The Cats of Tanglewood Forest by Charles De Lint Page A

fed up with it.
    Picking up a good-sized stick, she held it in a tight grip and glared at the last place she’d seen the fox dart out of sight.
    “All right, Mr. Fox,” she called out to it. “Or maybe you really are T. H. Reynolds. I don’t know and I don’t care. But you need to either stop following me or step out where I can see you.”
    She wasn’t actually expecting a response, so when a voice spoke to her from the branches of the tree above her, she thought her heart would stop.
    “Hey, little missy. Think you could keep it down?”
    She felt as though she’d fallen back into her dream again, where creatures kept talking to her from trees. Looking up, she half expected to see the fox sitting up there on a branch—or at least Jack Crow.
    The foliage was thick, and at first she didn’t see anyone. Then a shadow shifted, moving into a shaft of light, and she saw that there was a man up in the tree. He had a long face with a raggedy beard and a wrinkled brown hat pushing down on top of a mass ofstraggly hair. His rangy frame was tucked into a crook between a couple of big branches and the trunk. A rifle lay across his knees.



“What are you
doing
up there?” Lillian asked, too surprised to be scared.
    “Well, I was hunting until you came traipsing down the ridge making enough noise for a whole herd of little girls. Any game for a mile around is going to have been scared away.”
    “I wasn’t making that much noise.”
    “Oh, no? You walk like you weigh ten times your size. And then there was all that shouting. Somebody should have told you before this that a fox isn’t going to be tracking some little girl, and he sure enough isn’t going to answer your questions.”
    Lillian flushed. All the fancies that the Creeks had put in her head washed away and she felt like a fool.
    “I
know
that,” she said.
    “Do you now.”
    Lillian gave him a determined nod and changed the subject.
    “What are you hunting?”
    “I’ve got my sights set on a big panther. I’ve seenhim a time or two and decided to see if I can track him down. That pelt of his’ll fetch a handsome price.”
    Maybe it was all dreams and fancies, but Lillian couldn’t help thinking about the things Jack Crow had told her.
    “Do you mean the Father of Cats?” she almost whispered.
    The man shrugged. “Well, now, he sure looks big and old enough to have been around since the beginning of time. But this isn’t some parlor-story fairy-tale cat. It’s just an any-old-day panther that keeps coming around my farm, looking to get at the calves.”
    “You’ve really seen him?”
    “I catch me a glimpse, time to time, but I never can get me a shot. He’s smart, that cat. Been around awhile—you can tell. But I can be patient.”
    “Where’s your farm?” Lillian asked, wondering if he might know about the bear people.
    He jerked his chin to the west, rather than north.
    “Over yonder,” he said. “A couple of miles as the crow flies.” He chuckled. “Takes me a little longer to make the trip.”
    “Do you ever see any bear around here?”
    He shook his head. “I know there’s some higherup in the hills, but they don’t much come down my way—leastwise, I don’t see any sign. Doesn’t really surprise me since there’s nothing for them. I don’t have an orchard or beehives or even a berry patch.”
    Lillian couldn’t think of a way to ask about bear people without feeling more ridiculous.
    “Well,” she said, “I’ve still got a-ways to go, so I guess I’ll be seeing you.”
    “You never did say why you’re up this far into the hills.”
    Lillian gave him a bright smile. “Talking to foxes,” she said.
    “Ha, ha. But seriously, you’re awful young to be out on your own, this deep in the hills. Where do you live?”
    Nowhere, Lillian thought. She didn’t have a home anymore. At least not until she figured out how to save Aunt’s farm. But that wasn’t anything she was about to tell a stranger.
    “Back there