Chapter 7

The young men began working hard to fill their father’s wishes.





Michael, when not running the mill, began actively courting Anne Baker. When Michael got up the nerve to finally ask for Anne's hand in marriage, it was greeted with enthusiasm… and one stipulation. Both Anne and her mother believed that the actual house was too small (I have to admit… I always wondered how Jacob and his wife managed living in the one room house… AND had three children). As part of Anne’s dowry, Mr. Baker would call in favors from some carpenters to add a second floor to the main house.

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Chapter 5

After four months at the mill, I was starting to feel a bit… well… aimless. By following William to school each day (to the amusement of Brother Bartholomew and the other students at the school), I developed a fairly good grasp of this land’s written language. I also continued to practice speaking to the donkey and the horses… which could have rather amusing results.



One morning I was sitting and talking to the donkey when Henry walked in on me. As soon as I saw him I stopped talking. “Who is there?” he demanded. Briefly he glanced at me, then proceeded to search the stable for the source of the voice. I innocently played “cat” and pretended to wash myself (a disgusting habit of the primitive cats, which is why I usually bathed in a stream I discovered in the woods beyond the mill). Henry took a long stick and poked into the hay. It was all I could do not to laugh. He left, muttering to himself that someone had slipped past him.

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Chapter 3



Daylight returned, waking the inhabitants of the hovel as this planet’s sun began to peek over the horizon. William was up first. He went outside and quickly returned, arms full of firewood. The cats returned as well, following him inside and mewling.



Stretching, I climbed gingerly off the grass bed. I was still sore, but lying around all day would get me nowhere. I pretty much summed up life inside the hovel. Time to check out the surroundings.

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Comments are welcome.

Real Cats Don't Wear Boots

Chapter 1


Humans are an odd species; Earth humans doubly so. They tend to take things they don’t understand and classify them as “magic.” Take me, for example. By all appearances, I look like a slightly larger than usual, grey and white Earth cat. However, Earth cats do not speak the same language as humans. They rarely wear clothing, unless forced upon a hapless cat by a juvenile human. Earth cats absolutely, positively do not wear boots.

Since I prefer to wear clothing and boots, and I am rather fluent in the language of Earth humans, I am quite definitely not an earth cat. Unfortunately I was stranded on this backwater, uneducated world that labels anything beyond their realm of understanding as “magic.”

Perhaps I should start at the beginning.



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