A Most Amazing Nature Show

The first scene shows us a baby lion,

down in his den by his mama’s side,

fumbling around in pale fur on her belly,

not very far from a stout, black nipple.

He finally finds it and gloms on.

We learn that Arthur, the adult male,

is away today, hunting buffalo,

and the camera pans to show him briefly

up on the back of one big one,

trying to take a hearty bite,

before he’s summarily tossed off

and flipped around by the whole herd

like a rag doll, deeply disliked,

put on the ground and gored good,

left for dead amid buffalo turds.

Katawi Park is experiencing a drought,

and the river is shrinking to mud holes.

In one a crowd of good hippopotamuses

is doing its best to get by,

when a pair of menacing males approach

and challenge our alpha male.

The big bull goes ashore to fight.

Opening wide to bite one bastard,

he’s bitten himself, right through the nose,

and hooked while the other unseemly intruder

latches onto his vulnerable ass.

The two bad hippos wrestle him to the water

and drown him! They fucking drowned him!

The commentator of The Nature Show

thinks the two intruders knew what they were doing.

Well I’ll say they did! They drowned him!

Unlike the story of Jesus and Humanity,

where JC allowed, they knew not what they were doing,

those goddamned, invading hippopotamuses drowned him!

Now he is just a big fat cadaver,

and his family comes up to feel bad beside him,

opening wide to make mournful sounds 

and muzzle him softly.

If you’ve never seen hippopotamuses grieve,

I am telling you: this was some deep sorrow.

Never mind that they were funny-looking:

they hurt. And anyone alive could feel it.

Now, back to the story of the lion pride:

Two females each have four cubs,

and times are tough in this here drought.

All the adults take off to go hunting,

except for one mother, Patch, 

who is left alone with the cubs.

She is starving and at the end of her milk

when she notices vultures, about a mile away,

circling over something to eat.

She decides to leave and investigate,

coming at last to the hippo carcass,

nearly ashore and being tugged at by crocs.

She tip-toes out for a bite, herself,

risking life and limb to do so,

and frankly, it doesn’t look promising.

But then, here comes the rest of the pride,

who had also noticed the vultures.

They all crowd in and the crocs back off,

fearing, perhaps, a paw to the eye.

And so it is our beloved mother lions

at last have a huge hippopotamus dinner.

Meanwhile, a dreadful, rogue male lion

has happened upon our defenseless cubs,

and his plan is to kill every single last one.

That way, the mothers will come into heat,

which they will not do while nursing.

He sniffs the air and knows they are hiding,

finds one, gives it a bite and a shake,

and looks around for another.

The camera shows one half up a tree,

hiding in leaves, as still as a mouse.

But the bad male is sniffing the air,

and he smells it and finds it: 

low hanging fruit, crunch, crunch.

Meanwhile, meanwhile, here come the mothers,

bellies sagging and swaying near ground.

You can tell they ate too much,

or perhaps just enough, all they could,

and they feel like you do at Christmas or Thanksgiving,

covered with flies and waiting for it to go down.

The rogue moves off and the mothers move in,

calling out for their kids, hopefully.

And one by one, they come out of the weeds

like survivors of one of Grimm’s fairy tales,

now making a grand total of six.

Pretty soon, several months go by,

and our lions have eaten a baby hippo

and a lot of less-appetizing pelicans

with their own bellies bloated with fish.

Then, as if on a cue from God,

it starts to rain and the world is relieved,

except for the nearly biblical flood.

But at last things are back to normal again,

and here is the icing on the cake of life:

Arthur, old Arthur, was not really dead.

The camera shows a great big buffalo,

covered in cats but still on its feet,

and here comes Arthur up at a gallop,

and he leaps and joins the attacking females,

landing squarely on the buffalo’s back!

That sinks it and dinner is finally served.

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Chat GPT says an adult male lion weighs,

on average, 330-500 pounds.

Exceptional5 specimens are over 600 pounds. Amen.