I could catch one and fly away with. But neither of us kinds of creatures possess the implements used for flying. But flight is and always has been something else. Birds have it, insects have it and the Wright Bros craftwork have it too. It's why they fly high. Their kinds of nerves and wires make them do! I can walk and that suits me. On walks I see a lot of what the world has under my feet. I miss the touch with the earth if I am not walking and so much brings me the eeriness of "I don't feel at home" and makes me want to touch down to be home.

Until I saw and met Klipspringer. Wow, so handsome. The hops, so majestic. The confidence, so high it literally hops around with its confidence in tow everywhere he leaps to. The horns; a twin jutting out the head so tiny like 8.1mm callibre bullet, yet so neatly positioned and you could tell, despite the minuteness of the pair, the sharpness and toughness bore a loud warning alert to the darkest of enemies. Klipspringer. Little toes called hooves almost lesser than a pinkie finger -a human's pinkie, not an orangutan's kind. Yet the hop from them is a wonder. So much so that I wanted to be baptized into becoming Klipsringer. What would I miss the most if it truly happened? A house. Just that? No problem. I'd have a home instead at the klipsringer's where height is everything.Not the standing height. not the flying height. The altitude of being able to hike and live up on any rocky peaks of the arid corners of our earth. To own the klipspringer's nose seems like it'd means only smelling the nicest of scents, fragrances and delicacies and for clean air only.

The silver, coat of fur. The best birthday suits klipspringer is endowed with and is so blessed and lucky to wear all round the clock because they are so crazy about proper hygiene that they return home after their ever fun errands of dutiful race and graze up and down treacherous gorges, canyons and escarpments. That's so kilipspringer.

I didn’t expect the feeling to linger. Admiration usually comes to me like a breeze—quick, light, gone. But the klipspringer stayed in my mind long after he vanished between the rocks. His hops echoed in my thoughts the way a drumbeat echoes in a ribcage. Something about him had rearranged the furniture inside me.

For days, I walked with a new kind of attention. My feet, usually so sure of the ground, felt suddenly clumsy. Heavy. Like they were too full of human. I kept imagining what it would be like to stand on the very tips of myself, balanced on hooves no bigger than a coin, and still feel safer than I ever did in shoes. The klipspringer didn’t just move across the earth—he negotiated with it, danced with it, trusted it. And the earth trusted him back.

I wondered if the ground ever felt disappointed when I walked on it. If it sighed under my weight, thinking, Here comes that one again, the one who wants to belong but doesn’t quite know how.

The thought made me laugh at first. Then it didn’t.

Because the truth was: I did want to belong. Not to a house or a street or a name on a mailbox. I wanted to belong to something older, something that didn’t need keys or walls or explanations. Something like the cliffs the klipspringer called home—those jagged, sunburnt bones of the earth that held him like a secret.

One afternoon, I returned to the place where I first saw him. The rocks were warm, the air thin and sharp like it had been honed on a whetstone. I climbed higher than I ever had before, my breath loud, my legs complaining. But I kept going. I wanted to see what he saw. I wanted to feel what he felt.

At the top, the world opened.

Not like a door. More like a lung.

The wind rushed past me, carrying scents I had never noticed before—dry grass, distant rain, the faint musk of some unseen creature. I closed my eyes and let the air press against my face. For a moment, I imagined I had the klipspringer’s nose, that miraculous little compass of scent and instinct. I imagined I could smell danger before it arrived, joy before it bloomed, home before I reached it.

When I opened my eyes, the horizon stretched out in every direction, a soft curve of possibility. And I realized something simple, something embarrassingly obvious:

The klipspringer wasn’t trying to escape the world by climbing so high.

He was trying to see more of it.

Maybe that was the real altitude—the height of understanding, not just geography.

I sat on the edge of the cliff, legs dangling, heart steadying. I didn’t become a klipspringer that day. No miraculous transformation, no sudden sprouting of hooves or horns. But something shifted. A small thing. A quiet thing.

A beginning.

I didn’t need wings to fly. I didn’t need hooves to climb. I only needed to remember that the earth wasn’t just beneath me—it was with me. And maybe, if I listened closely enough, it would show me where to step next.

The sun dipped lower, painting the rocks in gold. Somewhere below, I heard a faint hop—light, confident, unmistakable.

Klipspringer was near.

And for the first time in a long while, I felt almost at home.