SHE WAS a brave little one, braver than a lion in her own way, though hers was the bravery that came from being the runt of the litter.

She had fought for those warm sucks of mother’s milk and her place at the brink of the nest, where her all-seeing eyes saw that the world was big, much bigger than she would ever be, and her long, keen ears heard the quick beat of life amid the snap of twigs and the stretch of webs.

Life had made her tough and fast with a resolute approach to every young minute that rolled before her.

This was evident in the electric dance of her back legs, which could lift her high off the ground and then switch direction in mid-air, as swift as the wind under the leaves. But she was not strong, not really.

God had made her an actress, who relished her moments. So she leapt to deceive – offering us her feints and swerves as an entertainment in that long, twitching grass, which would always be her theatre.

And, in the defiance of her strut, the imaginative person might have observed doomed qualities, similar to those that had sprung in the 1930s in certain gaunt Scotsmen, flinted in the pits and dockyards, who brought their frail skills to the great football stadiums of England – darting hither and thither, thrilling all those who watched them.

 “Catch me if you can, pal,” they said to tease their lumbering opponents. But sometimes, in battle, they were caught and hurt.

Her enemy was not a lumbering fellow.

His senses were as sharp as hers; for he, too, had been raised fast and tough – in a municipal park, far away from the open country of his forebears, but he still coveted the ancestral call to hunt and to be hunted. He asked no favours and he certainly gave none. Human sentimentality had no place in his sly instinct.