Bearly Believable

The partridge, perched precariously on a branch, felt a rumble deep within her. It wasn't a pleasant rumble, like the satisfied sigh after a particularly juicy worm, oh no. This was a deep, guttural, *bear-sized* rumble. She blinked, her beady eyes wide with a mixture of disbelief and a growing sense of… well, of things being very, very full. How had this happened? One moment she was contemplating the very peculiar, inexplicable urge to swallow a pear, the next, a cat was wiggling and jiggling and tickling inside her, followed by a dog who was apparently determined to catch the cat, and a hen who was quite set on pecking the dog, and a fish who had decided the hen looked like a tasty snack, and now… now there was a bear.

A bear. Inside her. It was, to put it mildly, preposterous. The partridge puffed out her chest, which was already quite strained, and tried to make sense of the situation. The bear, a large, shaggy beast with an insatiable appetite for salmon, was now doing a rather enthusiastic jig in her internal organs. He seemed to be attempting to catch the fish, which, in turn, was still trying to bite the hen, who was still trying to peck the dog, who was still trying to catch the cat, who was still wriggling and jiggling and tickling inside her, all in the grand pursuit of that original, baffling pear.

"Oh, dear," the partridge muttered, her voice a faint squeak against the seismic activity within. "This is a bit much, even for me." She wiggled her wings, a futile gesture that only seemed to jostle the bear further. He let out a low growl, a sound that vibrated through the partridge’s very bones. It was a sound that said, "I am a bear, and I am here to hunt, and nothing, not even a slightly overstuffed partridge, will stop me."