The boy and the bear
By Strega

Randall was young and playful and not too bright, which were all things the young bear had been taught to  look for in a new friend.  He was also alone at the most isolated campsite in the whole camp ground, and that, of course, made him an even more attractive playmate.

He had run out of squirrels to chuck rocks at and was poking disinterestedly at the fishing poles they'd brought camping.  He was bored and no amount of yelling at the next campsite brought anyone by to play. The family there had very quickly lost interest in the loud, rather dim boy in the next camp and had pointedly turned up the volume on their portable radio to drown him out. They had even drawn the curtains on the side of their lengthy RV so in addition to not hearing him they rarely saw him.
He was just obedient enough to instructions to not leave the camp unattended while his mother was off paying the campsite fees but when he saw the little bear all thoughts of staying put went right out the window.

The sight of the young bear splashing in the stream made the eyes go wide in his chubby face. It was lanky and big-pawed, no more an adult than he was, and though it would stand a little taller he and the bear were just about the same size.

"Ooh, mom, look!  A bear!", Randall cried, forgetting that his mother wasn't there. One of the campers at the next site heard him yell but that was just an excuse to turn the stereo volume up another notch. Some people go camping for the quiet; these were not those people.

The boy soon forgot all about his mother because the bear looked up at his shrill cry.  It stopped playing in the stream and ambled out of the water onto the sandy bank, where it sat up on its haunches and waved a paw at him just as a human would.

A broad smile broke across Randall's face and without a second thought he ran past the signs at the end of the camp - which naturally included warnings about the wildlife - to meet the bear.  Like most young animals it had a childishly oversized face and paws, big ears, and a playful nature that it soon shared by wrestling him him.  Randall was overjoyed to find a playmate his own size and age, albeit of a different species, and though the bear couldn't talk he was soon engaged in rough-and-tumble play.  The bear was very strong but the boy had a lot of muscle under his fat and they rolled and tussled and soon both were entertainingly tired and bruised.

The boy didn't notice that their play took them behind a copse of pines and further out of view of the campsite and he didn't see the furry muzzle and dark eyes of a larger version of his playmate peering from the woods.  When they were well out of sight of the camp his furry playmate met the gaze of that other set of eyes and smiled when his glance was met with a nod.

Randall was used to wrestling with the bear by now and thought nothing of it when it wrapped its forepaws around him and began to lick his face. If anything he laughed at the feel of of it, not noticing how careful the bear cub was to pin his arms to his sides.  He just laughed as the broad wet tongue moistened his chin, then his cheeks and his forehead, and didn't react with so much as a yelp of surprise as the young bear's muzzle suddenly tilted downward.  There was a scrape of a fang along his scalp and he stared in dull surprise at the teeth and wet salivating tongue so close now to his eyes.  The young bear had playfully taken his entire head into its jaws. 

It wasn't until it tugged powerfully with its forepaws and pushed its jaws further over him that he felt the least alarm, but just as he gathered his breath to protest this odd treatment its tongue pressed against his chin and with a heavy gulp his face slipped past the teeth and into the warm, slimy grip of the little bear's throat.

Still not particularly worried by this odd play Randall pushed the bear away so he could get his eyes back into the light and get back to wrestling.  The bear though had an entirely different sort of play in mind and gripped him tight between its powerful forepaws as it worked its disjointed jaws bit by bit over his shoulders.  It had positioned itself very carefully, waiting until Randall sat down to begin feeding, and the first hint of real fear came when the throat now wrapped tight around his face and chubby neck tensed down as the bear swallowed again.  Fangs scraped past this shoulders and he at last began to  struggle as he realized the bear was eating him. 

He could kick at it only feebly with his rump pressed firmly against the grass. It didn't even bother to muffle his attempts as its forepaws busily stuffed him into its maw.  He could scarcely squirm as the jaws around his shoulders held him tight as the slimy throat slid past his face.  All he could do was try to free his arms from the bear-hug as with a series of gulps and wriggles of its blunt muzzle the bear worked its jaws further over his torso. As stretched wet cheek-skin slid over him to the elbows it was more and more difficult to resist even that much.

He was a tubby young man almost as big as the bear and had a considerable natural strength but the lanky, taller bear was all muscle beneath its short black fur. Once or twice he managed to free an arm and pull at the bear's fur but with his arms to the elbows in gullet and jaws he couldn't punch it with any force. When he did manage it his fist simply sank into pelt stretched over his own half-swallowed body and the worst injury he sustained in those first couple of minutes were bruises from punching himself. Soon enough one of the blunt-clawed paws would pin his arm again and the bear's jaws would lurch another inch downward.

It had finally occurred to him to call for help but not until his head was well down the bear's throat and saliva and muscle and fur absorbed his panicked cries as he was swallowed alive. Out of sight of anyone who might help he could only whimper and squirm and his new bear friend showed no pity at all.  Hugged tight in powerful paws the boy was swallowed bit by bit until his sweating face slipped free of the constricting grip of throat into the looser, bile-scented folds of the young bear's stomach.

The little bear was panting with effort, gasping what air it could through a throat full of boy, but faced with a choice of coughing its half-eaten meal back up so it could rest or swallowing it down the bear took the route that left it well-fed.  With a lurch it sat back, lifting the boy's chubby legs with its muzzle in a surge of effort that made even the strong young bear grunt with effort.  All the blood rushed to Randall's head and stars spun past his eyes in the slimy darkness of the stomach as the bear heaved its head upward. The fabric of hiss shorts kept the canine teeth from scraping as painfully this time as his flabby rump slipped into the bear's gullet and suddenly there was nothing at all left of him but a set of pallid, kicking legs protruding from the young bear's maw.

