The last days I was busy with writing a linking book for Yateesh. Noemi and Clint asked me to do it, because they had erected a high seat for watching the wildlife, without the danger of being hunted by the … more unpleasant species of the age.
When I was done with the linking book, I spent a few hours with them, sitting up there and watching the marvelous creatures of the age. Besides the already mentioned antelopelike species (we are calling them “Royalopes”), there were bigger, more bulkier built herbivores, much like the Toosha, but with a much rounder snout and even larger. They slowly grazed the grass around our observation post, a small group of about a dozen individuals.
Another, much smaller species of herbivores, which looked like big rodents, ran about in the high grass – so fast, that we couldn´t recognize any other specifics about them.
The highlight of our trip was to watch one of the predators hunt. Noemi and Clint had seen it long before I did – Clint touched my arm, signaled me to be quiet and pointed into a certain direction. It took me some minutes to see the silhouette of a large animal – nearly as large as the big, bulky herbivores – lying there in the grass, motionless, focussing on one of the youngs.
For ten minutes nothing happened. The herbivores grazed on, not seeing the predator, which lay in a distance about thirty feet away from them.
Then it struck. It moved so fast, I only could see a blur. The next second, the young herbivore lay on the ground, with a big, furry predator biting into its neck, effectively killing it.
We watched the predator feeding. Now, standing in full sunlight, it was perfectly visible. It was about 15 feet long, had four big paws with long claws. It was nearly built like a female lion, but a little leaner, with a long, rather thin snout with a lot of sharp teeth. The teeth looked like crocodiles teeth, almost the same size, without fangs like our predatory mammals have.
It had a long, scrubby fur, with a dark brown hue on his back, neck and tail, and a short, grayish fur on the face, paws and lower side of its body.
After the creature had finished its meal, it dragged the rest of the carcass into the high grass, where we lost sight of it.
After that, nothing special happened – the big herbivores had ran away, obviously, and the other species kept distance to the site of the hunt, so we couldn´t see much for some hours.
We left Yateesh before dusk.
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