He ran till he couldn’t hear the angry screams of the two humans. He ran till he found a dark place to sit and hide.

  Here the darkness draped over him like a blanket. Dropping the piece of flesh onto the ground he sucked and licked his claws. He had hurt himself quite badly and he wondered if this pain would ever go away. He allowed himself a moment of pity and whined to the moon and the stars in the sky. Why had this happened to him? What had he done? Was this a dream walk? A horrible dream walk that he would soon wake up from and come back to the waking world? Tears slowly slid down his snout and he hid his face from the world in his long legs and arms.

  He did not despair for long. His stomach rumbled loudly and the smell of the flesh at his feet was too much to try to resist. He lowered his snout and bit into the warm flesh. He had never eaten flesh like this. The outside was crispy, like pine needles that cracked in his jaws. But just under that the flesh was soft, juicy, and tender. He hadn’t eaten anything like it. There was something else though, something that made him a little nervous. There was a flavoring that he had never encountered before. He couldn’t describe it in any real way. Somehow it seemed as if this place itself has permeated the piece of flesh he was eating. He knew that the meat wasn’t bad, decayed, or rotten, not like the smell of the wind here. It wasn’t all together unpleasant but it wasn’t anything he was used to. If it wasn’t for that small bit of his meal that was unsettling, he would have said this was the best meat he had ever eaten.

  Even though the chunk of meat was sizable, he finished it with ease and still hungered when it was gone. It saddened him that he hadn’t been able to grab more food from that metal object. He knew that at the time he had been lucky to grab anything, he couldn’t see or breathe because of the smoke, and the humans were very close to him yelling at him. He wasn’t a thief but there was no way those two humans could have eaten all the meat that was in that metal container, this he knew.

  He stood up and slowly clenched and unclenched his claws. His flesh was sore and still was in a lot of pain, but not so much as he had been before he started eating. He licked his claws clean. That seemed to ease his pain considerably. He was thirsty and needed to find a source of water.

  Since waking up on the cold smooth stone, he hadn’t seen or smelled any water anywhere. He knew that he needed to drink and his wounds needed to be cleaned. Now that his hunger was at least lessened by the meal, it was time to find water to quench his thirst and clean himself.

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  He moved slowly through this strange place. Stepping out in between two stone cubes, a huge light pulsed and shone in his eyes. He raised his forelegs to shield himself from the sudden light. He knew he had to get away. Not trying to look through the light to see who was attacking him, he turned his head and ran on all fours to his left. He quickly was out from under the light but he kept running. He heard humans shouting and yelling but he didn’t stop to try to interpret what they were saying. He could hear the emotions clear enough, shocked fear, and angry excitement. He was well versed in the language of those emotions.

  Finding himself waking up in that small cage with Tony giving him that cold flesh that somehow tasted just a bit off was one such incident that caused him great shocked anger. He was never afraid of Tony, that much he remembered. But he had been angry to be put in that cage.

  He ran forward, again sticking to the deepest shadows he could find. Running low and silently through the night he looked for a safe place, an abandoned den perhaps where he could sleep with some kind of security.

  He ran for a long, long time, till at last he came to a small enclosed space, protected on one side by a long thin stone that he was able to scale with only some difficulty. The place had no grass and it wasn’t open on any side, completely hidden and enclosed by the strange stone structures that littered this place. There was a single tree however, its branches showed a full healthy compliment of leaves. He didn’t recognize the leaves at all but it gave off the clean scent of his hunting grounds. He felt better almost immediately.

  He slowly hunched down in a corner of the enclosed space and curled up in a ball with his back to the stone behind him. His tail wrapped around him. Even though his stomach protested a little, and his claws were still wrapped in pain, sleep was not long in finding him.

  He awoke suddenly as the excited yells of young humans met his ears. He stood up on his four legs baring his teeth quickly in warning. His eyes caught where the noise that had interrupted his sleep came from.

  Standing only a few feet away from him was a small female human and a taller male human. Both were young and both had astonished happy looks on their faces that froze and had shifted to terror at his stance.

  He sniffed the air and didn’t feel any malice or deception. He could smell something that told him of his youth, of running and playing with his pack mates. The smell of these two humans felt happy, something called innocence. The emotion was known to him, though the thought and name was alien, a word he had never known, but there it was.