"I thought you were my friend," the boy whined, but if the bear heard it did not heed his complaints.  A heave of its head combined with a massive gulp sent a few inches of his thighs sliding into its throat and enough of him was inside now that gravity helped the bear finish its meal.  The boy whimpered as with a few tosses of its muzzle the bear swallowed him to the knees and as he slid deeper even between the gulps. There was much more of him inside than outside now and as the furry neck and chest tried to shrink back to their usual shape it helped squeeze him downward into the waiting stomach.

Though it had its meal all but finished he was a very big chunk of meat for a bear the size of his new friend and there was already a lumpy and almost painful bulge in the young bear's middle.  Its neckfur was stretched just as tight and it was with a terrific effort that it stretched out its muzzle to take in his feet.  A fang caught in the laces of one of the shoes and popped it free so it was one shod foot and one set of stockinged toes that peeked briefly up past the bear's meaty tongue.  With a grunt of effort the young bear got his jaws shut at last and with a final straining gulp the feet slipped down its throat to join the rest.

Unable to save himself or even control his smallest movements now the boy slipped and slid against the slick walls of the bear's stomach.  The folds in the walls had flattened as more and more of him was swallowed and it was a drum-tight kettle of flesh that held him tight now.  He whimpered as he was forced to curl up, face pressed against his knees, when the bear rose up onto all fours.  It had started out hardly larger than he was and with its entire body cavity stuffed full of plump young man it struggled to keep its grotesquely stuffed belly from dragging the ground.

Though he heard it groan in effort at the least attempt to move and even whine a complaint of its own as he struggled, the fluids coating the walls were stinging his exposed flesh and his summer clothing soon grew sodden with the caustic fluids too.  He writhed in the slimy confines of the bear but by the time a long belch vented most of the air his story was all but over.  It had taken a tremendous effort to get him down but he was in its stomach now and a bear's stomach knows what to do when someone ends up there, even, it turns out, a very big someone.

The mother bear emerged from the brush at the end, but offered no help.  Her cub had not needed it.  Her teachings had taken well; he had lured his prey to a private place, crept up on it, and held it close until it was too late to escape.  She watched with pride as a last gulp sent a foot-shaped bulge moving through her son's black neck-fur, and sat down to see what he would do next.

He was a good student.  He stretched and grunted as he got the ponderous meal settled beneath his thin-stretched pelt, muffled the first great burp lest some wandering man hear it, and sniffed around for any traces that might tell the humans what had happened.  A snap of his jaws and a gulp disposed of the errant shoe, which would be regurgitated and buried with the boy's clothing when everything else was digested, and then scraped a paw over the few shoe-prints mixed in with his own.  

Bear tracks were fine, shoe prints were fine, but the two together might give away the game.  By the time he was done checking for tracks the last twitches were quieting in his stretched bellyfur and his stomach was working on the plump young man he'd eaten. Very few humans knew that the local bears could swallow a man whole and the bears worked to keep it that way.  Most who found out had a hard time telling anyone due to a bad case of having been digested.

Finally her son looked up and she nodded her approval.  "Good boy," the mother bear growled.  "Let's go."

It wasn't easy to walk without dragging your belly when someone almost your own size is inside, but this too was a lesson he must learn.  Every one of these tricks must be mastered if one wished to make meals of humans and not be caught.  The young, careless ones were the easiest meals, of course. A growing bear needs a lot of feeding and when this human had helped fuel a few more months of growth it would be time to teach him how to take an adult.  Maybe by then he would be interested in more than eating them, because if you were going to make a meal of someone, why not use them to indulge your other urges as well?  It was not as though they'd be around to complain, after all, and a healthy young bear has needs beyond its appetite. He wouldn't be big enough to fight for a bear sow for years but that didn't mean he must do without relief.

The first meal she'd had of an adult human had been a man she lured in by waggling her rump.  It would never work, her own mother had said, but it turned out to be easier than one would suspect to find a human interested in such things.  Even these days she had an occasional meal of randy and foolish man. At least they had a last bit of pleasure before they disappeared down her throat, just as the boy had a last bout of play before vanishing into her son. 

Distant from the campsites now the young bear didn't bother to muffle the next belch that came up and the mother bear smiled as he settled down to sleep off his meal.  A few humans did know what went on in these parts, and the annoying young man wasn't the first to be left alone at that campsite only to vanish without a trace.  There would be a perfunctory search in the woods but by the time her cub was done digesting his meal that would be over.  The humans-in-charge would point to the lack of tracks or other evidence and the search would move on to human suspects. Months from now there would still be a search on, distant and faint, as those not in the know looked for a boy that existed by then only as fat lining a healthy young bear's flanks.

Her son didn't need to know any of that yet. She would teach him to be careful and never greedy, taking only a meal or two a year from this camp and moving on to others.  The deal they had with local humans to 'disappear' troublemakers had its limits, after all.

The great bulge in her son's gut shifted as he struggled to find a comfortable position, and the shape of the swallowed boy stood out for a moment.  Briefly, she looked away, then looked back and shrugged.  If a few of those troublemakers were of tender years and their fates arranged by uncaring parents, well, she might feel a qualm or two, but young or old, humans were still made of meat and no matter how many her family ate, they never seemed to run out.