Siyar the jackal had a cave, and Siyar had a habit.
Every evening, coming home, he would stop a little way off and call out — "Cave! Hello, cave!" — and then wait, and then laugh at himself, and go in. He had done it for years. It was a silly thing. His cave had never once answered, because caves do not.
Now, one afternoon a lion came through that part of the forest, hungry and out of luck, and found the cave. He looked at the tracks going in and out and thought: somebody lives here. If I wait inside, somebody comes home.
So he went in, and lay down at the back, and was quiet.
At dusk Siyar came up the path.
And stopped.
He could not have told you why. Something about the ground, or the smell, or the particular way the dark sat in the mouth of the cave. Nothing he could name. So he did what he always did — he stood well back and called out.
"Cave! Hello, cave!"
Silence.
He waited. He called again. "Hello, cave! You have not said hello!"
Inside, the lion thought: the cave must usually greet him. If I do not greet him, he will know something is wrong.
So the lion, in his most welcoming voice, roared a hello.
Every bird for half a mile went up out of the trees at once.
Siyar was already gone. He ran and he did not stop, and somewhere down the valley he slowed to a walk and said out loud, to nobody, the only sensible thing he had ever heard himself say:
"In all my life — I have never once heard a cave talk."
And he found another cave, some distance away, and he did not go home again.