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  'No, Yowlar, I don't think I will.'

  The ebony Sabretooth grimaced. ‘You're refusing? I wasn't asking, brother. That's an order from your pride leader.'

  'Look around you. Sunning Rock is gone and the pride with it,’ Hoaru scoffed. ‘You lead nobody, least of all me.'

  'What has come over you?'

  'Gumption, I guess. I haven't the faintest idea how I got changed in looks or why, but I feel different as well. No longer am I compelled to be part of a group, or to be bossed around by the likes of you anymore. I have a compunction to be alone, to hunt for myself. You want something to eat? Get off your lazy haunches and go catch it yourself.'

  Yowlar voiced his outrage in a scream. ‘I am still you're leader! So help me you will obey me or I'll scratch your eyes out.’ He bunched his muscles, ready to spring at his treasonous sibling, when Miorr deliberately stepped between the two males and swatted Yowlar on the nose.

  'Are you prepared to claw me also?’ she growled defiantly.

  Yowlar felt as if the ground had caved in beneath his paws. ‘You too?’ he croaked at his favourite. ‘But why?'

  The she-cat hissed at him. ‘You have to ask? I have been your unwilling concubine ever since you took over the pride by killing my sire. Though I never envisaged this day ever coming, I've been dreaming of my emancipation for the longest time. I despise you, Yowlar, and happily reject you.'

  'Seems I'm not the only one tired of living in your shadow, brother,’ Hoaru observed, amused by Miorr's display of women's lib.

  'Shut up, Hoaru,’ she spat. ‘I'm not fond of any of you males.'

  Hoaru was taken off guard by her attack. He had thought they shared a common foe and were loose allies.

  'You can do me one favour,’ Miorr contradicted herself. ‘Leave. I'm claiming this territory for myself. There's a copse of bushwillows on a riverbank off to the northeast that'll be perfect for raising cubs in ... by myself.'

  Hoaru assented without saying a word and melted into the grassland.

  'Take your rotten brother with you!’ Miorr shouted after him. ‘By the way, Yowlar, you were lousy at the mating game.'

  Too flabbergasted to retaliate, Yowlar turned tail and trotted after Hoaru. A snarl of objection quickly dissuaded the Black Panther from that course of action. He halted, mutely watching Hoaru's ringed tail disappearing northwards. The break up was complete. Without family or friends, the reformed Sabretooth was set adrift in an expanse of uncertainty. Heaving a sigh of regret, Yowlar trudged due west.

  Gurgon-Rha had imposed his own preferences upon his feline draftees. The campaign he conceived to annihilate the apish humans was to be a guerrilla action, not a mass attack. He therefore dissolved the cats’ instinct to form up into a pride. The African false-Sabretooths were manufactured to be solitary creatures, coming together only to mate. They were to lead a lonely life, concentrating for the most part on hunting game, notably the ancestral humans. It was classic military strategy of divide and conquer. Little did Yowlar and the Sunning Rock Pride fully realise that they were mere conscripts recruited into a battle of attrition by the long defunct Tsor war machine.

  The lonesome cat roamed the open grassland for the remainder of the unbearably hot afternoon, resting periodically in the shade offered by the scattered acacia trees he infrequently came across. Climbing out of the broad basin the waterhole sat in, Yowlar was now ranging across a plain of stunted Bermuda grass cropped short by vast herds of grazers. He wandered with caution. The wildlife was broadly similar to that of his old world and just as dangerous. Twice Yowlar was chased off by itinerant buffalo, huger than the short-horned and humped bison of the Americas and just as ornery. Crowned with massive, sweeping horns that curved into wicked-looking hooks, the groups of half-dozen bulls serving as protectors for their respective herds of fifty and more head were relentless defenders, hounding the trespassing cat remorselessly. Yowlar narrowly escaped being gored and pressed on through the throngs of flighty impala and hartebeest. An outcropping of slate-grey stone loomed on the horizon like a beacon, drawing the dislocated cat toward it.

