I am with her now; right here with the stinking snorting flesh and blood beast herself, and I know what’s coming. So does she. Her ears prick up, her nose tastes the air and as she bellows her warning and turns to escape she gets a rush of adrenalin to help her outrun the charging females, but it’s too late. One swipe from a single massive paw slaps her hind legs out from under her and I realize at once that she’s a goner. So does she. With one pair of jaws tearing open her groin and another closing tightly around her throat, a highly specialized gland at the base of the thalamus is activated for the first and only time in her brief existence. The effect is dramatic and instantaneous. Her respiratory, nervous and circulatory systems come to a virtual standstill and all voluntary movement ceases as narcosis quickly blurs both the panic and the pain. Face to face now, looking deep into those huge brown eyes, I can see her in there; but only barely, and only for a moment.
What happens to her in this moment, I wonder. Where is she? Can there be sensation without senses? With her instinctive drives for survival, mating and repelling predators no longer present, is there now room for something else to rise to the surface? In this final moment before becoming something less than zebra, does she somehow become something more?
The questions linger long after I wake. The dream is always the same