Morning- his yawn upsets the very pebbles. A dashed sheep, then two, for breakfast. Villagers run in fright, their main occupation. What choice have they?: their heads come not even to his knee.

Guts and bones and fleece pawed through, morsels devoured, lick smacks that echo. A mostly whole carcass he slings over a shoulder (never you mind the offal dripping into his chest hair), and it's back to the cave with him.

The mate awaits, a pile of gravel hugged beneath her head. Grunts, growls, an ape-like scream and more, and her breakfast plops like wet moss before her. He cowers back to the opening of the cave, then peeks out at the sun. So bright. He calls to have the stars back, nothing listens. He dares enter the cave again only when she has a mouthful of food, when she's busy studying the half-sheep for another strategic bite. She slurps and gulps, she holds her stomach a moment, she growls and has at the sheep again.

A fight: the villagers have gathered tools and fire and mounted an offense coupled with angry words. They find him picking an apple tree green, running branches clean between his teeth.

No one understands each other: he does not like fighting full of fruit; they are keen on fire and think everything but them fears it. There is clashing, villagers thrown into lethal positions, the scraping of rakes across his shins. The torches singe his leg hair; one so lucky as to heat his testicles. He pinches one villager's head until it pops, backhands three from whence they came.

He hates most stepping on the bodies- such unsure footing. Like walking on dunghills. Once he happens to slip, catches himself on a hand, and the villagers are at him, their hoes pricking at his wrist, the boo-boos they make with their scythes. Another team has at his ankles with hammers and sticks. Is that one trying to bite him?

Villagers flattened, villagers broken, villagers pureed. As they retreat, he gnashes one between his teeth and sprays bloody spittle and flesh and crushed bone at the fleeing force. He makes the wounded squirm and scream and cry as he picks them up and drops them, higher and higher, until they've stopped moving. The one that's lasted the highest, that one he holds aloft reverently to the darkening sky. The body hangs limp in his grip. Broken limbs dangle. A light moan now and then: feeble, hopeless ones.

A good one. He keeps this body in his pouch for himself, to treasure as long as the smell keeps.

He follows the villagers' tracks for a bit to make sure their retreat is complete- their numbers have diminished greatly, but it seems there is always a swarm out there ready to prick at him at his slightest transgression into lands they fail to mark but still consider their own. They spawn like mosquitoes, like cattle; they dig lines in the earth and make things grow in unnatural patterns. He swells with anger at them and decides he will crush one of their huts tomorrow and make their women scream and splatter some of those little, helpless babies and scatter their cultivated grain.

His mate will kill him before he ever gets to know that child in her belly- this knowledge burns him in his very genes.

He makes off with two choice victims: plump, bloody and still mostly whole (she likes the bloody ones). His mate snatches these from him with rages and growls him from the cave and bites into her evening meal, bones cracking between her jaws. As she eats, she looks at him with hatred, with instinctual rage, this child whose kicks literally jolt her and push her about the source of all her distress yet the last thing she'd take it out on.

She's going to crack his head open one day. He hovers at the mouth of the cave, reading all this in her eyes. She's going to bite his face and rip half of it off at one go, then she will be back for another bite. This child will be feasting on his thigh. If he's lucky, he'll be dead when all this happens.

Below, he can see the villagers' squares. Their fields. Their huts gathered in ordered arrays of light. The fires they so covet, they hold in such high esteem.

The stars are visible. He sits and points his face toward them. How can no one else be crying to the sky on a night like this? When he howls, when he sings his poetry, he can't hear another soul joining him.