistle as its vocabulary seemed to fail, "not-so-big ones. Mostly middle-sized," it said, with a confiding air. Then it tilted its fluffed head from one side to the other, red eyes a-gleam. "You staying here, Serval?" "I might," Itikadi answered smoothly, unable to resist adding, under her breath, "if only to grab you some grey morning." Then, at a more appropriate volume, "Lions, you say? I've found no scent of them." And she had been walking over most of the ground, in case there was a place worth the longer trip to the river than this thicketed one she was currently assessing. "They've gone," the Drongo said, with a raising and lowering of its brown-tipped wings which might have indicated embarrassment. "I never saw them. But my parents told me--" Itikadi cut it off there, not anxious to hear that the parents had been told by an old uncle, who had heard it from that pack of neighbours over that way with their stories, who-- But it was good news, at least, that there were no Lions now walking this ground, let alone claiming it. Itikadi didn't object to them in moderation, but in her mind they tended to lumber and to posture. Settling somewhere without any Lions would go a long way towards the quiet she hoped for. She curled up in the most promising hollow she had found, under the thickets and partially formed of their roots in the earth. She could make this her den, here in the Kopje Valley. That bird had provided her with the name, and no doubt would tell her the history of the lands at length, if she cared to hear. She could make her own history, and the bird could put her into his tales--if she hadn't got tired of his chattering and made of meal of him, before such tellings came to be. * * * * *