Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/116174
Africa, 270 kilometers south of the Serengeti, between the Njombe River and the Muyungu Hills . . . two subordinate, adult members of his own gender, and six yearlings, his offspring of the previous winter. A pack of 21 in a species already gravely endangered, numbering less than 3,000 on the entire continent. It was a charge he accepted as readily as death, as urgently as the next second. The jackal had intruded to an offending distance. This he could not allow. He could see the smaller canine now, skulking along in the open interstices of moonlight between shadows. Slowly approaching. The same, cheeky, silver-backed male, the corroboration of his heightening scent irrefutable. Though there was a difference, a strangeness of the closing interloper that was as equally undeniable. Something the warning at his gut interpreted as vaguely unnatural and foreboding. Unnatural was disturbing in an existence conditioned by caution, strained in any moment for survival. But it was a thing duty and nature would never shrink from. The alpha-dog sank to his stomach, tensed he calico dog stopped dead-still, using the dusky shadows of the bush to secret himself from the revealing glimmer of the building moon. He had the fragile night breeze in his nose. On it had been borne the stimulus of ire. Immediately, instinct worked to craft an illusion bigger than himself. His tail bushed, a low growl grew in his throat and the hackles lifted along his back. While his large ears flared and curled to discern a more exact disclosure of its location. He had sensed abruptly its source, the pungent spoor unmistakable. A jackal, his smaller, wild canid cousin. An ancient rival in the contest of predator for prey. Their encounters were frequent, inevitable in the normal breadth of travel for his kind, which might account for 30 miles or more in a single night. Though the jackal was as ever opportunist as hunter, quick to infringe or steal a kill, and normally too cowardly to venture confrontation. It was probably the same, insistent silver-backed male he had put to flight the week before. Now he was poised to do it again, this time for better, as for present his wanderings and that of his companions were not so far-flung, circumcised to a lesser and guarded distance from the abandoned warthog burrow, by the nearby kopje, that sheltered the litter of three-month-old pups that bore his genes. For that was his duty, as the alpha male of a pack of African wild dogs, perpetuating the survival of his band. A dependency of 20, constituted of nine pups, three breeding females, S P O R T I N G C 96 L A S S I C S