In the tall grass of sub-Saharan Africa, a slim snake climbed toward a nest she had been watching for three nights.
She had almost no teeth. What little she had would not have troubled a beetle.
And yet she was, in her own quiet way, one of the most exact hunters in the grass.
She reached the first egg and paused before touching it. Something about the weight was wrong, the way it settled when she nudged it, the faint smell rising off the shell.
Too far along. A chick was already forming inside, closer to hatching than eating. She left it where it lay.
The second egg felt right the moment she rested her chin against it. Cool. Even. Nothing stirring beneath the shell but yolk.
She opened her jaw wider than seemed possible for something so slim, wider than her own head, and drew the whole egg inside her, shell and all.
Deep in her throat, bony points along the inside of her spine did what her teeth could not. They pressed, and the shell gave way in one clean crack. She squeezed, slow and steady, until every drop of what the egg held moved on into her, and what was left folded flat, small and dry, and she spat it back out onto the grass below the nest, neat as a closed envelope.
She would not eat again for days. Maybe longer. A snake like her only truly hunts while the birds are nesting, and fasts through the rest of the year on what those weeks provide, so every egg had to be the right one, and she had learned to trust her own nose and the weight of things.
She was halfway down the tree when a shadow moved too close, too fast.
Something bigger. Something that had seen the pattern across her back and mistaken her, the way most things did, for a snake with venom and a temper to match.
She had neither.
What she had instead were rough scales along her sides, and she coiled and rubbed them together in tight loops, a dry hissing rasp that filled the air like a much angrier snake giving a warning. She lifted the front of her body the way an adder might.
It was a bluff, and a good one. It cost her nothing, and it worked. The shadow moved off through the grass, unwilling to test a hiss that sounded exactly like trouble.
She lowered herself back down, unbitten, uneaten, and slid on into the grass, carrying nothing sharper than good judgment and an empty stomach she was in no hurry to fill.
Somewhere above her, the nest she had left alone still held its one unfinished egg, safe until it was ready to be something other than a meal.
She would remember, when the season came around again, which weight to trust, and which to leave for the sky.