"This is how it works...

"The plant cannot swallow as an animal does, and must use gravity. The leaves come together, grasping the prey between their tips like chopsticks or tweezers, and raise themselves almost to verticality. Clasping each other they form a great erect tube like a chimney, and down this the prey slides, soothed and sedated and slowly digested by the juices running down the inside, dwindling to a mere pellet of bone and fur.

"And so, before we vanish, each sacrifice has a moment when we are lifted up and high and see the earth below us and the sky above, feel the wind in our fur, take in the scents and sounds and sights of everything, witness the world and feel the world witnessing us back.. And then the green throat opens below us and we are gone.

"I am held now, grasped by my shins, standing in the green mouth raised to full height, my initial fear of the drop turning to awe and exhilaration, drinking in the hugeness of everything, seeing the smallness of the houses and the people and the things that made my life, feeling my life coming to climax in this bright instant between my long past and my journey into the life of the plant... the burning aching joy of knowing myself alive and present in this moment before I disappear...

"... And even as I have this thought, I feel the plant shifting, its grip loosening, my leg-fur pushed up as I go down the first inch, and I know that in a few breaths the mouth will gape beneath me and take me, And having this one moment left to me, I take the moment, close my eyes, lift my muzzle, raise my hands, greet and praise and commend myself to the world, the winds, the gods if the gods exist, the earth, the wide wide sky."