The Legend of Winstone Blackhat by Tanya Moir Page B

sight and if they should ever reach its end the Kid didn’t know where they’d be and all Coop ever could or would say about it was that they’d be on the other side.
    But behind them the sun was coming up and lighting the grass and pretty soon it would be on their shoulders. The Kid watched the range grow sharp and gold and the sky turn blueand the sun warmed his back and the palomino shook the cold from his mane and stepped a little higher. The range ran forever and it was empty and free and theirs for the riding and as long and wide as it ran there was no need to stop or turn back or get anywhere because there was no place better than this and not everything had to …

    Winstone froze, a chunk of All Day Breakfast sausage between his teeth. The kitten. It was creeping over the rocks, a cartoon cat, placing each paw with exaggerated care, watching him as it wound its way up and over and through to the vanilla rice stain and when it got there it sank, ears back, a pressed spring, and began to lick the stone.
    Slowly, Winstone took the sausage out of his mouth and the kitten’s ears pressed even tighter to its head and its stripy tail batted side to side on the rock like a rattlesnake someone was trying to kill but the kitten stayed where it was and very gently, with just his fingers and wrist, Winstone threw the sausage onto the ground between them.
    The kitten exploded out of the rocks as if the sausage had been a grenade and Winstone stared at the empty air and chewed and he half expected to see some bits of fur come down. When they didn’t, he got on with his breakfast, and he was picking the last bit of bacon out of the beans when the kitten came back, through the grass this time, stalking that Wattie’s canned sausage like it was a gazelle on the Serengeti.
    The kitten snatched up the sausage and then it didn’t know what to do first, run or chew, and it glared at Winstone and hissed like it was all his fault it was in such a difficult situation. In the end, it scuttled backwards a bit and dropped the sausageand licked it and turned it about and then ripped into it with its kitten teeth and bolted it down.
    Winstone threw a bit of potato next because those weren’t as good as they sounded. The kitten seemed pretty keen on it though, so he threw it another chunk and this time he didn’t throw it as far. The kitten didn’t like that one little bit, you could tell, but it wanted that potato bad and so it had to come closer.
    The kitten was right to be nervous. It was on the run too. Wanted, just dead. People were probably hunting it now, laying traps and poison. Its kind had no right of their own to a place in the world, all they did was hurt good things, lizards and birds, the things people cared about, and sometimes they enjoyed it. That’s why people wanted to destroy feral cats. ANNIHILATE them, which was another word Winstone had learned how to spell in Glentrool after Tom Barker threatened to do it to him and he’d found it in Todd’s dictionary, waiting for him between ANNEX and ANNIVERSARY, a long cold word, a line of traps around a silence.
    Winstone fed the kitten all the potato and himself all the beans and by the time they were finished the kitten was really quite close. Then there was no more food and the kitten ran away but not as fast, and that afternoon when Winstone broke into the hut with the sliding door, as well as caramel condensed milk and a bottle of Coke he stole a tin of cat food.

EAST
    Winstone could remember the first time he slept over at Zane’s. It was right after he got his phone.
    Hey there mate, Zane said when Winstone walked through the door after school, I’ve got something for you, and he threw Winstone a box.
    The box was covered in light blue paper with cowboys on, long tumbling lines of cowboys in hats and chaps and boots and spurs and they were rearing and roping and galloping on brown and white and red horses. Winstone turned it around.
    Go on, Zane said, you can