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"You shouldn't worry about it Mipa." said Kovu. The lion sped up to walk beside the female as she waddled, her overlarge tummy swinging side to side as she moved. There was a tiny rasping sound, the sound of the fur between her thighs rubbing as she walked. "It's not a big deal."

Mipa suddenly rounded on him, frowning deeply. "Not a big deal? Really Kovu? I got banished from my pride because I was fat! and I've only gotten fatter since then."

"Mipa." said Kovu, his voice rising a little. He was indeed tired of the lioness's self-pity. "That can't be the whole story."

"I'm sorry, I forgot, they also didn't want me because I refused to run after stick-legged gazelle and work myself into exhaustion every night!"

"That's not what I meant. I-" started Kovu, but she interrupted

"Just stop-" cried Mipa, flustered, her tail lashing back and forth, "I don't want to talk about this." She rushed forward and Kovu followed in her wake, silently.

They said little over the next few hours. They checked many traps; Mipa had littered the entire oasis with them. She followed a well practised trail, leading down the mountain, around the lake in the middle and back up the other side. Most of her devices needed little to no attention. Other ones she triggered and then left broken. Kovu could not help inquiring as to these. "Old traps," Mipa would say. "Leaving too many about is dangerous and also it discourages prey from forming set foraging patterns."

Only a few of Mipa's traps were baited, usually the larger, more elaborate ones. Mostly she set snares where she noticed a game path. She explained how she and the animals who shared the oasis with her went through regular patterns of change and development, she always had to keep on top of their habits, and they were always trying to keep her on her toes as well. The way Mipa described it, it was like a vast play with each player moving into the gaps of the other's steps. It was far more intellectual than the savage pleasure of the chase. But as Kovu tried wrapping his head around it, he thought he could at least appreciate her point of view. Her approach - and it was a valid approach, he saw now - seemed almost stately somehow. But it was not something that he could or would want to do. He needed the blood rush, he needed to stare death in the face. What Mipa was doing seemed too impersonal and it did not respect the creature being captured for its strengths and weaknesses, but rather sought to take advantage of them. In Mipa's game the winner was not the 'best' of hunter and prey, but who was the smartest.

In a cage made of twigs and grass, they found a small monkey trapped inside. Mipa grinned. "At last a bit of good luck!" she squealed and took off after it. The trapped animal was weak, but it revived when it saw Mipa. It shrieked and threw itself against the bars, but to no avail. As Mipa reached in, it still, seeming resigned to its fate. Mipa took the little creature in her mouth and shook it, breaking its neck. She reached behind her to her tattered cloak of grass, but became alarmed when she saw the state it was in. "Oh no! My isidwaba! Ugh, it's ruined!"

"Oh..." said Kovu, "I'm sorry about that Mipa."

She looked at him then back at her cloak. "It's... oh, it's fine, Kovu, really." She hopped on three feet, carrying the monkey in her paw. "But I used to have a strap here I could tie my kills to. You can carry this right?"

Kovu grinned at the chubby lioness. "Sure." And he took it in his mouth and followed her as she twisted through the lush oasis.

As they made their way through the jungle they saw few other creatures, but that was normal, smaller creatures avoided large predators; it was a fact of life. But Kovu had to admit that Mipa made no pretence of her location. She stepped on twigs and shuffled rocks underfoot, making a relative racket as she passed through the jungle. Though Kovu guessed she figured that with traps to catch her food for her, she didn't have to be all that stealthy as she moved through her domain. Still, there were signs all about, some quite fresh. If Mipa had not been so intent on her traps and her procedure, he might have started on the trail of some warthogs or a forest antelope by now.

They were getting to the end of the trail now. Kovu could tell that without Mipa's guidance because they were coming around to the other side of the mountain. The slope increased sharply as they began to climb. Mipa's traps often took advantage of the angle of the terrain. He had to admire the creativity and her adaptability when it came to devising this things. Each one seemed almost unique in its construction and the way it worked. But overall, most of them turned out to be empty.

"It's usually like that." said Mipa later on. It was dark now and the lioness had finished trying to repair traps; lion eyes lost color and a lot of detailed focus at night. She was now just checking to see which ones had food. "I'll set 100 traps and maybe three or four of them will have something. But that's all I need, and really, it's enough to get fat on apparently." She said the last with a resigned shrug. She laughed, "Some days I'll get nothing, and other's I'll find half a dozen monkeys and a hog to boot. But it evens out over time. Most days I get something to eat, and that's more than my sisters can say."

