Chapter 76 - The Last Mammoth Hunter part 2

The man they sent home to fetch their families was the young one who'd found me on the pile of stones, the boy-man with the shaggy dark hair. I slithered through the grass after him, falling further and further behind at first, but luckily, when he passed out of view of his elders, he quit jogging and adopted an idler pace. As the sun swung past its apex in the sky and began its slow roll westward, I found myself drawing nearer him. Near enough to smell his flesh and hear the ditty he was singing under his breath.

When he was finished eating the half-cooked mammoth meat, the boy-man stopped for a moment to piss. I slithered stealthily forward as I watched the urine arc out in front of him. He smiled to himself and swung the stream back and forth. The acrid stink of his water made me curl my nose.

I was less than a hundred meters away, but he did not sense me. Still, I approached cautiously. In my crippled condition, I knew I couldn't overtake him if he discovered me by chance.

When he was finished urinating, he looked over his shoulder the way he'd come, his almond-shaped eyes narrowed. The constant wind of the tundral steppe plucked at his lanky black hair, brushed through the fur collar of his outer clothing.

I froze where I lay, flattening my body as close as I could to the cold earth beneath me. There was little cover where I crouched, mostly lichen and moss and a few tufts of wind-bent grass.

Had he seen me from the corner of his eye? Had he heard the tiny scrapings of my movement?

No.

I smelled no alarm in his scent. After a while, I raised my head enough to catch sight of him and found him kneeling on the ground, furiously flogging his cock. He was turned three-quarters away from me, his back hunched forward, and he was rubbing his stick like he was trying to make a fire, a breathless low groan in the back of his throat.

Grinning, I dragged myself toward him, staying low and placing my limbs carefully. I froze again when he yelped, but he was just spilling his seed. A moment later, he laced his pants and jumped to his feet. His legs were a little wobbly, but he glanced back in the direction he'd come, smiling and flushed, then continued on his way.

As the sun lowered in the sky, he gathered dry grass and shrubs while he walked, braiding them into tight bundles. I followed, and just before sunset, watched as he settled to make camp beneath the low limbs of a tree.

I observed from a distance, peeking through a gap between two exposed stones, as he retrieved his fire kit from some inner pocket in his clothing. He spread his tools out and went to work, striking two stones sharply together—flint and some iron-bearing stone. When he had his tinder smoldering, he crouched down and blew in it. After adding some larger sticks and his twisted braids of grass, he leaned back beside his crackling fire to relax. He ate some dried meat he took from a small sack tucked in his coat, then poked his fire with a stick and watching the embers swirl upwards for a while, chewing thoughtfully.

Dark came quickly once the sun dipped below the horizon. The first dim stars began to wink in the blackening sky. The boy shrugged off his coat and unfolded it, transforming his outer wear into a clever little sleeping sack, which he wrapped up in to retire for the night.

He didn't have enough kindling to keep a strong fire for long. It had burned down to coals before he'd even gotten good and asleep. The embers glowered beside him, a feeble red light, popping every few minutes as a knot or seed exploded in the heat.

The dark closed in on him.

And so did I.

I slithered nearer, then waited, twenty meters away, until his eyes drooped and he began to snore.

He didn't stir as I narrowed the distance between us. Ten meters… Then five…

I hope he was dreaming something pleasant, for it was his last night in this world.

Ordinarily, I'm hesitant to kill the young, even one as close to manhood as this boy, but I was not myself that night. Injury had robbed me of my normal compassion, as surely as it robbed me of my memories.

It shames me to describe the exhilaration with which I killed him, the pleasure I derived from drinking his life's blood, but I've sworn that I will speak no lie in the recounting of my long life. Even those acts which cast me as a villain.

He cried out when I threw myself on him, shrieking in his sudden terror like a toddling child. I threw my good arm across his head, pressing his cheek to the ground to bare his throat, and then I bit into the warm meat of his neck.

And when I say bit, I really mean "maul".

In my hunger, I savaged that poor boy. I drove my face into his neck, slashing and biting and ripping huge chunks of muscle and flesh out of him. He heaved beneath me, pushing at my head and chest for a moment, pissing in his fear, but the fight, like his life, ran out of him quickly. He collapsed beneath me with a quiet groan, his eyes rolling toward the moon before losing the spark of awareness.

I sucked the blood out of him as quickly as I could, for it would not spurt as forcefully when his heart stopped beating. He died and then I pumped down on his chest, trying to force as much blood out of him as possible.

I rose up on my knees, feeling the heat of his life surging through me. I moaned and threw my head back as the bones of my face shifted, realigned.

My injuries healed rapidly. My left arm finally came free of my back and dropped down by my side. My dangling foot drew back to the mangled stump of my ankle, reattaching. My right arm snapped and popped, becoming the arm of a man again, smooth skinned and with only the natural joints and bulges.

I licked the blood from my lips, my fingers, my forearms. Turning back toward the boy, I stripped away his furs and underclothes until he was naked beneath me, then I dropped upon him and began to bite into his flesh. I gnawed at him like a starved wolf would gnaw at the bones of a reindeer, slashing him in a thousand different places to suck the last dregs of his blood from the capillaries of his skin. I gutted him, pulling his organs from the cage of his ribs, then licked the juices from his tangled entrails. Finally, I plucked out his heart and ate it raw.

Kneeling there beneath the stars, with the boy-man's blood smeared all over my hands and chest and face, I cried out in the dark.

"I am Gon! I still live!"