Kids t-shirt
Get ready to explain this one: this sand cat t-shirt for kids features a feline that really exists and that almost nobody knows about. The portrait is of Tiziri, a character from my Animal Kinhood series who hunts water leaks under the streets of a city in the Algerian Sahara.
Foto: Matthieu Rochette (@matthieur68) / Unsplash (Unsplash License)Felis margarita
Here. You don't need the device, but put it down anyway.
True sandy and stony deserts: dunes, plains and regs, from the western Sahara (Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria) to the Arabian Peninsula, Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan), Iran and Pakistan. It avoids steep rocky terrain and prefers loose substrates where it can dig or shelter in burrows. It withstands extreme temperature ranges, from -25°C in winter to ground temperatures of 50-58°C in summer.
Tanina, the older sister, left for Ouargla before Tiziri started working, and calls on Sunday afternoons. She's always the one who calls: ten minutes, and they hang up at the same time. She's been with Aksil for four years, and he lives in Berriane, three quarters of an hour by car to the north; they see each other on her days off, two or three times a month, and neither of them calls that little. Among her people, those distances are simply accepted.
At eleven at night she parks, cuts the engine, and waits inside until the chassis stops ticking. Only then does she open the door. If the kid wearing this t-shirt asks about the real animal — and they will ask — here's the good answer: the sand cat has litters of four or five kittens, and the mothers raise them alone. Nobody at school knows that one.