Kovu nodded, still carrying the limp monkey. Lions were opportunistic feeders. There was the sudden plenty of a kill, followed often by days or a week without food. One had eat to food while it was available and store fat for when it wasn't. He looked at at Mipa's plump, round rear as she walked ahead of him, a heavy saunter in her gait. Only with Mipa, it seemed there weren't any lean times. And she doesn't have to run for her food, Kovu added in his mind.

It looked like it was going to be early evening by the time they arrived back at Mipa's private glade. It had taken only about a fifth of a day to traverse around the entire oasis. It was a decent amount of land, but now Kovu thought that it was actually rather small to be an entire world. They still had a few more traps to check. Mipa remained hopeful. "You never know what you're going to find. Sometimes the big catch is in the very last one." She grinned back at him, "Really, there's nothing truer than that I've learned. You never know what you're going to find." She finished with a wink at the tailing lion and turned to make her way through the grass and ferns.

As the two lions were approaching the end of the long route they'd taken around the oasis, there came a distant clicking and hollow clopping. It sounded like... coconuts.

"This way, Kovu, hurry!" said Mipa as she garnered a spry step in her gait and bounced off into the jungle. Kovu followed without too much effort. Glacing ahead, he noticed Mipa's big belly heaving to and fro, her flesh jiggling and quaking at her hips, flanks and shoulders each time her paws hit the ground. Her tongue lolled out the side of her mouth with obvious effort as she lolloped along; her gait was efficient for her frame, but not what Kovu would have called 'graceful.' Mipa was definitely out of shape. He would have hardly called this running, let alone sprinting and females were supposed to be lighter and faster than males; Vitani and Zira could certainly have outrun him any time they pleased. Of course, she was carrying a lot more weight than he and on a smaller frame besides. Perhaps he ought to be more generous.

He continued to let her lead the way, carrying the limp simian in his mouth as he followed in her footsteps.

When she stopped suddenly, Kovu almost bowled into her broad back. She plopped her round bottom on the ground and panted briskly, her tongue hot and wavering in the warm jungle night. "Would... you look... at that..." she said between deep gulps of breath.

Kovu hoped she was not overexerting herself on his account. But he rounded the wide lioness and the monkey fell from his mouth when he saw what Mipa had caught. Initially, it looked like nothing so much as a jumbled heap of feathers and twine. But as he stepped forward while Mipa was still catching her breath. The thing writhed and let out a low crooning. A large soft feathered wing, black and white in color (or at least light and dark as far as he could tell), flapped uselessly in the air. Kovo turned back to Mipa, "It's an ostrich!"

Mipa grinned with a mouth full of fangs. "Looks like we are going to eat well for the next couple days!"

Kovu didn't dare take the privilege of ushering Mipa's catch into the next phase of the Circle. Thus, it surprised him immensely when she asked him to do it.

"Why?" asked Kovu, raising his eyebrows, "Don't you want to do it?"

Mipa hissed through her teeth. "I don't really mind when they're small. All you have to do is shake them a bit. But the larger ones... There's all the blood everywhere... uck." The big female shuddered. "It's such a mess."

Kovu cocked his head. He really didn't understand a lot of Mipa's priorities and odd manners. He shrugged. "There really isn't that much blood when you grab them by the throat." Of course, the amount of blood never seemed an issue before, in fact the more there was usually the better; it meant the animal would be dead faster.

"Oh fine! Just let me..." Mipa started, but Kovu reached out to touch her elbow with his paw.

Again she seemed surprised by physical contact. She settled back onto her thick haunches, her generous belly resting on the ground under her chest.

"No, I can do it, if you prefer." said Kovu, "I was just wanted to know why you didn't. The ostrich is yours by right, after all."

Now it was her turn to look dumbfounded. But she just shook her head. "Just go kill the thing already. Can't you tell it's suffering?"

And it was. The ostrich was not caught in the original snare so much as bound up into the entire mechanism. Apparently it had tried to break free only to wind up making itself even more hopelessly trapped. Kovu was even more duty bound to make this quick. Fortunatly, the large flightless bird's neck was accessible and its hollow bones snapped quite readily. Mipa stared at him as he muttered a small prayer he and Vitani would say after catching something fresh, but she said nothing. They both worked for the better part of an hour untangling the large bird from the ruins of the traps without further mangling it.

