Shenzi was unafraid when she saw her first lion as pack leader. Lions fancied themselves rulers of the savannah. The lounged on warm rocks and called audiences to announce when their latest whelp had been born. But it was on the backs of the hyenas that the lions built their oligarchy. The lionesses brought their king to the food they had prepared for him and pretended it had not been the hyenas who had caught it. The lions were not better hunters than the hyenas. They were only better thieves.
Others trailed after the first lioness as she breasted a knoll in the field and approached the hyenas gathered around their kill. Shenzi left her packmates gnawing at the cooling antelope and met the interlopers at the dip in the hollow of the knoll.
"This is lion territory," the lead lioness said. She had a bearing suitable for a member of the royal family. The deferential positions of the lionesses behind her emphasized the impression. "Take your pack and leave."
"It has never been lion territory before," Shenzi said. She flinched back when the lioness snapped at her. Deeply entrenched social games underlay any interspecies communication on the savannah. There was a hierarchy and though she could assert her own will inside it there were concessions that must be made and submissiveness that must be displayed whether or not it was felt. Similarly on the lionesses' side the gesture had been made out of performance and not aggression.
"It is now," the lioness said. Her pridemates waited behind her looking more bored than anything else. One lazily flicked its tail at a fly. Another opened her mouth and huffed to gather the scent of the antelope she knew she would soon be eating.
"And where is hyena territory?" Shenzi dared to ask. She cared not for the answer but for the time she could delay the lionesses so that her packmates could eat. Lions were not stupid but a creature amply secure in its position and resources would be more likely to indulge a small impudence like her transparent stalling.
"Somewhere else. Go," the head lioness said impatiently. Shenzi wheeled around and walked back to the carcass before the lioness decided to strike at her.
"Move out," she told her pack. Her hyenas quickly stood and departed without resistance. Lionesses had stolen kills before and lionesses would steal kills in the future. The hyenas' only revenge came when they were able to turn the tables on a smaller and less established pride and steal their prey. But the lions of Pride Rock were strong and numerous and their leader Mufasa was respected from one horizon to the other. Even Usaliti had nothing to say, though Shenzi saw her swallow some words to file away for a later time when the size of the lionesses was forgotten and the hunger of a stolen kill was keener.
The encounter had been Shenzi's first since she became matriarch and joined only a handful of prior encounters. Though the lions of Pride Rock had the strength and the position to steal kills, it was not a usual occurrence. They were a prosperous and arrogant pride who preferred not to mix with carrion-eaters, as they ironically regarded hyenas. It was an irregularity that became all the more glaring when several others followed shortly after.
"This is lion territory," the lioness said after the hyenas had been displaced for the sixth time and had set up a seventh camp. They had not even brought in any prey for the lionesses to steal. The only way the lionesses could have arrived so quickly was if they had been following the hyenas and waiting for them to try again to settle.
"Where isn't lion territory?" Shenzi asked, curtailing the edge in her tone to allow only some of the sarcasm in her half-serious question to bleed through. The watering hole was "lion territory". The old hunting grounds were "lion territory". And now even the thick brush with its pricking thorns and impassible slopes was "lion territory". The hyenas were breaching into territory Shenzi had never even known in her life. It struck her as somewhat for the best that Muuaji had died before she saw her pack so treated.
"Everything the light touches is lion territory," the lioness said with the same ambivalent and certain tone of someone brushing a fly from a choice piece of meat. The lioness regarded her with such uninterest that in all their encounters she and Shenzi never even learned each others' names. Shenzi was grateful that in their first meeting she had not brought Banzai with her, for the only lioness she recognized among the group was Sarafina, who years ago had killed his mother in a routine theft of prey that had left wounds that turned septic.
Everything the light touches, Shenzi thought as she looked over the place to which she had led her pack. Light reached the tops of the twisted stone spires but was choked off and devoured by their cracks and crevices. The soft grass of the savannah around them faded into hard, jagged stone underfoot. The faint smell of death, old enough to signal no threat but refreshed often enough to drive away most animals, hung in the air, twisted around the bones and bits of desiccated flesh that carpeted their home, ribcages like tunnels in a vast system of caves. Strange green ooze bubbled in some of the streams, leaving only a few safe to drink.
Some of the hyenas, Usaliti chief among them, protested living in such a place. Their protests died when on the first night the pack easily slew a jackal that had been picking among the bones. Prey abounded if the hunters were not choosy.
They call us carrion-eaters, Shenzi thought as she and her pack ate unmolested for the first time in weeks. It was not lost on her that only the hyenas and none of the other predators were excluded from "lion territory" Then let us be. She knew looking that at last they were somewhere the lionesses would not follow. This was the most prideless place she had ever seen.