Sonny Mathis is a poacher who hunts Claws and sells their talons to apothecaries that market them as cures for 'Dark Lung,' a disease caused by the polluted air of futuristic Earth. He is sued for these illegal activities by Langdon, the head of the Inter-Terra-Anti-Poaching-Organisation (ITAPO), but he is rich enough to pay off the judge and have the charges dismissed. When he returns home and finds an open window in his apartment that he remembers closing, he chalks it up to exhaustion. He partly blames the architects who designed the building for their faulty temperature controls. Sonny takes a shower and reflects on Langdon's rage-filled threat - "I'll get you, poacher" - but he dismisses it quickly. As he relaxes, he thinks about his childhood and all the time he spent with his father, developing the keen instincts of a hunter. When he emerges, Sonny senses that something in the apartment has changed. When he realizes what is happening, it is already too late. Claws are large birds that can make themselves invisible, and the slightest exposure to their venom can be fatal to human beings. They are not usually found on Earth, but when Sonny is brutally attacked by creatures he can't see, he deduces that Langdon must have released Claws from the local zoo into his apartment through the open window. Sonny makes it to his bedroom and quickly bandages his wounds. One of his legs is all but useless, but he manages to call Karl, his associate, and demand his aid. Taking up an old gun hidden in the room, Sonny shoots and kills one of the Claws. As he peers through the hole to see the now-visible corpse, the second Claw wrenches his eye out of the socket. As he struggles to deal with the pain, the telephone rings. Langdon is calling to gloat over his victory, but Sonny laughs into the phone, certain that he will survive. A Claw talon is hanging in his room, a trophy he took many years ago when he first began hunting Claws. He knows that Claw products cannot heal wounds and diseases, but Sonny is now desperate enough to fall for his lies. Not having the means to powder the talon, he tries to swallow it - the venom spills out and quickly infects him. Sonny dies in a pool of blood, killed by the very creatures that he built his fortune off of. When Langdon comes to recapture the Claws and finds Sonny's corpse, he discovers that the second Claw had fled moments after taking Sonny's eye, believing him to be dead already; if he hadn't consumed the talon, he would have survived.