They might have eaten it there, but Mipa insisted on taking it back to her glade and Kovu saw the sense in this. It was not far, after all, and it offered more comfortable sleeping than the rocky, wooded area where they had found the bird. Lions liked to keep their kills close, especially if if would take a day or more to eat in full. If Mipa had not claimed her right to kill the ostrich, she definitely enforced her priority as the provider of this meal by making Kovu do the heavy work of dragging the beast back to her lair. She took the puny monkey in her teeth and left Kovu to struggle with the 200 lb creature up the rest of the mountain. Kovu might have complained, but even as an adolescent, he was already used to females asking him to do things for them.

Unencumbered by a large dead animal, Mipa made her way back much quicker than Kovu. When he finally stumbled into the glade, holding the ostrich by the base of its long neck, he spied Mipa sitting in the grass doing something. Kovu smirked, imagining her to already be eating the monkey, an appetizer for the feast to come. He dropped the large and very dead bird on the moss of the glade and sauntered over to her.

He wore a smirk on his face, expecting to find her off guard and guiltily stuffing her face. However as he approached he saw he had stereotyped her incorrectly. Mipa wasn't horking down the monkey before he could arrive. Rather, she was busy manipulating the long grass with her forepaws. She was weaving. Feeling a bit ashamed for his assumptions, Kovu lowered himself down onto his belly and looked up at her. She paused. "How do you do that?" he asked.

"What?" asked Mipa, not sure what he was talking about, "Oh you mean this." She looked down at the new cord she was making out of the long dry grass. "I'm just making some twine to start fixing my isidwaba... my camouflage."

"Yeah... but how?" asked Kovu, his tail wavering in curiosity.

"Well, I bend this part down, wrap this around, and then come back. See it's easy." said Mipa, but Kovu stared in mild awe, seeing the lioness work her paws with seemingly impossible dexterity. Given the physical limitations, Mipa had stretched the ligaments and tendons in her paws in a way Kovu had never seen another lion do. She was capable of moving her first two digits of each paw independently of each other. She would grip things with the last two and even demonstrated increased flexibility in her dew claw. She moved them with a quick and easy grace that came with years of practice.

Kovu snorted happily. "No Mipa, it's not easy. I couldn't do anything like that. I never met a lion that could."

Mipa glanced at Kovu and dared a small half smile. "Really? It just seems so... obvious."

Kovu chuffed and tossed his mane a little. "It's because you're really smart, Mipa."

"I..." Mipa looked down at her partial cord and frowned. She wiggled the toes of her forepaws in a way that looked extremely strange to Kondo. "Nobody's ever said that to me before..." she muttered.

Seizing the opportunity, Kovu crawled forward over the grass. He pressed his shoulder against her softer one. "Well now they have." Kovu said, "And I wouldn't say it if it weren't true."

Mipa sniffed and wiped something from her eye. The moment lasted a few seconds longer, and then she coughed, rising and letter her cord fall away. "Come on, let's eat, I'm starving."

The first time that Kovu saw Mipa eat reminded him not so much of large meals with Nuka and Zira and Vitani in which there was always a lot of bickering and propriety. But rather of a monkey alone in a tree full of fruit. Mipa and Kovu both had a lot of fun tearing feathers away from the ostrich and watching them drift away in the slight breeze. She then settled herself at its breast while Kovu waited at the opposite side. After she'd open up the bird, she began to eat with a single minded abandon. She obviously took a lot of pleasure in her food, closing her eyes and even moaning at times under her breath. She tore meat away from the carcass and gulped it down at a steady, though quick pace. She wasn't frenzied as Kovu remembered his family being, everyone trying to eat as much as they could as fast as possible, but rather she ate with a clear passion for dinner while at the same time pacing herself to maximize the experience. Kovu watched her for a couple mintues without her noticing before starting on the other side of the great bird.

Some time later they both rested full and lazy in the grass surrounding the glade. Their paws intermingled, Mipa too turgid to care about the contact or perhaps even growing accustomed to Kovu's presence.

"Thanks again." said Kovu.

Mipa opened her mouth, but belched quite loudly instead of talking. After a short laugh she tried again, "For what?"

"For sharing. If I weren't here, you would've had the whole thing to yourself."

Mipa rubbed her vast tummy with a paw absently. With each lion able to pack away up to 70 lbs of meat in a sitting, there was actually little left of the once proud ostrich (although, in reality it was more like 50 for Kovu and 75 for Mipa, he was still a little full from the warthog the previous day, although the female showed no signs of waning appetite). "Well, if you weren't here, I'd have nobody to talk to either... Nobody real." she amended.

Kovu smiled awkwardly, then, on impulse he reached out and touched his nose to hers...