Without Us

The Rabbit and the Wolf

I flew for an hour before I grew tired. I landed in a tree with needles, but my hide prevented pain. All my pain came from inside.
I was also hungry. The flight had drained me. A rabbit wandered cautiously across the ground below me. My body hunched down of its own accord. A swoop and a snap, and the dead creature was in my jaws. I dropped it and backed away, huddling against a tree. My human would never let me kill an animal. My job was to scare it, then bring it back when he killed it with his flying feathered-and-pointed-stick. I think he called it an "arrow". But I never killed. What happened to me?
It took me a bit of sulking before I remembered that my human was dead and if I was to live, I had better get used to killing. Dragons were meat-eaters, of that much I was sure.
So instead I lit a fire and made my first attempt at cooking. But the rabbit's skin and fur didn't come off right. Eventually I gave up and stuck the rabbit on a stick to roast it. But the rabbit kept coming off, and when it stayed, I was too hungry to wait. So, feeling guilty, I snapped it up raw and licked my lips. Not bad, I thought, licking the blood off my claws. I curled up in a hollow between a tree's roots to sleep.
I was awoken by a snarling. A wolf, fully grown, was growling and snarling at me from across the clearing I was in. I rose to my feet, lips pulled back, exposing my sharp teeth. My back arched and my claws came out. I became intimidating to the wolf, who shrank, whimpered, and darted away. As it left, I saw claw marks on its side. It had, apparently, already met one of my kind, and was not willing to repeat the experience.
The next wolf that interrupted my sleep wasn't as wise. It attacked, going for my neck, but its teeth could not penetrate my hide, and it bounced off with a yelp.
My turn.
My attack was much more successful. I went for the neck, as the wolf had done, and my teeth went through fur, muscle and windpipe. The wolf died swiftly.
I hesitated, then leaned down and began to rip chunks off the wolf. The rabbit I had eaten earlier hadn't been enough to satisfy me, and I was hungry again.
I feasted on the wolf until I was full, but it wasn't much smaller than me and I only got halfway through. I left the rest and crawled back to my hollow, my belly aching from fullness.