"Psst. Hey. Shenzi."
Shenzi stirred from her nap, picking her head up. Banzai's face was peeking at her from the shadows of a patch of grass.
"What?" she asked, squinting at the light and a little irritated at being disturbed.
"I found a half-dead snake. Wanna come bite at it with me?" Banzai asked.
That changed things. They were just starting to hunt on their own, and any practice was welcome. Practicality aside, snakes were fascinating. They were funny little sharp worms that she hardly ever got a chance to get close to without worrying.
"Why didn't you say that in the first place?" she asked, getting to her feet. They left Ed still sleeping as they started off. Shenzi didn't spend every minute of her life with her brother. She could let him keep napping. Sometimes she could play just with Banzai, or with someone else entirely.
The snake was gray, with tan and brown spots. It was about as long as Shenzi's tail. It lay half twisted over on the hot dirt, squirming intermittently.
"Think it's one of the dangerous ones?" Shenzi asked. Her own rule of thumb was to consider dangerous any animal that might be harmless or might turn her blood to paste.
"My mom says the ones with pointy heads are usually the bad ones," Banzai said. He craned his neck to look at the snake without getting closer.
"It looks pointy," Shenzi said.
"Yeah, I think so," Banzai agreed.
Shenzi hooked a rock with her paw, slinging it at the snake's tail. The snake snapped its mouth shut and open again but didn't strike at the spot, marking it as too weak to fight back if they harassed it. She and Banzai moved closer, yipping as they sniped at the animal, pawing at its tail and clacking their teeth closer and closer.
The snake stopped moving, and the two sensed the change. Dead meat wasn't a problem for them. Dead food was just food that was easier to catch. It was best of all when they didn't even have to kill it. At the same moment, Shenzi and Banzai bit into the snake. It ripped easily into two pieces in their powerful jaws, and they started gnawing on the dangling a sudden chorus of screeches and hyena laughter a few minutes later interrupted.
"All right, food!" Banzai said, swallowing his last bit of snake.
"We're eating food right now!" Shenzi said, but she knew what he meant. Lots of food. Some of the other hyenas had scared up something really big, and everyone was about to eat.
"Ha ha," Banzai said. "Race you!" He darted into the grass.
Guess you win this time, Shenzi thought as she walked both toward the spot where Banzai had found her. She wanted to make sure Ed was up, since he could sleep like a rock sometimes.
When she got to the napping spot, Ed wasn't there. Good, he already went, Shenzi thought. She caught a sniff of his scent in the air, but oddly, it was leading the other way. He must have found something, she thought as she followed the scent. She could hear the celebration, which meant Ed could, too. If he was going somewhere else, he probably found a cool lizard or something.
She followed the scent through the grass, her nose skimming the ground. Her mother's scent was there, too. That's nice, she thought. Mother hardly ever spends time with Ed. She hardly ever spent time with Shenzi, either, but Shenzi was beyond the first few days of her life, when a hyena still cared about her mother. Ed… was different.
Right by the edge of the river, Shenzi heard the sound of Ed playing by the river. She sat at the edge of the grass, about to call him, but then their mother's shadow fell across him. She stood slightly behind and to the side of Ed, who was splashing at some minnows in the shallows. She opened her jaws above Ed's neck, like she was going to pick him up and carry him across the river like a little cub.
Shenzi's body tensed, all at once. In the speed and certainty with which she understood, Shenzi would never be a cub again.
Shenzi surged forward from the grass, limbs trembling with the speed and urgency of the move. Her mother's head snapped over at the noise, and Ed smiled when he saw his sister.
"What are you doing?" Shenzi screamed at her mother. Her chest was so tight the words came out high-pitched. Her claws ground into the dirt under her paws. She wanted to sink them into her mother's side. Her teeth were bared as she stared into her mother's eyes.
Her mother stared unflinchingly back. "He's useless," she said. Shenzi had no answer, because her mother was right.
"Get away from him," she finally said, and her voice quavered with the peril it carried. She had no defense for her brother, no rationale for why she spent so much time and energy on something that wouldn't give her food. It was something she couldn't explain to her mother, and she didn't blame her for not seeing. She couldn't argue with her mother, only oppose her. And she would oppose her. If her mother made another move toward Ed, Shenzi would fall on her with tooth and claw, and she wouldn't stop until she'd killed her.
Shenzi's mother looked at her daughter, still half her size. Her expression was blank as she saw Shenzi's eyes, and her twitching jaws, and her claws scraping furrows in the dirt. She broke off her gaze and left without a word.
Ed looked back and forth between Shenzi and their mother, knowing what each word meant and that they were talking about him, but nothing of the things left unsaid. He cocked his head at his mother's back, but didn't follow her.
"Let's get out of here, Ed," Shenzi said, nudging him. "We're grown up now. We don't need a mother anymore." It was true she was big enough to catch small prey, and she'd practiced plenty of times. They could go on eating the scraps left from larger hunts, and before long, she would join the hunt herself. It didn't matter if she was small or inexperienced. Only hunters shared the food. The only exception was cubs.