treading on sharp twigs and hidden stones. Rough country around here, not like the clean, bare tundra he was used to. There was so much vegetation about. Positively tropical. Why, it even got above freezing in the winter!
He was homesick, and not only for the castle. He wanted six or seven layers of good packed snow under him, and a fathom of permafrost below that. Made your feet feel nice and cool.
He strode along the narrow trail he had been following for the last hour. Lots of game about. He had seen white-tailed critters bounding away, and tiny things had chittered at him, hiding among stalks of brown weeds. Nothing he could eat, even if he had taken the trouble to chase them down. Besides, he didn’t like land game. Seafood was his first love. Spikefish, fried in rendered blubber. Four-clawed crab, boiled and served with clarified blubber. Plain blubber in tasty, glistening chunks, served up fresh. Now you were talking food.
Great White Stuff, was he hungry! He had to stop thinking about it or he would go crazy.
He tried not thinking about it.
Nah. Didn’t work. He was hungry, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He was outdoors, that’s what the problem was. The air was sweet, fresh, if a little strange. But during his stay on Earth he had grown used to the native environment. The smell of the forest set his juices to flowing, and all he could think about was stuffing his maw with endless quantities of …
Food. He licked his chops. He was really losing it now. If he didn’t get food soon … well, there was no telling what he’d do.
He swiped at a tree and came away with his claws full of bark. He sampled that, spat it out. Too dry. He tried some weeds. Not bad, but like eating air.
There was nothing around to eat! But what did he expect? It was winter. He tore off a fresh branch and gnawed at it, spitting out the bark and biting into the fresh green wood underneath.
No taste. No taste at all. Nothing in this world had any taste.
He howled once, then came to a halt, astonished at himself.
“I’m going crazy,” he muttered.
He stalked on, increasing his pace. The trail bore downhill, then leveled off. A narrow brook crossed his path, which he took in one hop. The trail went up again, crested, then twined down the side of a steep hill.
There was a structure sitting on the gentle slope of the field below. A human dwelling.
He approached, hiding behind an outbuilding. Peering around a corner, he checked the place out. It was quiet. The house was dark. Fine. He went to the back door and tried it. It was a sturdy door, locked good and tight, but the carpenters had never figured on a seven-foot-tall quasi-ursine alien with the strength of ten gorillas.
Snowy pushed hard, and the dead bolt tore out of its slot, ripping the doorjamb.
“Oops,” Snowy said. He felt guilty about this. He respected private property. After all, he wouldn’t take to someone breaking into his own shack out on the ice, humble as it was. But Snowy really didn’t have a choice.
He found himself in a dark basement. He knew there was a light somewhere, but couldn’t find it. His eyes adjusted to the dark quickly, though, and the first thing he saw was a possible food substance.
Whatever it was, it was packed into glass jars lined up on wooden shelves. He looked at the stuff. It was red. He unscrewed the top off one jar and stuck his finger in, licked it. Tangy, not bad. He upended the jar into his mouth.
Not bad at all. It was what they called tomatoes. He had eaten them in salads and other things. Salads! Now, talk about eating air. How could humans live off a bunch of leaves? Nothing to it.
He unscrewed another jar, then tossed it disdainfully over his shoulder. Nothing to this stuff, either.
There were other foodstuffs available. Metal cans of junk. Forget that. Other things, hanging from the overhead beams. Meat! Spiced meat, too. Sausage, it looked like. And a big hank of raw rump, cured with salt and having a smoky flavor. Hey, this was more like it. Idly munching a haunch of ham, he went up the creaking wooden stairs.
His appetite was getting stronger, despite an overpowering human smell to the place that ordinarily would have put him off his food. Enticing smells turned him to the right, toward the kitchen.
He rifled the cabinets, finding dry and dusty cereals, more cans, spices, packages of unidentifiable whatever, still more cans, more boxes of dry and dusty stuff….
The refrigerator held leftovers that hadn’t been good ideas in the first place, along with ice cubes, three trays of which he crunched up with relish. There were various liquids to drink. He glugged those. There was fruit and some greens. Ptui.
He searched the rest of the house, but came up empty. Going back to the kitchen, he looked under the kitchen sink. Here was some hooch — drain cleaner, liquid soap, furniture polish, and suchlike. He popped the lid off a bottle of Lysol and guzzled it down.
Mmm, pine-flavored. But he needed FOOD.
All right, he was desperate. If quality wasn’t available, quantity would have to do. He stumped back down to the cellar, rummaged, and fetched up a huge plastic tub. This he filled with everything at hand. In went Jell-O Pudding, corn oil, Nestle’s Quik, Spic ‘n’ Span, Hungry Jack pancake and waffle mix, California seedless raisins, cornstarch, sugar, flour, Rice Krispies, Quaker Puffed Wheat, Corn Chex, ammonia, vinegar, salad dressing, Crisco, bread crumbs, Log Cabin syrup, Karo syrup, molasses, baking powder, milk, Pepsi-Cola, Kool-Aid, mustard, ketchup, floor wax, a half gallon of milk, lemonade, orange juice….
And on and on and on, everything going into one ghastly, heterogeneous concoction. For savor he threw in everything in the spice cabinet, from turmeric to fennel, from paprika to cream of tartar, along with two canisters of salt and a big box of ground pepper.
He thought of cooking down this horror, but who was he kidding? He couldn’t wait. He dipped the gnawed ham bone into the stuff and sampled it.
Not bad. He searched for an eating implement, found a big soup ladle.
He ate it all.
Snowclaw was exceedingly ill. He had wanted to get up on the roof and scout the countryside, get his bearings, but he had not made it farther than this small bed, on which he had fallen asleep. Now he was awake, and it was night again, and he was sick. Very sick.
He wanted to die right then and there. He was going to die, he was sure of it.
Voices. Humans. Snowy thought of getting up and running, but maybe if the humans saw him they would kill him and put him out of his misery.
A female screamed, then moaned.
“Oh, look. Look at all this. Fred, someone broke in. Look at my kitchen.”
“Cheezus. Honey, call the cops.”
“Oh, my God, what the hell were they doing?”
“Some kinda goddamn weirdo.”
“Mommy, who did this?”
“Shh! Jennifer, go back to the car.”
“Why, Daddy?”
Snowclaw really wished they would make less noise. He groaned and turned over. Maybe if he got a little more sleep …
“Fred, do you think they could still be here?”
“I’ll check upstairs. Where the hell’s my shotgun? Shit. It’s upstairs. The pellet gun, it’s down in the cellar.”
“Jennifer, don’t touch that!”
“What is it. Mommy?”
“I don’t
“It’s yucky.”
“Jennifer, don’t.”
“Can I play with it?”
“No, it’s horrible. Leave it alone.
Great White Stuff, Snowclaw thought. What does a guy have to do to get a little sleep? Why did humans have to make so much noise all the time? He rolled over onto his stomach, his lower legs sticking out a yard over the end of the bed.
