ered his muscles into themselves as if he were coiling like a snake which is the image he held now of himself in his mind, that he was a coiled and cornered snake, and he was a thing of instinct now and watching steadily his wounded prey, and he was so hungry, so certain that life and death were right there in the crawlspace with him, and the fox and he were only these two things, these two states of being, life and death, and either the man would live or the fox would, and if the fox did, then they would both die, and someday someone would find their two sets of bones, and would anyone care that the man was missing? He didn’t feel like a man, he felt like a snake, and he pulled in and he tightened, and he steadied and calmed himself into a steely scaled version of himself, tightening and waiting for the moment when it would reach fullness in him, and then he let the propulsion happen, and his body bolted with the explosion inside him, and, his arms ahead of him like an open maw, his feet skuttering in the soil and shuttering him forward, his hands snapped with the force of a hinged trap upon the fox’s head.
29