Being THIS and using it…

“Look at THIS isn’t it cute?!”

I’ve heard that more often than I can count, being “cute” is not that bad, but being “THIS” is kind of offensive.

Apparently I am kind of a “special-treat” on table mountain, and I really do wish they told me about that before I moved here. Well, the mountain is nice, the view is great and the food is amazing. And you got it all to yourself once the cable car closes down for the day or even better doesn’t work due to storm or other wheaterwise circumstances.

Talking about food, look at those gorgeous orange flowers, they taste amazing and they do come with the table mountain inventory. Although once you ate the easy reachable ones you really have to invent something  to get to the non-reachable ones. We tried buiding pyramides, not egyptian style more like I’ll be down as the biggest and then you get your folks up on you according to size, but this was a major tourist attraction and not helping us to get to the desired plants. We stopped doing this and made ourselves rare, since we grew sick of the “I hope they do the pyramid thing!” whispers.

Then out of the blue coincidence helped us: there was a tourist who started to pick those flowers and just held them as a bunch lose in his hand, my youngest couldn’t resist and it was quite frankly an easy to reach source of really nice food – so he went for it and got it out of the tourists hand. After the first shock (on the human side) we hear it for the first time: “Oh look at …. THIS… isn’t it cute?????????”

Seriously, how many question marks can a sentence which includes the word “cute” entail? Anyway – we succeeded in finding a way to get to the remaining flowers and with it agreed to becoming the newest member of the category “THIS”.

We started to train tourists and they are really quiet fast on the hang of things (though reading doesn’t seem to be their forté, otherwise they would know who we are thanks to the signs on the mountain…) Look at it, it works, giving food to THIS seems to be a win win situation…

We only have one secret wish and maybe you could help us out. We are afraid that as soon as tourists know that THIS actually has a name of its own they might stop picking our food for us. So please, if you know what we are — keep it to yourselves, because THIS is a very hungry (and kind of lazy) species and we like our new found way of getting to the good stuff.

Thanks a lot, we will be forever gratefull!

Your Dassies