He was so hungry.
Sylvester took a long, deep breath and tried to think about anything except food.  The wolf man was lying draped across the branches of a stout tree, where he had remained almost motionless for the last three days.  Water wasn’t a problem, but he hadn’t seen a scrap of food for several weeks, and to make matters worse small animals and birds kept zipping by as their own little food chains played out right before his eyes.  Sylvester looked down and spied a small scruffy-looking thing (cat? marten? he didn’t care) with another smaller piece of scruff in its mouth, trotting off to curl up in a corner somewhere and enjoy the spoils of its hunt.
He could have easily slunk down, overtaken the thing, and gobbled it up.  But he simply lay in the tree, unmoving except for his eyes which tracked the feral animal until it vanished into a bush.  He sighed.  His stomach growled, and being that his stomach was more than ten feet long it made quite a racket.  He winced and turned over to examine himself.
From the waist up, Sylvester was a normal-looking wolf man: lean and muscular, with black fur over most of his body, and a lighter gray tone over his chest and abdomen.  Glossy black hair fell down just past his shoulders and chin, with a bang covering one eye and part of his face.  His tail was dark on top and lighter on the bottom, as usual.  From the waist down, Sylvester was certainly not a normal-looking wolf man: he had a strong and heavy snake’s body, with rich shiny black scales on the back while the same light gray continued from his chest downwards all the way to his tail.  Large gray circles ran down the entire length of his body in a regular pattern that could arrest the attention of any onlooker.  The only piece of clothing he wore was a loose red sash around his waist for modesty.
As he stretched himself out for a proper inspection, the true depth of Sylvester’s hunger finally began to dawn on him.  Once lustrous black and gray scales had dimmed to pale tones, their glossy finish worn off by the elements and yet to be renewed.  His fur was dull and matted down unevenly, devoid of the healthy coloration it should have had.  He arched his back and sat up, flexing the bands of his long and sinuous body until he was interrupted by a fierce pain.  The wolf naga hissed as agony rippled up his spine and ribs, a protest from muscles and tissue ignored and left to sag into unyielding wood.
Swearing under his breath, Sylvester slowly and carefully began to vacate his perch, delicately unwinding himself in a reverse of the path he had taken up there.  Things had been bad when he had first retreated to the tree, but they were positively awful now.  When had it all started?
Sylvester considered himself the apex predator of his own food chain, which consisted mainly of tribal women who made the mistake of wandering into his neck of the woods.  There were a few different tribes whose territory came together near his grove, which meant he often had a revolving buffet of athletic babes who wore little clothing and were exhausted from hunting or hiking.  After securing her own quarry, a huntress would often rest before beginning the long trek back to her village, which provided the naga with the perfect chance to descend from the trees, catch her eye, and spend the next day turning her into a plaything with the help of his hypnotic gifts.
A single luminous white ring pressed outward from his red irises unconsciously as he salivated at the memories.  Svelte wolf girls with fire in their hearts, who tried so hard to fight back but never quite managed to break free; bunny girls with fat and fluff in just the right places gasping in awe at the sight of him, softly sinking into his coils and begging for more; deer girls with their wide, curious eyes that always got hooked on his body before he even had to make a move.
And after he was done playing with a woman she would satisfy his hunger.  Sylvester licked his lips.  He could still remember the last girl, a doe who had been rather top-heavy and altogether too trusting of strangers far from home.  She had almost been too good to be true.
Maybe she had.  She’d been the last person he’d seen or heard since the new moon, and since then it had waxed full and waned down to a sliver.  Sylvester could go for fairly long periods of time without eating, thanks in no small part to the abundance of prey he’d turned into body mass over the years, but even he had limits.  Had the tribes finally realized why their women were disappearing?  Had something outside the grove caused them to start avoiding it?  Had they simply decided to move?  Impossible to say, and frankly he didn’t care.  Sylvester just knew he was hungry, and that offended him.  His mind wandered.  Maybe the scruffy little things on the ground wouldn’t be so bad . . .
The naga shook his head.  “No.  I’m the biggest, most captivating thing for miles around, not some common mongrel.  I am not going to go slithering after something like that no matter how desperate I get.  It’s far too small to satisfy me, anyway, and can you imagine the taste?”  He finished lowering his body to the ground and began to inch forward, not wanting to trigger another spasm.  His stomach, dragging behind him, growled again.  Sylvester rolled his eyes.  “Be patient.  It’s been a long time since I had to hunt something.”