skin of our teeth

by delicious

a survival tale



The smoke was in Hunter's eyes, the smell was in his nostrils,

and shortly, the kill would be in his belly.  But hungry as he 

had been, difficult as his hunt had been, this was a sad moment.



He was not one to rememinisce.  He simply could not reconcile all 

the complex emotions he felt.  On the one hand, he was hungry, and 

eager to eat. This normally meant a single-minded effort to eat.  

But Hunter also experienced relief at having found food, after a 

very long period of near-starvation. Just as Hunter was not one to

reminisce, he also wasn't one to think about things too deeply.



But he was all alone with his feelings and his food.  After the

first wild gorging ripping tearing left him a bit sated, and less 

afraid, other impressions began to sing within him.  There had always 

been others to share his meals.  Who would share this kill? Who would 

taste, who would see, who would be fed?



It was early: early in the first real thaw of the European Icecap, 

early in humanity's quest for better barbecue, early in Hunter's life.  

Memory was precious, because anything that was remembered was remembered 

in song.  Hunter sang of his hunt, his kill, his dinner, dancing with 

the skin....his only dance partner. It had not always been this way.



Hunter was full, but Hunter was not satisfied.  How could he be, when 

he was so alone? Since the big fall, he had been alone.  The big fall

began, as a deep rumbling.  He had taken a sibling in each hand, and

begun to run.  All three could not quite outdistance the avalanche 

that buried everyone he had ever known.  Trees slowed the advance of 

the biggest ice chunks, but the snowflood would not be denied.  By the 

time Hunter and his brother and sister were also buried, they were a 

long way away from everyone else, in what seemed to be a swirling white 

cave.



Struggling, as though underwater, he came up, gasping for air.



All Hunter had left of either child was a chunk of his sister's fur. 

He had turned back, wandering for a long time, before the cold finally 

beat him, made him surrender the search for traces of his family.



There had been other caves, other kills, and other greasy smoke in

Hunter's eyes.  On those other occasions there had also been other 

men and women to share his meat. Now he danced alone, and his eyes, 

prompted by the smoke and the memory of other fires overflowed with 

the memory.



The bellowed song and dance trailed off, as Hunter was overcome.



Wait....Had he heard someone else sing? No. It could not be. Hunter was

filled, but still was hungry, for companionship.  He looked around, but

the phantoms were nowhere to be seen: his friends, family, loved ones.

So clear in his memory, they weren't present now, to share a bounty that

would have been rich indeed.



Hunter was almost as old as anyone of his line had ever been. He was

mature enough to be wearing the signs of maturity: teeth that would one

day be known as "wisdom teeth", a set of teeth that had recently come to

him, as a bonus to replace all the teeth lost in early adolescence.

Hunter was indeed old, to have received such teeth, having survived 20

revolutions of the Earth around the Sun. Astronomy was not something

Hunter took note of, although he did see the star-shapes in the sky. 

But it would be a long time before anyone made sense of them as well.



It had been a hard winter....all of Hunter's life, it seemed. He sighed

into the silenced echoes of the cave.  Hunter was alive, to outrun that

avalanche because he somehow saved his food better than others in his

family. No matter how much they all ate and shared, Hunter's body

retained the richness of the kills, to sustain him for those long

periods when he

could not find meat. Like a wolf between kills, Hunter lived with a fire

in

his belly where he would have had meat, a fire of hunger. But somehow, 

a little bit of his kills was still left to him, to keep him alive until

this moment.



A glimmer that might have been the beginning of thought fluttered

through Hunter. He somehow began to look ahead to the next hunt. While

his stomach groaned with his conquest, as he tried to eat still more, he

remembered the pains of hunger. Somehow, he knew that this good warm

feeling of contentment could not last. It never did, he realized. How

long until the next kill? He had no conception yet of future actions,

only the certainty of what he had seen and the likelihood of more

burning in his stomach when this fullness passed away. That too made him

sad, made him want to eat more.  How could this feeling stay?



He remembered the bleak moments, crying children, howling winds, and

empty snares reproaching him like the mouths of his starving brother and

sister....



...no....his brother and sister....they were....? There was no word for

what they were, where they were.  He talked a moment to them, but there

was no answer, of course.  He looked at the wall of the cave, and

wondered if he could hear their voices, continuing to sing somewhere,

even after their throats ceased to breathe.



Again, he thought he heard something. Surely. Not a voice singing, but

a sound outside. An animal, game, coming to him? No, that had never

happened in the cave, although game occasionally stepped into his

snares.



Their eyes met. A young person attracted by the smoke, that smell of

meat, of survival, stood, just outside the cave, with a face that was 

an open demand to be fed. Hunter saw a form so gaunt he did not 

recognize her as female, for there was no curve to her at all.  He 

tore the thigh from the roasted mass, and held it out as an invitation.  



She came forward.



Later, as they huddled together, Hunter marvelled....he's so thin, he

thought to himself.....he chuckled to himself, drifting into sleep,

while the he who was actually a she continued to suck the fat from some

roasted skin.



The next morning, Hunter looked at the sleeping figure....something

seemed familiar about this situation. There was no question in his mind.

