I am a young lion and this is my pride, being a fictionalized account from the perspective of the King of the Jungle

For the past three years, I have wandered mostly alone after being driven from the pride of my birth, doomed to lurk at the edge of my elder’s territory, always on the outside, looking in, but all that has changed since I drove off my father and killed his cubs. 

I am a young lion, and I have taken over a pride for the first time.  For the past three years, I have wandered mostly alone after being driven from the pride of my birth, doomed to lurk at the edge of my elder’s territory, always on the outside, looking in.  These years weren’t wasted, however.  I took advantage of this time to grow into my adult form, bearing the mighty mane my kind if famous for, improve my hunting skills, and gather other young males, some of whom are my brothers, to increase our chances of simply surviving.  Our lives are not easy ones by any means, eking out a meager existence in an utterly hostile and unforgiving territory, where the sun either beats down upon everything, squeezing every drop of water out of the land, or the rains come, flooding everything for miles around.  Humans sometimes call us the King of Jungle, but especially at a young age, we are more victims than anything else, preyed upon by hyenas and other beasts, even other lions, tearing us limb from limb whenever they can.  More than half of us die before reaching a year old; far less will make it to ten; many of us are killed at the hands of our own kind; only a daring, powerful, fierce, lucky few like me will earn the right to breed.  Like everything else in our existence, that right to breed is earned with blood itself.  A lion doesn’t willingly give up his pride, and my own father was no exception.  When I returned to claim my birthright, he fought to defend his.  The conflict was short, but brutal and bloody, all flashing teeth and claws.  I will bear the scar, a gash that runs from the right side of my mane down over my shoulder, until the end of my days, but still, I fared better than my father.  I don’t even know whether or not he will live, nor do I care.  He was bleeding from the neck and the lower back when he slunk across the horizon, limping as he went, dragging his left rear paw behind him.  He might survive for a time in exile as I did.  He might collapse as soon as he’s out of sight, either bleeding out or starving, becoming food for the scavengers, the hyenas and the vultures that prey upon the dead that litter this brutal landscape.  Nor is his blood the only that will be spilled to solidify my reign.  As soon as my father was defeated, I set upon his children, breaking each of their necks with a single swift blow while their own mothers looked on, doing nothing as I killed them one by one, though they were merely defenseless babies.  The four young bodies are still lying on the ground, visible at the edge of the trees, until the scavengers take them away as well.  Humans who study my kind have determined that I kill these cubs so the female lions will come back into heat, making way for my own offspring, but I don’t know any of this.  I kill them because I am descended from a long line of other male lions who did the same.  Likewise, the female lions watch because they are descended from a long line of females who have done the same.  Either way, remorse or regret simply do not exist in our world.  There is no time for it in the battle to survive and reproduce, the twin drives of our entire existence, male and female.

After the cubs are killed, I survey my new dominion, savoring the sights, smells, and sounds, as though the world was brand new.  There are five females who are now mine by right along with two males, one a brother and the other a cousin who I have brought into my coalition.  These males will have limited rights to mate and might one day battle me for supremacy, but for now an uneasy peace prevails.  The same can be said of the neighboring prides; my new territory stretches across some 50 miles of savannah in central Africa, mainly tall grass and a few copses of trees for shelter.  To the untrained observer, there seems nothing worth protected, but is mine. Beyond the horizon, which is defined primarily by scent, other prides lurk, as wary of their own territory as I am.  Between the horizon, young male lions prowl along with hyenas and other foes, but also food, zebra, gazelles, buffalo, wildebeest, effectively whatever the pride can find and kill, or scavenge as we are certainly not above eating the flesh of the already deceased, whatever makes the easiest meal.  Fortunately, lions have been gifted with excellent senses. I do not see color as well as a human, but my pupils can dilate further, I have more rods than cones, and a tapetum lucidum, a reflective layer of tissue, all of which help me see in poor light.  I can also survey across a full 180 degrees without turning my head and armed with much better peripheral vision and more sensitivity to motion, I can scan a wide area for intruders of any kind.  My sense of smell is also excellent, though inferior to the wild dogs that sometimes cross through my territory as a pack, more nuisance than enemy, though sometimes we might fight over food when it is scarce.  Still, I have a small organ on the top of my mouth unknown in either humans or dogs, the Jacobson’s organ, that allows me to literally taste smells, sniffing the air and feeling it in a way that other animals simply cannot.  Beyond the Jacobson’s organ, I have 200 million receptors in my nose, allowing me to smell things from five miles away.  My hearing is equally impressive, able to pick up sounds from a full mile and because I can swivel my ears, I can better locate the source of a sound than a human, pointing them around like a natural radar.  If you see me sitting under a tree, paws stretched out in front in the way of an Egyptian sphinx, mane blowing in the occasional wind, it might seem like I’m resting or merely killing time, enjoying the warmth of the sun and the feel of grass against my belly.  In reality, I am watching and observing everything happening within several miles; the scents on the wind, the noises echoing across the tall, open grass, and the motion in the distance.  All of these I continuously monitor for the members of my pride, our many enemies, and food, the sensations rippling through me, scrutinized by my predator brain, weighed according to finally honed instincts, judged good, bad, or indifferent, and finally either acted upon or ignored.  If I choose to act, the entire living world takes notice.  I am more than eight feet long, standing four feet at the shoulder, adding up to almost 600 pounds of muscle and sinew.  I have 30 teeth including four large pointed canines that are close to daggers at almost three inches long, capable of crushing anything at a force up to 1,000 pounds per square inch.  Like a housecat, I have retractable claws, but no domesticated animal boasts a set that measures 1.5 inches, backed by muscle that can strike with the effective weight of a small car.  I can run almost 50 miles per hour, falling upon my prey with enough momentum to shatter a human body with ease.  If I hit you, chances are you are dead, a shattered, bloody mess, but you might get lucky.  I might simply roar to scare you away, creating a burst of sound that can be heard for miles around.  

