They walk for days, padding past hundreds of spiky trees and through dry grass. It’s hot and Mum keeps charging ahead.
At first the journey is terrifying, they come across flocks of strange, sharp-horned animals, a crea-ture made of long spines shuffling around, and, worst of all, something that snaps at them with hundreds of teeth as they cross the river. But, after a while, Sunny starts to realise that nearly eve-rything is scared of Mum. No animal, big or small, messes with her.
And so he and his siblings start to relax. After all, walking is quite boring and now they have new exciting insects to chase and snakes and …even something with a big tough shell it can disappear into - and not come out no matter how hard they bat it.
They’re having so much fun that a couple of times they almost lose Mum completely. This re-sults in some quite fearsome growls pulling them back into line for at least five minutes - before they spot a green bee-eater which looks particularly tasty. Sadly the brightly-coloured bird is too quick, so Sunny makes do with pouncing on his sisters. He’s just got one pinned, when Mum freez-es and hisses. Jumping, the three cubs tumble behind a bush and peer through it. Mum looks seri-ous.
They wait.
From behind a tree appears a lion - just like Mum, and then another one and another one.
The first one moves towards Mum and roars.
None of the cubs have ever seen another lion - let alone three. They stand frozen. Are they going to attack Mum? Can she beat three other big lions?
Mum roars back.
Everyone stays still.
Then suddenly she moves forward and rubs heads with the first lioness, and the next one and the next one. Two more lionesses join from the trees - followed by a whole rabble of cubs of all differ-ent sizes, tumbling and running and swatting at each other.
This is their family, this is their pride.
Even though everything seems fine, it takes Sunny a long time to feel brave enough to join the group of lions. He stays in the bush watching the pride enjoy a good grooming session then lazing in the sunshine. As he watches his braver sisters suckling at Mum his hunger starts to take over - but he still doesn't like the look of all those big lions.
Finally he sneaks over to Mum and is just about to scramble in next to his sisters before ‘sluuurp!’ -something rough knocks him over. And before he knows it he’s getting a bath from one of the other lionesses.
Now Sunny and his sisters are part of the pride. Guarded by the lionesses and spending the days playing with the other cubs, they’re always safe.
And now they’re all together he’ll never have to leave.
Right?
Watch out for chapter three coming soon!