  Night was falling, bringing with it a blessedly cooling end to the heat of day when Yowlar gained the bushland at the base of the rock monolith. Weaving his way through the open acacia woodscape, his cat's-eyes easily penetrating the murk of the descending darkness to help him find his way, the ideally camouflaged panther reached the end of his impromptu sojourn. The tower of stone clawed skyward for a hundred feet or so, an edifice of immutable solidity topped by the first stars of the evening peeping through the curtain of night. Gashes of impenetrable blackness lined the bottom slopes of the upthrust of the valley's foundations, marking the entrances to fissures and grottos in the fractured rock. He fancied that he heard faint scrapings of movement from within those unlit spaces and shrugged off the feeling, putting his nerves down to fatigue.

  Yowlar tiredly hauled himself into the lower branches of a stunted tree overlooking the cave complex, scaring a troop of vervet monkeys into the uppermost branches. He ignored their abusive shrieks of indignation. Hungry as he was, the panther had neither the energy nor aspiration to hunt. It had been a harrowing day and, in spite of the weirdest feeling of having arrived home, Yowlar longed to sleep. Flopping down on a stout branch, his back legs and tail dangling below him, the cat foolishly wished again that this whole unpleasant episode was all said and done just a bad dream. If it was not and indeed proved real, he wanted to be fresh for whatever surprises the morning held in store.

  Yawning before shutting his eyes, Yowlar consoled himself with the mumbled thought, ‘At least I wasn't changed into a dog.'

  Chapter Five

  The cave was pitch black.

  Bushwalker stirred. Night always frightened the female Upright, her anxiety made worse by the added inkiness of the unlit grotto. She sat up, unintentionally jostling the snoring body curled up next to her.

  'What's going on?’ a drowsy hoot sounded.

  'Nothing. Go back to sleep, Rockshaper,’ she whispered back.

  'I can't. You've woken me now.'

  Feeling the speaker roll over onto his side, Bushwalker softly chided, ‘Go to sleep. You need your rest, old-timer.'

  'Less of the old,’ grunted Rockshaper. ‘I can still outrun you if I have to.'

  Bushwalker sincerely doubted that. ‘Let's go over to the cave mouth,’ she suggested in a low voice. ‘I always feel better when looking outside.'

  Yawning, Rockshaper crept after Bushwalker. ‘Try not to disturb the others,’ he muttered. ‘I detest company.'

  The pair carefully made their way through a mass of sleeping forms, bare feet softly rustling the dried grasses used as bedding to make the coarse cave floor bearable, to crouch at the entrance bathed in the cold glow of a yellow moon.

  The Uprights were short, Bushwalker standing a measly three and a half feet high with Rockshaper only half a foot taller, and seldom weighed more than 70 lbs. For all their smallness the hominins were sturdy and strong, physical traits well needed by the ancestors of humankind if they were to survive, let alone flourish, on the merciless African savannah. But one of two species of man-apes coexisting in tenuous mutual tolerance, Bushwalker and her troop were of the gracile kind and, unlike the vegetarian robusts, omnivorous foragers, supplementing their principal diet of seeds, corms and fruits with occasional scraps of meat snatched from carnivore leftovers.

  Feeling Bushwalker trembling at his side, Rockshaper asked her, ‘Why are you so afraid of the dark?'

  She shrugged. ‘The shadows, I guess, and whatever could be lurking within them.’ Bushwalker stared upwards in adulation at the luminescent ball hanging against the star-studded velvet night. Unlike the sun, forever obscured in the daytime glare, the illuminating moon shone unafraid from the encompassing blackness, reassuring Bushwalker with its unheated presence and boldness. ‘The night-sun is pretty, don't you think?’ she said aloud.

  'Yes,’ Rockshaper concurred in a voice echoing her awe.r />
  'What do you reckon it's made of?'

  With profound perception Rockshaper answered, ‘Stone.'

  'What makes you think that?’ Bushwalker sounded amused. ‘It could just be a rolled up ball of shiny yellow grass.'

  'It's coloured the same as the blocks in the rock-field I collect my cobbles from,’ he asserted. ‘It's definitely stone.'

  'I honestly can't fathom your fascination with rocks. What use have they other than for throwing at Hookbeaks?'

  'You're sounding like Caverunner, my dear.'

  'I'm not that insulting,’ she disagreed.

  'True enough. I suppose I'll have to soon show you, as well as our doubting leader, just what my shaped rocks can do.'

