comfortable.

He tried to get back to sleep but the stifling heat made his legs uncomfortably damp and sticky. Through the stillness he thought he heard something… but what exactly was that sound? It was a crinkling, crumpling sound like a paw slowly pushing over the stalks of dry grass. He lay awake and listened, with his eyes still closed. For ten or more seconds he heard nothing. Then it came again; a small, delicate sound; a sound from behind him. He rolled over slowly as if still in sleep and tucked his head against his flank, flapping his lips as he rubbed his chin on his side.

The sound came again, a little closer still. A heart-thumping thought coalesced in his mind: was he was being hunted? Leopard? No, it wasn’t their style and what sort of fool would it take to try to hunt an adult lion? Lioness? There had been no signs of any. He quickly dismissed that ridiculous idea. Hyena? No, no hyena would ever bother to creep up on a lion through cover, that was far too complex for them to understand, and anyway, the hyena he’d seen would never have the guts to hunt a lion. So, what could it be?

He prised his right eye open, forming a tiny crack through which he could dimly make out his surroundings. For a moment he saw nothing unexpected then the horizon moved. It rippled like the back of a lioness on the hunt. Then a terrifying thought struck him: could his father have caught up with him? He opened both eyes, for a second they were blinded by the light of the afternoon. He blinked repeatedly as his eyes adjusted, showing him flashes of a very young lioness. No, not a lioness - a cub, an almost adolescent cub; he was being stalked by nothing more than a cub!

“Ooo, you’re awake...”

“What in the grasses do you think you’re doing? I could have killed you!”

“Yeah, but you didn’t did you? I wasn’t going to pounce, honest I wasn’t.”

Nengwalamwe stared hard at the cub, he was sure he had seen her before. She stood just two of her lengths from him, but no matter how hard he tried he could not recall her scent. On days such as this, the air full of the heat of the savannah sun, her scent should have pervaded everything for many lengths around, yet he smelt nothing but the dry warmth of the grasses. Clearly she was an exceptionally clean cub. Even the fastidious Nengwalamwe could not mask his scent that well. Llasani had certainly been totally unable to mask hers, even if she had wanted to.

“Yali? Is that you?” Nengwalamwe blinked against the burning sun.

“Kinda.”

“What’s ‘kinda’ meant to mean? What are you doing here anyway?”

“I did say I lived down here you know. Welcome to the Pridelands.”

“The what?”

“The Pridelands. That’s what we call this land.”

“Pride Lands - what... we?” Nengwalamwe grew worried, did this mean there was a pride of lions here? So he was on another pride’s lands after all. What would the males think of him? No, Nengwalamwe knew exactly what they would think of him. Yali was young, not yet a year old. Her father had to be around somewhere, somewhere close. “Does that mean there’s a… a pride here?”

“Well...”

“There is! There’s lions here!” He swished his head to one side in panic. “Do they know about me? That’s stupid - Yali, you know about me, they must do too. I must get away from here, I must go - now!”

“No, don’t go.” Yali’s look grew close to terror and her tail swayed powerfully from side to side. She seemed very frightened at the prospect of Nengwalamwe leaving so soon. “Please, we need you - we need another lion for the pride.” She was nearly crying. “You can’t go now. You can’t, you belong here.” She appeared a little calmer, “This is your home.”

Nengwalamwe stood up and shook his mane. He looked searchingly at the young cub standing before him. She seemed genuine enough, even though what little of her scent he could detect revealed nothing about her. Somehow she was already more than just someone to talk to. What was it about her that felled his natural suspicions? How was it that with her he dropped his defences and actually began to care?

He lowered his head and said quietly, “I won’t leave you.” He very gently shook his head. “I really won’t leave you. Now then, what’s frightened you so much? Having trouble with hyenas?”

Yali’s ears pricked up. She almost smiled.

“Not recently…, but we do need you. We need a lion to protect us.”

