Crouching was something that was purely instinct to me. Wiggling my bum in the air to stabilize myself  before attacking my prey was also pure instinct. Pouncing on my targets with claws extended and teeth bared was also insitnt, but it had taken training to get that art down and flow smoothly like my parents.

What wasn’t instinct, were those two legged creatures. If they weren’t having territory fights over the dumbest of reasons, then they were turning on their own kind like those of our ill folk. There were so many different kind of two-legged creatures, so many in fact that I think they outnumbered the populace of my kind and many other folks like me, and no two looked alike in anyways. I looked like my siblings to a degree, only the spots of my camouflage and scent marking us as difference.

Perhaps that’s why the two-legged creatures were so different. They couldn’t smell. It all made sense to me now. Two-legged creatures developed different features, so many in fact that no two-legged creatures looked alike, so they could tell each other apart. Since they couldn’t smell, they needed something else. Why not use sight? After all, those two-legged creatures had them. Had to – there was no other way the two-legged creatures would get ego bigger than the giant rocks that go into the sky.

But that meant that two-legged creatures were insecure about themselves, which I just can’t see as a possibility. To my kind, if you were weak or faint of heart you didn’t live long. Having insecurities about oneself was the biggest weakness our kind could have. One has to be sure of themselves before they crouch, before they wiggle their bum and before they bare their teeth and claws in a leap to kill. If one wasn’t sure, they would second-guess and that would cause the mark to miss. If a mark missed, then dinner gets away and the hunter doesn’t get to eat. If those two-legged creatures were insecure about themselves, they wouldn’t be able to fight among themselves the way they do.

So, no insecurities. That ruined my train of thought. Here I thought I had finally got to the bottom of those two-legged creatures. But no, I had to stop. I was trying to think about those two-legged creatures as if they were akin to my kind. Those things, the two-legged creatures that wore those weird things to hide behind (and fail at), were not my kind.

It also seemed like they all spoke different languages, which I found to be a bit weird. The tree-swingers spoke a language to screeches, the confusing four-legged ones made these weird grunts and groans and stomped their feet, and the green river-killers even had their own silent language, but we all could understand each other. It might not be perfect, and it might even be wrong at times, but we could understand each other. Humans, on the other hand, couldn’t understand each other when they spoke differently. It would always be wrong and it would always be confusing.

I had caught a conversation once, and I’m pretty sure it was the same language and just different accents, but the two people couldn’t even understand what the other way saying. My kind didn’t have that problem, and truthfully I didn’t want to try and figure out those two-legged creatures any more after that.

I wanted to preserve what little of my sanity I had left. Besides, I have dinner I need to catch before it becomes aware of my scent in the grass. Those two-legged creatures that call me ‘Leopard’ could wait, after all.

Besides, I’m not Leopard. I have a name given to me at birth, and it’s very much beautiful. Leopard just sounds like it was taken from a mumble-jumble of poorly thought out ideas and – no… I told myself to stop before my dinner got away.

So, dinner here I come. Wait for little tasty treat that those two-legged creatures call a monkey.