Not Walking

Translated from the Persian original.

Quite by chance I saw a cheetah. Naturally, my first thought was that he would attack me. But when I looked closely I realized he didn't expect me to be afraid of him at all. I trusted him and went along with him to a quiet corner. I looked for some meat for him, but he said he wasn't hungry, so I made a hot drink so I could have a chat with him. To get the conversation going I started with the cold air after the rain and then moved on to their extinction, which has been much talked about lately, but it seemed to me he knew nothing about it. I figured the first time you meet a cheetah, you don't talk about death.

From there I got onto the problems of habitat protection and the troubles with hunting. I asked, these illegal hunts must do a lot of harm to the growth of your cheetah population. He gave me the frown of a sage regarding a fool and said, quite the opposite. He said when hunters multiply, cheetahs stay at home, and out of idleness the urge to breed actually grows. I said, then the reason your numbers are falling must be the lack of prey and food. He said no, but didn't explain any further. Well, I'm not the kind of person who drags words out of animals by force, so I changed the subject and asked, what are you doing around here at this hour of the night? He said, I was taking a walk. I couldn't help laughing and asked, really, as the fiercest predator in the wild, you have nothing more important to do than that? He toyed with his glass of tea a little, lowered his head and said quietly, the most important thing a male cheetah does is walk at night after the rain. He said cheetahs don't die from not eating or from hunting, they die from not walking. He said first they get depressed, then they go and stand in front of a hunter so he'll kill them. He said that's how the dinosaurs went extinct too, with the difference that they hadn't discovered walking yet, and they didn't know depression either; they would get angry and start killing their own kind; the greatest hunters of dinosaurs were dinosaurs themselves. It was interesting; until today I had thought the main causes of the dinosaurs' extinction were things like volcanoes and the earth's periods of climate change and, in the end, their species' genetic weakness. To the cheetah, who was getting ready to leave, I said, I have just one more question. I wanted to ask, why after the rain? But there was a more pressing question. I asked, why did you say male cheetahs? He said a female cheetah loves her mate when he walks. Female cheetahs are proud of their males who walk and show off to the other females, and in fact when the males see the females' indifference it wounds their cheetahhood and they get depressed. He said this and left.

I don't know if he went home or went off somewhere to die. I was so dazed I forgot to ask where in this city he lives, but then I thought, what use am I to him that I should know where he lives? His ache isn't meat and bread and safety, which I could provide for him and so be of some help; his ache is being a cheetah. If the rain doesn't fall, the world is no longer a place for cheetahs.

It makes sense, too: why don't all these animals that don't know how to hunt at all, and are by nature the hunted, go extinct, while in the middle of it all the most skilled hunter on earth does?

A hunter's ache is the hunt,

A great hunter's ache is to walk, at night, sated, in his own forest.

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