  Bushwalker's hominin head bobbed. Displaying an apish snout, she and her kind sprouted the formative beginnings of a protrusive, humanlike nose and a gradual reduction of the brooding brow ridges commonplace amongst more primitive primates. ‘I can hardly wait,’ she honestly said. Her childlike fascination with the moon resumed. ‘Treeclimber says the night-sun is the eyeball of some giant creature.'

  'That boy's got rocks in his head.'

  'Probably, but he is rather cute.'

  Rockshaper sighed. ‘Young ‘uns.’ At twenty-six years of age the silver-haired male was considered an elder of the tribe, since Uprights rarely lasted beyond their twentieth year of life. ‘When are the two of you going to mate?’ he bluntly asked. Bushwalker herself was nine and recently sexually mature.

  'Whenever Treeclimber decides to grow up.'

  The oldster chuckled quietly to himself. ‘That'll not happen overnight.'

  Bushwalker grew coy and cleared her throat. ‘We have already mated once.'

  'Bushwalker!'

  'Well, twice actually,’ she further confessed.

  Divided in his reaction, Rockshaper hooted confusedly. On one hand he wholeheartedly approved of the coupling, for while a reckless sort Treeclimber was immensely likable and a good partner for Bushwalker. On the other, the elder fancied the Upright maid and would have offered himself to her were it not for their considerable age gap. His thoughts darkened. A pairing between he and Bushwalker would have been highly improbable for the simple fact that she viewed him as an honorary uncle. ‘Are the two of you planning to settle together?’ he asked her rather tersely.

  'I'm not sure. Treeclimber is also romantically entangled with Cloudlooker and Raincatcher.'

  Rockshaper grunted, expressing a mix of envy and disapproval. Monogamy was not a strong suit of hominin culture. He looked over at Bushwalker's daintily snouted moonlit face, sensing that she was holding something back. Deciding not to press her further, the older Upright returned his gaze back to the starfield overhead, wondering what sort of rocks made up those faraway glowing points.

  The twosome spent the remainder of the night in contemplative silence at the cave mouth, enjoying the stillness of the forbidding dark and each other's company. Their peacefulness came to an end when the skies imperceptibly lightened, a steely grey displacing the blackness, only to itself be usurped by the pink and gold splashes of the flowering dawn. The first rays of morn touched the dozing pair, prompting them to stir. The others sharing the cavern also began waking from their nightly slumber, stretching and yawning throatily, rubbing crotches, voiding bladders and bowels. Mornings started off noisy and stinky.

  'I thought I warned you off from sleeping in the entrance,’ a gruff voice said from behind. ‘Any passing meat-eater can you snatch you from there.'

  Bushwalker huddled over in a crouch of submission. ‘I'm sorry, Caverunner. I forgot.'

  A hulking great chestnut coloured male gracile stepped from the gloom at the back of the cave into the milky light, his five-foot height towering over the rebuked female. ‘Don't let it happen again,’ grumped Caverunner. ‘I don't like having the orderliness of my caves disrupted.’ The leader of Home-rock was plainly not a morning person! The surly chieftain normally slept with his family in a private grotto above the main living caves, but occasionally made his presence felt by slumming it with his followers. Looking out upon the coming day, he scratched his armpit and absently remarked, ‘Another fine morning, I see.'

  Getting up, Rockshaper poked his snout out of the cave and grimaced at the waxing sunlight, his brow ridges contorting into a frown. ‘It's going to be too damn hot as usual.'

  Caverunner looked down at the elder gracile and deliberately baited him. ‘Planning to play with your rocks again, old one?'

  'It beats playing with your food. Eaten any good fleas lately?'

  The look Caverunner gave Rockshaper was purest contempt. He had lost that round. The insulted chieftain roughly tapped Bushwalker on the back with his knuckle, by doing so giving her permission to stand. She obeyed, careful to hide her mirth at the stooped oldster's impertinence, and traipsed after her offended leader as he left the grotto. Halting on the narrow rock shelf fronting the cavern, Caverunner hooted loudly before beginning the descent to the open woodland below. Followed by the occupants of his own cave, the dominant male of the Home-rock tribe was joined also by those emerging from the lower caves, so that by the time he reached the ground he was heading a troop numbering some forty individuals.

  Bushwalker met up with Treeclimber when she hit the dry earth at the base of the cave complex and greeted him with a friendly bark.

  'No time to talk,’ responded the young male. ‘It's my turn to join the lead group.'

