That college basketball player had said that to him back when he was seven and The Man in the Gray Suit had taken him to the track. Posie was outrunning all of those college men and that one cheered him on. He never forgot that voice of encouragement, and somehow it came to him now as he heard his feet chop through the snowy turf at the crest of the rise.

The crisp chopping sound of his bare feet cutting the snowy turf was instantly drowned out by the sloppy mashing sound of the dog-bear’s paws raking the same frosted grass. He glimpsed a brown paw to either side from the corner of his eyes even as he felt its moist rank breath blow across the back of his head.

There was no thought, no calculation; just a sure gut-felt knowledge that he must leap now, for the forepaws of that mighty meat-munching machine were coming next—then it would be lunch time for Old Munch, his first and worst Ice Age friend.

His right leg extended before him as his left launched him into the air. He was flying forward with no elevation, dropping like a thrown log. A great hairy paw brushed his ankle just as it left the turf. A bellows-like snort splashed hot bear snot across the back of his thighs.

He seemed to hang there for a moment until his hands caught the tree about three feet from the ground and he swung around behind it, instinctively climbing up with a palm press hand over hand, his legs swinging out to either side. Munch recovered and raked for Pozer’s flanks with his foot-wide paws and three inch claws. If Pozer had used his legs for traction and push he would have been peeled from the tree like a fruit rollup from its wrapper.

One paw raked the tree on the inside of his left leg.

The other paw raked him from pelvis to groin!

His panic over the pain of the claws raking his pelvis and continuing below sent him scampering like a squirrel, literally clawing into the bark with such force that some of it gave way, as well as some of his fingernails which splintered and broke on contact. Within seconds he was twenty-five feet up, clinging to where the tree had been split by lightning, perched among lightning seared splinters. Below the bear leaped and raked the tree, shivering it. The forepaws reached to within five feet of Pozer’s feet. He felt the tree shake in his bones, and did not feel the presence of his testicles or penis against either leg. They should have swayed or jiggled at the impact.

The snorting bark of the bear came to him like a punch as it backed up on its haunches and stared at him hungrily. Pozer Sensky had had enough with the Ice Age already! He no longer cared about a thing, not even wanting to return to the future, without his reproductive organs. He began to think about how difficult it was going to be just to urinate, and the fact that he would lose strength and vitality, and the ability to survive encounters like this, without his testicles. He was afraid to look into the ruin of his painfully flaring groin. He did see the blood running down the inside of his thighs. The blood and the absence of anything brushing the inside of his thighs pulled the fatalistic ripcord in his brooding soul.

His voice bellowed like he had never heard it before, having always heeded the advice of The Man in the Gray Suit when he said, ‘Special people live in their own mind and keep their own counsel, never waxing loud. You are special Posie.’

“Hey Munch! Want some! Think I’m freezing up here while you wait for me to drop like frozen fruit!”

The bear slunk over like a dog made out of two bison, and sat at the base of the tree, looking up at him with a burning hunger and wolfing like a bulldozer with vocal chords.

Pozer stayed aloft by pressing his feet against the cold tree as he grasped the largest splinter, looking like a giant charred letter opener, and heaved upward and twisted, snapping the two-by-four sized splinter loose. He was impressed with the blade like edge and nasty point, and flipped the thing over so that the part he broke off was held like an inverted sword between his hands. He stepped up between the lightning struck Y and screamed, “Your order is ready sir!” and jumped, feet first, twenty-five feet from the ground.

He fell like a stone toward the rearing bear’s chest, which took to its haunches as it reached wide with its paws to embrace and rend him. The great paws closed around him as his feet brushed the shag-rug quality belly fur. The shock of the claws ripping open the outside of both thighs, his hips, and then his ribs, did not perturb him. The sword-sized splinter ripped through the massive tongue and the inside of the lower jaw, ripping it from the skull as it plunged with shock force into the upper chest of the bear.

The impaled bear threw Pozer off to the left as it wheeled, unable to hug him with the piece of tree deep in its chest. He made a bloody brown smear across the once white turf and then came to a stop when his shoulder hit a stone, a fifty pound rock half buried in the permafrost.

As the bear lumbered toward him in a rage he tore with his bleeding hands at the earthbound rock and ripped it out of the ground, breaking the two small fingers on his left hand in the process. The thing was nearly on him, waddling awkwardly now, raising up only half way, paws coming for Pozer’s shoulders so his head could be bitten off, although there was not a working jaw with which to bite. The pained beast seemed to be wading through a confused dream in which the prey ate it. Just as its eyes locked with the eyes of the puny creature in its grasp and its paws began to drive the creature down to the ground, Pozer smashed the chunk of stone on the bridge of the nose, knocking away that structure even more hideously than the splinter had the lower jaw.

The bear swayed and turned, in confusion and pain, taking to all fours and trying to lumber off, only to have Pozer bring the heavy stone down on the base of its skull and bring the bear crashing to its belly. Pozer was crazed over the loss of his genitals and roared furiously, howling like a madman as he smashed the head and spine of the creature that had emasculated him over and over and over again.

No thought came to his mind, no words to his lips, no desire other than to pound his enemy to pulp!

He roared and smashed, howled and crushed, screamed and thumped. His lengthening shadow seemed monstrous on the snow when he raised the rock high, again and again. But he did not care, did not notice; did not truly comprehend. As the sun slid across the gray sky toward its destination the beast who had once been Pozer Sensky snarled and slathered like some primordial horror—from his pained mind all reason having fled—and continued to re-kill the dead.

To be continued in Out of Time #11: My Junk