Pride

The contradiction

The most frightening animal a child can name lives in a family, and the family is asleep. Five, six, seven lions in the flat warm shade of the Silent Savannah, overlapping, leaning, one head resting on another's back — a heap, not a row — and every eye closed.

Nothing is hunting. Nothing is being looked at.

The lions are doing, for twenty hours out of every day, exactly what you are being asked to do for ten.

Their personality

Awake, they are heavy and warm and in no hurry to be anywhere else. They wear the same expression at the same time, the way a family does when it has been in the sun all afternoon.

They do not react separately — the pride is one character with more than one body — and what it does, it does together and slowly. They are never in a neat row; always a pile, always overlapping, one head on another's back.

Their sleep

One breath. That is the whole of it.

The heap rises and settles as a single shape, slowly, and nothing else in the frame moves — not a tail, not an ear. Under it, if you listen, is Zi Lion's soft rumble on the out-breath, the smallest sound in the cast coming from the biggest voice in it.

There are no Z's. The breath is the Z.

How they got so good at this

Lions have always slept like this. In the real world a pride spends the hot part of the day — which is most of the day — lying together in whatever shade there is, because a lion's whole strength is saved for a very few minutes, and the rest is rest.

The Pride did not learn it and did not need to. What they have, that a single sleeping lion does not, is the heap: a pile of family reads as safe at any distance, in any light, with no words.

Somebody lies down first. The rest follow.

It has been the same every afternoon since there were lions.

Their method

They show you a crowd going to sleep as one thing. You do not watch six lions; you watch a shape settle, and lift, and settle again, and there is nothing in it to follow — no face changing, no next verse — only the breath.

Everything in you that was waiting for something to happen gives up, because the heap has made it perfectly clear that nothing is going to.

Their challenge

There is only one mane in the heap, and it belongs to the one who sings — so once Zi Lion is down, nobody in the family is awake to hear the quiet he made. The Pride is the answer to his verse, and the answer is always asleep by the time the question finishes.

Their arc

The ladder runs on how much of the pile is still lifted. First the heads are up, one or two, looking at nothing in particular.

Then they lower, one at a time, onto a back or a flank. Then the last head — Zi Lion's, the dark one — goes down, and the heap is one shape.

Then the shape breathes, and the breath slows, and it does not do anything else.

The true thing

Lions really do sleep in a pile, and they really do sleep for most of their lives — up to twenty hours out of twenty-four, resting through the heat of the day in the shade and moving mostly at night. The word for their family is a pride, which is the real word and a lovely one to teach, and in that family only the grown male has a mane.

Everything in this picture is what a real pride looks like on a hot afternoon.

Source: Schaller, G. B., The Serengeti Lion, University of Chicago Press, 1972.

What they like, and what they do not

They like flat warm ground, and shade, and each other's weight. They like an afternoon with nothing in it.

They do not like a neat row — a pride in a line is not a pride, in their view, but a queue — and they do not like being asked to look fierce. They have not looked fierce in years, and they see no reason to start.

Tardy and them

They have never met him. Zi Lion has — he rides the bus home in the seat behind Tardy every night — but the pride stays in the shade of the savannah, off his route, and Tardy has never come that way.

If he did, he would find a heap of sleeping lions, and a place at the edge of it about his size.

Their friends

Each other, and nobody else needs naming. They share the Silent Savannah with Goodnight Giraffe and the Griffon Vulture, who are neighbours in the way that a very tall thing and a very high thing are neighbours to a heap on the ground.

The quiet detail

There is one dark head in the heap, and it is never in the same place twice. Some nights it is on top; some nights it is under a golden flank at the edge.

Nobody points to it. You just learn to look for it.