“Protect you? From what?” Another thought struck him: he had indeed not seen any lions, but what if there were lions here? Not many perhaps, just a few lionesses and cubs, including young Yali. Perhaps they had had a male that had died, killed perhaps by some deadly adversary who had left the lionesses too terrified to show themselves. Perhaps they were in hiding, somewhere away from the world. Nengwalamwe’s mind raced as he tried to think of all the places where lions might hide.He thought on: ‘Hide? We don’t hide from anything… but lionesses do to bear cubs. They like high rocky places with cracks where they can hide their newborns. It has to be close to water, it has to be safe....’

“Please Nengwe, please don’t leave us now. Please.” As Yali stopped speaking her ears turned to pick up some unexpected ripple in the blanket of background sounds. Nengwalamwe heard nothing except the slight scrunch of her pawfall amongst the grass as she suddenly looked away.

“HEY! My name’s Nengwalamwe, son of…!” But she was gone, running off down the eastern side of the ridge. ‘What’s she up to now? She looks as though she was being called by her mother!’ He wondered if he should follow her, or if she meant for him to stay where he was. Perhaps she would return later with her mother. He stood still and watched her run off, her form soon merging into the grass. She appeared to be heading for the massive rocks just to the north of the waterhole. ‘Rocks? Waterhole?’ He considered for a moment, ‘That’s it. That’s where they are, there on the rocks. That’s where she lives!’

He began to walk up the rise towards the rocks, but soon broke into a gently flowing trot. He could not merge his form into the grass like Yali had done; he was much too large for that. He followed her trail. It soon became indistinct and he found himself running over knee-high grass. Even though her track had faded her route was distinct. It ran directly to the foot of a massive outcrop of towering rock: the very rock on the plain that Nengwalamwe had seen that first dawn high up in the mountains.

From the distance the rock seemed a pure pinnacle of solid unforgiving stone, with little promise of cover or shelter. As he approached he skirted west round a great field of boulders, only then beginning to appreciate the true extent of the rock. It was not just a pinnacle but a long ‘L’ stretching over a hundred and fifty metres north to south and rising to more than fifteen metres over most of its length. The tower at one end rose to almost 100 metres, higher than Nengwalamwe could comprehend, only in the mountains had ever been so close to such an incredibly sheer vertical face. This was surely the home of Yali’s Pride. This was their rocky home. ‘Surely,’ he thought, ‘there’s got to be no end of caves and ledges up there. Any number of lions could hide in there and never be found.’

He drew close to the south-western corner where the rock rose sheer out of the savannah. There was no way to climb the claw-breaking near-vertical rock. If Yali had got up onto the rocks, it was certainly not there. Yet there were no tracks, no scent: no sign of any kind that any lions had ever passed this way. There were no breaks in the grass, no pad prints: nothing.

The sun on his hindquarters reminded Nengwalamwe that night was not far away. There was no obvious place to lie up. His hunger was growing, but was not yet strong enough to push him to the effort of catching another warthog. Nengwalamwe decided to forget about hunting: it could wait for another day. This, the great rock of Yali’s pride, was much more exciting. ‘No,’ he thought as he sniffed around along the south side, ‘that’s far too many words: Yali’s pride’s rock. Or perhaps just Pride Rock… yes, that’s it, Priderock.’

Further on he thought he could smell the faintest echo of a lion’s scent, not a cub’s but the much more obvious acrid scent of an adult male. It spurred him on to further exploration as it must have been left by the pride’s last, and now lost male. That meant they were here, but where? He thought about calling to them but he knew that if they really were in hiding then the last thing they would want to hear would be a lion roaring the place down attracting all the animals on the savannah. There would be time enough for roaring when he was their male, and what a place this would be to roar from! It wasn’t going to be easy. He had first to get up and among the ledges of this great Priderock and find Yali and the lionesses.

As the evening crept over the savannah Nengwalamwe crept length by length round the great curve of the southern end of the rock, always searching for a way up; always searching for any sign of the lionesses he knew must lie above silently watching him. He risked a few rumbling chuffs but he gave up