Charles de Lint - The Cats of Tanglewood Forest

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Text copyright 2013 by Charles de Lint

Illustrations copyright 2013 by Charles Vess

Book design by Saho Fujii

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ISBN 978-0-316-21551-0

For my two best gals:
MaryAnn and Clare

Charles de Lint

For Miso (I miss you, buddy) and June,
who peeked through the trees and saw
the very first circle of cats

Charles Vess

And for Joe Monti,
who thought a longer story was a good idea

O nce there was a forest of hickory and beech, sprucy-pine, birch and oak. It was called the Tanglewood Forest. Starting at the edge of a farmers pasture, it seemed to go on forever, uphill and down. There were a few abandoned homesteads to be found in its reaches, overgrown and uninhabitable now, and deep in a hidden clearing there was a beech tree so old that only the hills themselves remembered the days when it was a sapling.

Above that grandfather tree, the forest marched up to the hilltops in ever-denser thickets of rhododendrons and brush until nothing stood between the trees and stars. Below it, a creek ran along the bottom of a dark narrow valley, no more than a trickle in some places, wider in others. Occasionally the water tumbled down rough staircases of stone and rounded rocks.

On a quiet day, when the wind was still, the creek could be heard all the way up to where the old beech stood. Under its branches cats would come to dream and be dreamed. Black cats and calicos, white cats and marmalade ones, too. Sometimes they exchanged gossip or told stories about Lil Pater, the trickster cat. More often they lay in a drowsy circle around the fat trunk of the ancient beech that spread its boughs above them. Then one of them might tell a story of the old and powerful Father of Cats, and though the sun might still be high and the day warm, they would shiver and groom themselves with nervous tongues.

But they hadnt yet gathered the day the orphan girl fell asleep among the beechs roots, nestling in the weeds and long grass like the gangly, tousle-haired girl she was.

Her name was Lillian Kindred.

She hadnt meant to fall asleep, but she was a bit like a cat herself, forever wandering in the woods, chasing after squirrels and rabbits as fast as her skinny legs could take her when the fancy struck, climbing trees like a possum, able to doze in the sun at a moments notice. And sometimes with no notice at all.