Once Upon a Timon - ENGLISH

Chapter 8: Life on the surface

" ... the snails that hide under the stones. They like dark and dry places, but sometimes we also find them in full sunlight, when they are looking for food. They are quite large, but they are very slow. Also, you know... now that there are no predators we can use our skills in other things. Would you believe me that snails are harder to crush than desert scorpions? Of course you don't have to take care of the poison, but they are still very tough on the outside. Finally, when we have enough snails, we place them on a flat stone and hit them with a rock until they are completely dusted. It has to be a very fine powder, if there are large pieces left the paint will not work. The stone must be flat in order to collect it. Did I tell you what happened the first time we crushed a snail? Well, Lena happened to be taking a nap when...

Tesma spoke quickly, as if fearing that at some point she would forget what she was saying, or that Timon would disappear, despite how much she sometimes strayed from the subject. She had been all the way back to the colony talking about the paint she had learned to prepare, and yet she still had not explained half the process.

Timon listened intently to everything she said. He was not one to love the chatter of others, but when it came to Tesma, and his desire to make amends with her, he made an exception. Besides, he had just seen the mural that he was so passionately talking about, and it was truly something spectacular.

The slope he had told her about the night before was part of a small rocky ridge that was only a few minutes from their settlement. With the help of a work team, they had polished the roughness and irregularities of the stone until it was suitable for the mural. It was so tall that Timon reckoned it was almost five times his own height, and so long that if he stood facing one end he could take twenty-five steps before reaching the other. They had started painting on the left side with what the meerkat believed was the first family of meerkats that had started the colony. The truth was that Timon knew nothing about history and was not particularly interested in it, but Tesma's work seemed so colorful and well done that he soon found himself asking about each passage carved into the rock.

As soon as Tesma finished drawing Timon's silhouette in the place she wanted, she left his companions in charge to finish the painting and offered to accompany Timon to see the rest of his new village.

"It's a long process to finish the painting," she had told him. "If you stay you'll get bored, and I don't want to waste your time. You still have a lot to see, and you'll only be here for a few days."

And that was how they ended up returning to the colony.

Tesma was still not finishing explaining the production of the paintings when they came across something that caught his attention. She left the sentence and the story of the first crushed snail unfinished and, with her eyes fixed on the side of the path, she stood still.

"Something happens?" Timon asked.

"Come, there's something around here I want you to see," she said.

Then she walked into the brush that bordered the path, and he followed her. The jungle plants grew so close together that it was impossible to cross the ground without crushing the smaller ones or getting entangled in the branches of the thicker ones. Thesma walked very fast, and Timon, by now accustomed to the open plains of The Pridelands, gradually fell behind.

"Tesma," he called, without getting an answer,

A second later he bumped his foot against some stray pebble and fell face first into a small bush. He got up immediately when he realized that he had reached a second path and Tesma was standing in front of him.

She was lost in thought watching something, which gave Timon time to get up and clean himself up. He followed the direction of her gaze until he discovered a series of strange lumps of dry earth covered painfully with dry leaves. It took the meerkat a couple of seconds to realize that they were not lumps, but some kind of hollow spheres, similar to swallows' nests.