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mother’s teat. But I needed flesh, not milk. Soft, wet flesh.
    Dusk came all too slowly. It always does when the hunger is upon me. By that time my hunger had teeth of its own, gnawing and tearing at my belly.
    The sun sank and I imagined I could hear the night’s blissful sigh as it rose out of the east from behind the mountains where it had been hiding. It rose fast until there was nothing but the lights people need to keep back the night. Were they afraid of the night itself, or the things within it that they did not understand?
    I could wait no longer. I ran toward the village. The night, warm around me, held me in its arms. It gave me strength. I ran silent in that warm embrace, faster than I had ever run before.
    I followed my ears to a house at the edge of the village. I had heard the mother come and go there. I knew her voice and I knew the babe’s wailing. I followed those sounds. I crashed through the door. She looked up, surprise and shock on her face and then she was screaming and the baby was screaming. Perhaps it was because of my nakedness. The people here all wore clothes. Whatever the reason for the screaming, it hurt my ears and I was hungry so I pulled the woman’s head to one side and took a bite from her neck. Her blood gushed from the wound and sprayed across the room. I put my head to the wound and lapped like a dog, gulping and slurping in my hunger. I was making small satisfied noises in my throat as I drank. This was better than meat. It sated the hunger. There was no chewing. It quenched my hunger, my thirst, and my desire.
    The blood dried to a trickle soon enough and she slumped back in her chair but I caught the baby.
    There were noises coming from the village, now. Shouting and footfalls, running toward the place where the baby’s screaming would not have brought them but the mother’s scream had.
    I didn’t know if I would be hungry enough to eat all of them, but the baby looked delicious. I sank my teeth into its fat leg and drank deeply.
    The door burst aside and a man was screaming at me. He grabbed me around the throat. It made me angry. I was eating and he was in my way. I pulled free, lashed out and tore part of his face off. Then another man took my arm so I tore his arm from the socket but that made me drop the baby and there were so many people in the room now. They were crowding around me, pulling me away from my meal, so I bit anyone I could. I sank my teeth into arms and shoulders and necks and faces, eating and eating, growing stronger all the time.
    Their shouts hurt my ears but I was so hungry now that I barely noticed the pain. I clawed and bit until they held me down and held me around the throat and by the arms and legs so that I could not move. 
    I screamed then, in hatred and in hunger, wanting to feed and not being able to, being held tight and my vision blackening, but really it was turning red as I cried.
    They dragged me away from the bodies, holding me tight.
    I was like the bear to them. I wasn’t a part of their world. They were my food. I should have controlled the hunger, but it ruled me then. It was more powerful than I was. I was thrashing and bucking in their grip and even through my dimming vision I could see their veins standing out and sweat dripping from their foreheads and their muscles, these dirty, grubby people, straining to hold a bear.
    I was their bear. The hunger was mine.
    I understood much then about my nature.
    But as usual, moments of revelation come too late to make a difference. Through the haze that had become my sight I saw a man approach with an axe. My neck was freed but still I was held tightly on the dirt. There was hatred in the eyes of the man with the axe. I did not understand why. I was only hungry, and people were food. The mouse and the fox and the rabbits, were they angry? Were the cows and sheep in the fields angry?
    I did not think so.
    The axe rose and fell.
    It bit deep into my head. Pain blossomed. Bone drove into my