Title: Threepaw’s story
Author: M C

Threeclaw’s story
By Strega
22 July, 2007

	Missuk was setting snares for snow hare when she saw the polar bear.  The nanuq stopped at a fair distance, and it had a seal pup in its jaws.  Missuk, whose name means ‘dew’, smiled and waved him closer.  She knew what he wanted.
	When he came closer she looked him over.  Big, but young -- the older a nanuq is, the yellower its fur became due to its diet of seal.  Eventually a nanuq grew as yellow as seal fat, and this one was white as new-fallen snow.
	Missuk frowned as she got a good look.  He had the look of a healthy adult, save for his color.  Usually the nanuq who came to Inuit women for sex were too young to fight for their sows, or too old…or too injured.  Surely this bear was big and strong enough to fight for a nanuq sow.
	The polar bear waited while she thought.  She took her time, and he pushed the dead seal pup a bit closer.  Missuk looked at it and frowned once more: usually nanuq brought new-killed seals, but this one was frozen solid.  Still, that could happen in a very short time.
	She shrugged, stood up from the snare she’d been setting, and smiled.
	The bear smiled back and stood up on his hindpaws.  Upright he was almost twice her height, and when he wrapped his forepaws around her she almost disappeared into the wall of white fur.  She pressed her mittens into his belly and felt the firmness there.  He must have caught the mother seal along with the pup, and the larger seal lay in his gut.  He could spare the pup and thought to trade it for sex, she thought.  It was not unknown for even healthy bears to come to the Inuit women when their sows wouldn’t breed.
	It was a short distance from the bulge of belly down to his sheath.  His paws raked over her back as she rubbed, and sharp black claws dimpled her sealskin parka.  She paused when the purple-black shaft began to emerge, and he slid his paws up her back to urge her forward.  All right then: this bear liked a woman’s lips.  She was not sure her sex could accommodate him anyway.  The exposed shaft was as long and thick as her forearm, and he was not yet fully aroused.  She took off her mittens and began to stroke the shaft that emerged from his bellyfur at the level of her mouth.
	The fur around his drawn-back sheath was stiff and frozen.  It crackled as her hands went up and down.  A thin layer of oil from the shealth coated his member, insulating it to some degree – for this same reason she smeared seal fat on her face before she left her tent in the morning.   It also lubricated it and made stroking easy.  She stretched her lips around his tip and sucked.
	The nanuq hugged her closer, arching his back in time to her strokes.  That made it harder, not easier, to please him.  She had to retreat lest his shaft gag her or even break her teeth – its inner bone made it stronger than any man’s.  With just her hands and the limited service with her mouth, it took a while, but eventually the nanuq began to shudder.
	Missuk drew back as he approached his passion…or tried to.  The nanuq thoughtlessly held her close as the big muscles in his haunches started to spasm.  She cried out and pushed at his belly, but it was too late.  Before she could squirm away hot fluid spurted across her cheek, splashing her hair and parka.  Then more and more as the bear came.
	Still he did not let go.  Missuk coughed and rubbed the stuff out of her eyes before it could freeze.  Luckily her hood’s ruff was wolverine fur, to which frost – or frozen bear seed – would not stick.  It crumbled away as it froze.  Locks of her hair lacked that resistance and hardened into glazed black icicles.  The front of her parka was a congealed milky mass that cracked and creaked as she pushed at the bear.
	“Illitsuitok!”  Stupid.  “Let go next time!”  The nanuq grinned and hoisted her up lightly as a feather.  She saw the inside of his mouth – purple with black splotches – as he ran his tongue out to wipe away some of the goo on her face.  Missuk had felt a polar bear’s tongue before, and enjoyed it, but it hadn’t been on her face then.  She reached out to hug the white bear’s neck and he took her head in his mouth.  
There was a flash of ivory as he opened, then purple and black.  He could bite her head off in an instant, but instead his tongue rolled beneath her chin, wetting her neck and wiping more nearly frozen seed off.