Of course, I don’t know any of this.  Numbers, comparisons, classifications, etc. are for humans.  I am a lion.  I simply am what I am and I don’t question it.  Still, I’m intelligent enough to observe how other creatures clear a path for me, especially when I am young and strong.  As a male, I don’t hunt myself, leaving that up to the females of my new pride, but I know well the scent of prey and the struggle for food from the time I was in exile and had to fend more myself.  In this sense, I am aware that nothing on the savannah can withstand my wrath, but millions of years of evolutionary history, before lions were even lions, have taught me to be cautious.  A smaller creature, even a prey animal, might not be able to defeat me in mortal combat, but out here, death can come from even a minor cut and any injury can prove mortal.  I try to avoid conflict when I can, roaring, growling, and posturing first, but will defend my territory to death when I must, and though humans like to think they are above such things, I am driven by imperatives that I simply cannot control, such as the drive to mate and eat.  For better or worse, both of these drives are based on a monstrous disparity.  Females do the hunting already while I provide protection for the pride, ironically that protection is frequently from others of my own species, but that’s far from the only difference in the division of labor in my kingdom.  Almost all females that survive into adulthood will reproduce, but only a tiny fraction of males will do the same.  The great majority of my brothers, cousins, and other distant relatives will live and die alone, forever frustrated in one of their chief biological imperatives, unsatisfied without even knowing why save we are all driven by an intense biological need we do not understand, cannot explain without language, and must simply act upon.  Whatever the case, these lonely males will never know what it feels like to preside over their own pride, to protect their own territory, or to mate with a female.  Because a female lion has an approximately equal number of male and female cubs, the competition for mating rights is brutal.  I fought and defeated my own father for the privilege.  Now that I have it, I will defend it as he did until I can fight no longer, sharing it only with the two males that have formed my coalition.  Together, we will sire the next generation of our kind.  Each female we preside over will bear between one and four cubs in about four months, and will breed every two years.  If I can maintain my position, I could birth dozens of cubs, passing down the drive that prompted me to conquer my own pride in the first place, as my father did before me, and his, and so on. This means that every male lion will fight for the same rights, even unto the death.  It also means that every female lion has within her the blood of other females who chose males to mate with who took over their own prides.  They didn’t mate with the losers.  They mate only with the winners, keeping our gene pool strong and ferocious, weeding out any that couldn’t prosper on their own, and mating is something we do, constantly, every twenty to thirty minutes, up to fifty times a day when the time is right.

Today, however, the time is not right, not yet.  The females will come into heat following the death of their cubs, but for now, I have to wait to exercise my new found power.  No other cat in the world lives like I do.  We are the only feline to organize ourselves into domestic groups, protecting one another, feeding one another, and yes, wasting the time away together with one another.  Fortunately, waiting is something I am built for almost as much as killing.  To conserve energy, I can sleep around twenty hours per day, during which I am said to have complex dreams, perhaps of hunting, perhaps of mating, maybe of my moment of triumph, even potential nightmares about how one day I too will be killed or forced from my pride, but I can’t remember them, wouldn’t know what to make of them if I could.  Whatever the case, I am active mainly during twilight and the early evening to avoid the brutal heat of the sun.  I don’t really sweat, so overheating with my fine pelt and legendary mane is a potential concern, a far too ignominious ending for such a majestic beast, who might survive close to twenty years if they are lucky.  As a result, some have called me the laziest animal on the planet, but I don’t care.  I am the King of the Jungle, after all.  Even though I don’t live in a jungle, you still don’t want to hear me roar, especially as night comes on and I begin to lope around my territory for the first time, feeling the ground under my pause, the ripple of my golden coat as the cool air comes on, the glow of my eyes in the dim light. A human once wrote that nature is red in tooth and claw. He was undoubtedly thinking of me at the time.