Blackfoot Forest and the things that i've loved are the things i have lost

the efforts of the woman went ignored. merrick stared at the child, watching as finally the smuggish glut of child-sneer slipped from her face and she found herself welling with blood to avoid him.
he did not register the woman longer; her lacewing tones dissolved beneath the simmer of his piqued intrigue and merrick stared toward the babe huddled in the briar-thorns, who still cut upward at him with the quivering of a tremulous saber.
aware he could step toward her at any time, knock aside the blade with a bat of his hard paw and a clip of his teeth beneath small round skull, where the tree's root began, merrick remained as he was. simply being possessed of the option to end the chafing little brat, and seeing that she too held such knowledge was enough to coax his quelling.
at the rattlebone language in her throat, merrick laughed, a gay sound that beckoned spring rain, a one-eyed cernunnos standing acackle in a meadow bordered by herds of elk and flush now not only with flowers, but new crimson buddings spreading slowly against her pristine pelt.
temper, temper; "he's dead," merrick chuckled back. "he died and had no girls." who knew what had become of tadec? not he, and not a muzzle-twisted simpering child of the same gender with which she tried to bait him. temper; the last time merrick had placed his jaws about a child, he had lost an eye. 
eye for an eye for an eye; well, he could not pay that price again, and while he refused to look up on the slim chance this aforementioned, invisible father would sweep down from on high to rescue her, merrick stepped back. "go back," he urged in a low, humorless mockery. "someone will be missing their pet."
he whirled to snap toward the woman, a controlled gesture of threat rather than promise; if neither of them moved to stop him, merrick would fade proudly back along the meadowline toward ursus.