A New Home, and an Unsatisfying Drink [archived]

It had been four days, four days since nearly everything Kihiri had known about the world had been turned firmly on its head. Her home, her hard-won territory for which she had searched for years, had vanished, all scent of it lost, and not just from the fire that had swept across it. That, at least she could understand; fire was a terrible but at least natural event, but what had happened to her could only be described as unnatural. She had been teleported to some new world, where the animals were at once familiar and as strange as she could ever have imagined.

One thing had not changed, however, and that was her need to eat. The mountain lion had been successful at hunting in her new world for the first time yesterday, and if all she had caught had been a rabbit, well, at least it had been a normal rabbit, at least in appearances. The result was that she was not particularly hungry today, yet she stayed in the same spot she had the day for two reasons; firstly her tan pelt blended well with the lichen covered rocks of the outcrop, and secondly, it was the only place she’d come across so far that had any sort of familiarity to it. She had lived all her life on the rocks of mountains, and these small outcrops hence felt at least a little like a place she could call home.

She was presently exploring, poking her nose into the cracks and crevices between the rocks, learning what she could of the place. If she was going to settle there, she would need to know it inside and out. So far she had already established that prey was a little scarce, though her nose told her that the pickings were richer in the nearby forest; that strange silent place would be a good place to stalk prey, if she could get used to hiding behind trees instead of under rocks. She wouldn’t stay there though; the absence of sound would drive her insane eventually, she was sure, and she would feel safer in a small cave rather than up a tree.

Her exploring eventually led her to just such a small cave, with such a narrow entrance that she could only just squeeze in, but the inside was large enough for her to lie down comfortably on the stony floor. As she sniffed around she caught site of something glinting at the very back like light off water, and she turned for a closer look. With her bulk blocking the light from the entrance she could not see the colour of the liquid lying in the small hollow, and is at had no smell she assumed it was water. Well if this was to be her home it could not stay there, and she was thirsty. Quickly she lapped it up, her tongue confirming that it was indeed just water. Strangely she still felt thirsty afterwards, but at least she had a dry home. She turned again and emerged from the little cave into the afternoon sun, stretched, and continued her exploration, loping among the rocks.