	This was a little too friendly.  “You don’t need to do that,” she said with careful calm…then his tongue pushed her chin from below.  Something – the bones on either side of the back of his mouth – pushed the parka hood against the sides of her head.  Things went from shadowy purple to full black as her face slid into the saliva-slippery tunnel of his throat.
	Missuk slapped the side of his neck in alarm.  In the time it took her to do that he hefted her upward, seemingly without effort, and slid his lips over her shoulders.  The parka hood pushed back off her head as her naked face went further into his gullet.   
Missuk surely hadn’t expected the bear to try to eat her.  Her tribe, like most, had a deal with the nanuq.  The seal pup was a peace offering!  He was supposed to only want sex.
This bear did not seem to know of the deal.  He tipped his head back to let more of her slide into his jaws.  She was in up to her elbows and sinking fast, sliding into the well-lubricated throat as easily as a fish disappears into a seal’s jaws.  Her arms were already trapped against her sides, but she kicked downward.  Her knee struck his chest hard – like kicking a mound of snow with ice underneath – and she almost managed to pull back out.  His fangs caught in her parka, though, and then with a toss of his head her rump was in his mouth.
Sweat burst from Missuk’s face as the sweltering gullet engulfed half her body.  Her clothing was meant to keep her warm in temperatures that would freeze pee before it hit the ground.  In warmer weather she would take some off, removing layers as needed…but the inside of the bear was hotter than it ever was here in the white lands, and she still had on her parka even as she slid down his throat.
She was reduced to wiggling feebly as her legs slipped into his jaws.  His gullet rolled over her, slobbery, loose and then tight as its muscles forced her downward.  He was ten times as large as she and ten times as strong.  
She had trusted the treaty to keep her safe – who would the young bears go to now when they needed relief?  Who would trust them when they began eating the Inuit again?
Missuk kicked again as the bear took her mukluks in his jaws.  Her toes hit hard palate and then fangs as his muzzle closed.  Gravity kept her moving downward – the bear just lifted his head and relaxed.  The tube of flesh opened in front of Missuk, ushering her facefirst into a looser, wetter place where thick slime coated the walls and hot fluid sloshed.  Something resisted her entry, then slid aside on its layers of slime as the throat clenched one last time.  The valve behind her toes sealed itself, and she settled into the nanuq’s stomach.
Missuk kept her calm – it was no use panicking – and felt for the little knife she kept in her pocket.  It was gone, along with the pocket.  Either he had felt it and torn it away or it had been lost by chance to his fangs.  She shrugged.  There was little air here, perhaps one breath, and she probably couldn’t have hurt him enough to make him throw her up anyway.  At best she could have made him pay for his meal with pain.
In the little time she had left she ran her fingers over the other occupant of the greedy bear’s gut.  Sealskin, yes…but here was a seam beneath her fingers.  She followed that to a collar.  Her fingers found soft, half-digested skin and a woman’s features. Hair.  So.  It had not been a mother seal that made his belly firm.
There was nothing more to be done.  She sank calmly into the pool of stomach acid and exhaled.
Three-claw was still licking his lips when the last little shudders inside him stopped.  Sealskin, human skin, equally tasty.  He sat back on his rump and ran a paw over his newly fattened belly.  Patches and little icicles of frozen seed broke off and fell into the snow.  He realized only now that mating with the first woman had left his sheathfur matted and frozen.  That was careless.  Usually he remembered to clean himself, lest it somehow alert future meals.
He scooped each of Missuk’s mittens into his mouth and swallowed them, then belched briefly.  Sealskin was as digestible as human flesh and bone, all fuel for his body.  Otter-bone buttons and the occasional bone tool, just minerals.  Head hair, body hair, the wolverine-fur ruffs and the short seal fur on the parkas would not digest, but loosened from its fleshy anchors it would cause him no trouble.  It would merely make its way through his body with any other parts he did not absorb.
Three-claw – so named by his mother due to the lack of claws on his right rear paw – knew about such troubles. Years ago he had found two humans in strange clothing far from here.  They had not reacted as the Inuit did, but had attacked him.  The male he killed with one swipe of his paw as it raised a metal tube, but the female had tried to run.  That had provoked in Three-claw the oldest of impulses.  When he caught her scarcely twenty paces later, he did to her what he had done to both nanuq and Inuit females, save that this time he did not ask first.  Her frantic struggle and screams did not particularly interest him, but he was aroused enough by then. 