An instinct as sure as the need to urinate or breathe took him.  He

wrapped

the fur around the sleeper, and went off, to look for game in his snares

as though this were his brother or sister, mother or father.



The first trap held a limp rabbit. A thank you to the spirits of the

wild passed quietly across hunter's lips.... not something we would

recognize as a thank you, nor even as a song of praise. It was more a

sort of expression of delight at the gift in the snare.  Hunter, at the

Holy Communion of The Wild, finding the rabbit, said a quiet "nyum" to

the Divine One who presented this tender and tasty morsel.



Coming to the next trap, Hunter found a black furry creature that had

stopped struggling hours ago.  Again, Hunter nyummed his Song of Praise

to the Divine One.



It continued this way through the morning. Hunter could not understand

the bounty, the continuous parade of delicacies in his traps. The

migration brought on by the thaw was not anything he would understand.



And to Hunter this was a blessing from the Divine One. Hunter continued

to be more and more mindful of the Goddess with every delicious discovery.



But now, as before the avalanche, there was a purpose to the hunt.

Hunter brought his kill home eagerly, presenting every trophy at the

feet of his companion. And with every gift from the goddess, and with

every thought of his goddess, the closer her incarnation came, the

nearer to being the Divine One she came.



One day, Hunter was presenting yet another tender morsel to the weak

person,

hoping he could encourage her to eat as ferociously as he did.  At some

point he was watching her eat. Yes, he saw a feminine shape. The teeth

were

bared savagely, and she was eating as wildly as he. But somehow Hunter

wanted to feel their bite. Her arms were young, strong, but curved, as a

layer of fat began to smoothly cover the sinews underneath. For every

small beast sacrificed to her wild appetite, a little more fat covered

her thighs, arms, cheeks, back.



Without any notion of goals or purposes Hunter relentlessly went back

and forth, harvesting the bounty presented by the Goddess for the

Goddess, as though the Divine Mother was feeding herself.  And so one

day, Hunter enters his cave, to discover The Divine One, The Goddess,

living for him.



The fox slung over his shoulder was almost forgotten, at the sight of

the growing creature in his life. She was perhaps the same age as he

was, but now exulted in a belly, partly grown from the hunt, partly her

burgeoning fertility, in the presence of her horny young consort. Hunter

had never seen so much health before, so much clear and holy fertility.

Her stomach was the largest stomach ever seen by a human in all those

thousands of years of ice.  No one had had more than mice and a few

occasional foxes to eat. No one had ever known satiety,

contentment...not since the migrations from the hot climes long

forgotten.



He fell to his knees, forgetting his latest kill, as he reached, to

touch this unlikely shape. When had a woman ever been so wide in the

middle? No bones were visible anywhere. Flesh actually moved on the

surface of her stomach, softly shifting with the fluidity of breast

flesh.  Was there pride in such a gathering of game? She pushed forward

as astonished as he was, in this unprecedented growth. There was no

surprise that he had to touch, had to then taste this rich white mass 

of Divinity. He, too, had grown, as well-fed as she.  But her size was

before him, a dream of white softness.



And she allowed his curious but reverent touch.



This was not the first time Hunter had touched her, of course. Her

growing body was a comfortable part of his life, warm and eager to be

touched.  On one of Hunter's forays, this one, not into the forest, but

rather, into her forested darkness, he had not killed, but created

life.  Was it an immortal spirit or the warmth of the spring sunshine

that brought her forth, naked chested in the afternoon, to greet her

partner in feasting? Her first labour was less than a month away, so

that her breasts were bobbing, achingly pert

before Hunter's eyes.



Hunter was stupefied....When had the Goddess blessed him by deciding to

visit?  He did not question, for questions were still far in his and

humanity's future.  He celebrated, worshipped, delighted, feasted.  He

sang with his face deep in the softness of that growing stomach, and

she, in turn, crooned a Divine accompaniment.



As she snoozed, full of berries,berry juice, and roast hen, Hunter

wanted to sing and dance. He was quiet with reverence, and wanted to

watch her sleep, that rising and falling of a belly that seemed to rise

higher and higher with every breath, as though growing visibly. But

Hunter would not touch.



He put his hand to the wall, thinking of her, and danced....he danced on

the wall with his hands, with the berries. His hands pressed the berries

into tribute of hunts, and of her growing curves. He made the horns of

the great deer, and of the goddess curves, fed by those deer. Ahhh, he

looked at the deer, and felt in his stomach a reverence for that

slippery smooth taste of deer. He had not eaten deer in awhile, and

wanted her big with deer. How he loved that grin when her face filled

with feasting, chewing sounds driving his passion higher.  They could

dance a noisy slurpy dance, that sounded like feasting, when the only

feast was between them. He shaped her belly and breasts on the cave

wall.



Again the smoke found his eyes, but there were no tears.  A recollection

of other songs dimly came to Hunter, but there was no desire to sing a

dirge. Quietly, before any child came, Hunter crooned to his own child

consort there by his side, while yumming his thanks for plentiful game.

The goddess provides for herself, Hunter thought...yes that is it, she

has come, and food is plentiful, and so she grows, nurtured by game.



He would not look back again.