  She watched him jog away as the troop fanned out into their typical marching formation; the subordinate males positioned to the front and rear plus around the edges of the group, with Caverunner and the geriatric males occupying the middle alongside the females and babies. Treeclimber eagerly made his way to the fore of the tribe, having been elevated from his usual place as tail end charlie. Bushwalker forgave her tan-hued beau his rudeness. He was a born show-off and always out to impress. She found his bravado most attractive.

  Caverunner directed his troop through the shrubland of Scraggly Bush and out on to the sparsely treed star and lemon grasses carpeting Firewind Veldt, angling them due east into the glaring face of the wakening sun. Bushwalker smacked her dry lips in anticipation. The first task in their daily foraging routine was a stopover at the only waterhole in the arid region.

  * * * *

  Yowlar slowly came awake.

  He eyed his surroundings and mouthed a growl of displeasure. This was no dream after all. The translocation, the body adjustment: both horribly real. Veiled by the leafy green foliating his tree hideout, the panther shakily climbed down from the branch he had been lounging on for the duration of his first night in deepest, darkest Africa. The foreign soil beneath his ebony paws further grounded Yowlar in his nightmarish reality. Sniffing the arid earth, he resolved to make the best of a bad situation. First off, the blackened Sabretooth had to become accustomed to his remodelled form.

  Lighter and nimbler than his old self, Yowlar scrambled back up the main trunk of the thornless fig tree and experimentally leapt between the many stouter branches spreading close to the ground, testing his newfound arboreal skills. The trial did not go without incident. More than once he misjudged a jump and fell out of the tree, landing expertly on his four paws every time.

  'I've gotta get the hang of this bigger tail,’ he snarled reproachfully after the last fall.

  And he did just that. By midmorning Yowlar the Black Panther was as proficient a cat as he ever was and more dapper to boot. Swishing his tail in resolve, the reconfigured Sabretooth made up his mind to eat. Hunger now asserted itself as the big cat's prime concern. Not having feasted for who knows how long since his abduction, the famished feline was damned if he would bow to the walking snake's insistence to hunt the Uprights, assuming he could even find them out here. He would prey on something more recognisable.

  Raking the trunk of his timbered climbing frame with his unveiled claws to mark the first boundary post of his new territory, Yowlar dropped back down to all fours to p
ad silently through a parched woodscape of umbrella-crowned acacias and straggly bushes. He was again struck by the incongruous familiarity of the place. Chancing upon a kneeling warthog grubbing about in the dusty earth a few yards ahead of him, he instinctively froze.

  'That's the ugliest Grunter I've ever seen,’ the ebony cat growled, accustomed to the smoother faced peccaries an ocean away in future times. ‘Still, meat is meat and right now pork is on the menu.'

  The knobbly old boar suddenly looked up, gazing straight into the hungering eyes of the stopped cat. With a squeal of alarm he raised his tufted tail and trotted away. Yowlar whined and bounded after the bizarrely four-tusked pig, undaunted by either the upper set curving swordlike from beneath its flaring nostrils or the lower pair projecting out of its chin. He despised going out for takeaways. The chase proved short-lived with a surprising end. Running hungrily after his meal, Yowlar aborted the hunt when the warthog ploughed into a troop of roving baboons. The startled monkeys dispersed in all directions as the flighty boar steamrollered his way through their midst and disappeared into the scrub. The trailing panther capitalised on the confusion and singled out a sub-adult primate racing blindly toward him on all fours. He pounced on the unsuspecting baboon, bringing him down with his jaws locked about the monkey's throat, as the escaping members of the troop scrambled for the safety of the trees.

  'Argh. P-Please don't kill me, sir,’ the caught baboon whimpered in a strangled voice. ‘I'll do anything you want.'

  'Right now I want you to fill my belly,’ mumbled Yowlar, repositioning his mouth to get a better grip. His slashing days over, the reborn cat was having trouble adjusting to this new killing technique instilled into him by his Tsor captor. To go from stabbing to strangulation required a shift in mindset.

  'Didn't your mother teach you not to talk with your mouth full?’ quipped the slowly suffocating monkey. The panther bit down harder. ‘Not a mummy's boy, eh stranger?’ the baboon laughed hoarsely. Some individuals are comedians to the bitter end.