When he was done he’d sniffed out and taken away other bits of metal, then swallowed them down, the woman alive, the man not.  That is when the trouble began.  Their smooth clothing was not like the sealskin and fur the Inuit wore.  It smelled strange, and he paused before eating it, but he was hungry.  It went down with its owners.  They were treated no differently by his stomach than any other meat, and his belly shrank to its usual size in the usual amount of time.  
Some hours after his meal, though, the cramps arrived.  Terrible pain in his abdomen as the strange clothing blocked his guts.  He could not eat, he could not drink, and he could barely walk.  Only when, after great effort, he managed to pass the first portion of their clothing did he know what was happening.
What could he do?  He ate snow and lived off his fat while hoping the problem would cure itself.  It took a week before the last of the strange clothing appeared in his droppings – the complete parka of the male, passed intact though dirtied.  He had to grasp the sleeve and pull it out of his body, but finally he was free of the stuff.
Three-claw learned his lesson.  The men and women in the strange clothing could be food, but not their clothing.  His fondness for humans also markedly diminished.  Like most nanuq he rather liked the Inuit, and followed the treaties.  These strange humans were not Inuit, though.  He returned to where he had found the two and found two more.  They were plainly looking for their lost fellows, and both had the metal tubes.  The way they carried them told Three-claw they were weapons, and he waited for an ice-fog to descend before he attacked.  In the white, falling powder he was invisible save his nose and eyes, and again the male of the two died in one swipe.  This time the female did not try to run…but the outcome was the same.  He swept away her weapon, tore her clothing and pinned her beneath him.  This time he rutted so savagely in his rage that when he was done, she was bleeding and barely breathed.
Three-claw carefully pulled the strange smooth clothing from their bodies, opened his jaws and swallowed them down.  He dug down into the snow, scooped everything he took from them – along with things he had found near, such as a tent of the clothing-stuff – into the hole and buried it.  Then he left the area.  Let the strange people guess what happened.
Three-claw was young when he met the strange people, too young to take a nanuq sow from an elder male.  When the mating season came again, he followed custom and brought a seal pup to an Inuit woman.  But as they coupled, he remembered the taste of the strange people.  As he loosed his seed into her he opened his mouth, and trustingly she had kissed his tongue.
When, perhaps a minute later, her mukluks bumped over his fangs and slid down his throat, Three-claw sat back and thought about the Inuit.  There was nothing in his stomach now that he could not digest or pass, and there had been a satisfaction to taking this meal that a meal of mere seal-flesh did not have.
He had taken the seal-pup, now frozen stiff, and continued on.  A day’s walk later he had met another Inuit woman.  He offered her the pup, rutted, swallowed, belched and moved on, never staying in one place more than a day or so.
It was two years now since he had eaten a seal.  His fur, barely yellowed when he met the strange people, was snow-white again.  Occasionally he caught another seal pup to replace one too well-worn.
Three-claw lay for a little while, listening to his belly’s small noises as it consumed the two Inuit women.  He could not stay.  Another nanuq might come, and if it guessed his habits there would be a fight.  A nanuq who found Inuit friendly would attack him for breaking the treaty (and for gulping down potential mates!), while the rare predatory bear would attack him for taking its prey.
He waited half an hour for his belly to settle, but he grew sleepy as it called upon all his body’s resources.  He heaved himself to his feet and padded toward the shore.  He would find an ice floe to sleep on, where other nanuq would be less likely to find him.
As he came around a powder-white hill, a figure appeared.  The wind was at his back and he had not scented the Inuit.  He paused, considering the state of his belly, and whether other urges were returning.  Then he padded forward.
Ixa saw something out of the corner of her eye and turned.  Fifty paces away was a snow-white nanuq, plainly a young one.  He had a seal pup in his mouth.
She smiled and waved him closer.  Her name meant ‘friend’, and she knew what he wanted.