One morning over coffee, a political cartoon showed a dandified Lion mincing along with banknotes stuffed in his beribboned mane. The caption read:

Quivery Brrrr.

What’s up with her?

What’s she prefer?

What makes her purr?

No loyal Cat

Should act like that.

The heart of a cur

In expensive fur.

The offending newspapers slapped to the floor, the Lion made his plans quietly-there were no friends to share them, after all-and then he disappeared from Shiz, leaving three months’ rent owed on Suite 1904.

He needed to avoid the Emerald City to the south, so he couldn’t go there. If anything the Animal Adverse laws were stricter in the capital. Yet, though some free Animals were said to be migrating westward into the Great Kells, the Lion could summon no enthusiasm for the wilderness outback of the Vinkus. He’d become too accustomed to his creature comforts. And he had no interest ever in revisiting the Ozmists or the Bears, or any other denizens of the Great Gillikin Forest. Shame? Been there, done that, as the wags said.

Instead, therefore, he made his way cross-country to the southeast. He wandered about, doing odd jobs and stealing from barns when hunger required it. In the best of times, a Lion can’t cause trouble in rural neighborhoods and get away with it for long. And these were not the best of times by a long stretch. So he lived in an unsettled way. He roamed the lower slopes of the Madeleines, hunger in his guts, burrs from hack-thistle in his pelt.

These were years of loping along, fits and starts. He would take a job on a farm-he wasn’t above hauling a wagon if it meant dinner-but the farmer was inevitably brutal, or stupid beyond tolerance, or offensive, or a sorry joke of a human being. Brrr didn’t think of himself as losing his jobs, but leaving them when the moment was ripe. (That moment so often came the moment he was fired.)

Once he discovered a pride of Lions trying to make a small conclave for themselves in some caves on the eastern slopes of the Madeleines. They had never been to Shiz, nor to anyplace more thrilling than the nearest market town. Nor had they any memory of abandoning a cub in the Great Gillikin Forest as Brrr had been abandoned. They were not his family, they attested. Far from it. None of their number could commit such a heinous act. Furthermore, they didn’t keep up with Lion tribes in other free-range zones.

At least, that was what they said at first. One evening on watch, a distinguished old auntie Lioness allowed that communiqués among the outlying prides had once been common. “There were human campaigns to separate prides of Talking Beasts from the rest,” she insisted. “The great WOO has never trusted Animals. I heard from a relative in the Great Gillikin Forest that the usual single poachers were being joined by a more systematic cohort of army hunters. They were intent on eliminating the larger Animals who might get wind of the Animal Adverse laws and mount an attack in defense of their citified kin. The Forest is not all that far from Shiz, as you must know.”