Bearclaw Valley a predicament

He is ignorant to being plucked from the mountain's side, and only notices a change in his mother when he tastes her milk; it is thinner milk, tasteless, and he does not like it but he is too hungry. She is different too; spindly, having lost much of the warmth and the solidity he is used to.

Was this their own doing? Had they devoured their mother from the inside-out?

She is absent much of the time too, which is a change. The seemingly eternal presence of mother has reversed, and now she only shares her presence with them when she deigns to feed them, and those feedings are short, rough, and leave him yearning.

Glaucos is not a nimble child, but he is more mobile now that he is a little bit older, and he is driven by his hunger to seek out mother; so he follows her waning milk scent in to the rain. He bumbles from the den mouth in to the open where he is met with the cold and the wet, and then the loud, the bright.

The sky booms overhead and he is reminded of the vibrations in the earth when mother collapsed. He trembles there, tail tucked, and urine dribbles down his leg.