Lions and Zebras

On the African plains there is a question: why are zebras feeding, heads bent as they browse, relaxed, uncaring, casual prey only to the flies and gnats in the air, while lions loll by, just over there?

            

Here is a lioness lazily walking, and another upside-down, pawing the sky, scratching her back in gravelly sand. And cubs are hilariously, perilously playing with ears and mane and tufted tail of a lordly male they’re bedeviling, but all he does is gigantically yawn and go on grazing. Peace, no domestic or any other kind of violence in this utterly placid scene.

            

Zebras meander and go on grazing, none of them remotely spooked. Some lions even hang in mimosa trees, prominent in their elevated torpor. And the zebras amble at their ease, unabashed, unconcerned, utterly casual.

            

Now, of a sudden, there is a change. Lions draped on boughs begin to clamber down. The great-maned lion who gazed unseeing, blind to the superfluous horde ahead, shakes himself, winks away his drowse. Other lions stir. They are hungering, no longer benevolent, lenient, relaxed. They are undergoing currents of re-animated appetite. And then they see, they see, innumerable zebras as—zebras—now.

            

Here is how: in that intervening placid stage, when they had fed, gorged more than enough, the lions saw their neighbors as a kind of horse, a horse with stripes or—they thought, in such a satisfied state—bars.. Each zebra-horse was in a cell or a cage, inside mobile metal enclosures. Who would charge iron bars, pounce on four-footed moving cars impervious to fang or leonine claw?

            

But then, after a while, a pang of risen hunger gnaws, releasing an efficient hormone secretion, called tapetum, in the iris of the lion’s eye. This whole pride can no longer detect or distinguish the color black—the color of the bars, or stripes. Staring at the zebras, the lions growl, “They are out!”—free for the taking, loose on the plains, in the sudden transforming blink of their eye.

            

The zebras sense something new in the air. They tremble; their skin ripples, quivers, you could say crawls. The adrenalized herd is preparing to flee, to follow old courses of flight and chase. Something in the wind, in the landscape, appalls them. They move in a body, restless, nerve-taut, escaping this place, away from hollow fellowship, feigned peace, false love. They no longer shuffle, they run, they prance, they flee.

            

The zebras never master this recurrent disaster, the sudden change from friend to foe; they tend to forget what they otherwise know.

            
Moral: A friend’s not a friend, tried and true, if half the time he turns on you.