The Cats of Tanglewood Forest by Charles De Lint Page A

helping her at all. Unless she was just a slave that the bear people were going to use until…
    John’s story about how the bears had planned to eat the little girl they’d put in the bottom of the well popped back into her head. Maybe they were just going to work her until she couldn’t do any more.
Then
they’d probably eat her.
    Maybe it was time she got herself out of this place.

    It didn’t take her long to tidy up the parlor since she’d just cleaned the whole room the day before. Taking a mop and a bucket, she filled the bucket at the well and walked down to the barn. Before she entered, she leaned on the mop and looked up into the hills surrounding LaOursville.
    “I know that look.”
    She turned around when Joen spoke. There was that belligerent glower he always wore.
    “What look is that?” she asked, hoping she didn’t look as guilty as she felt.
    “You’re thinking of taking off into the hills.”
    “I’m thinking no such thing. I’m just admiring the trees and all their fancy colors.”
    Joen nodded. “Sure you are. But make no mistake, girl. If you run, I’ll be right behind you. I’ll chase you from one end of these hills to the other until I run you down. Don’t think I won’t.”
    “I’m not running anywhere,” she told him. “I’ve got too much work to do. Wasn’t it
you
who told Mother Manan that the barn needs cleaning?”
    Then she picked up the bucket and mop and went into the barn. She could feel his gaze on her back, but he didn’t follow. She let out a breath she hadn’t been aware she was holding.

    That afternoon while she was cleaning out the cold storage—because Mother Manan was convinced she’d seen a spider scurry under its door—Lillian found a tray of small tincture bottles. The tray was on thetop shelf and had been pushed all the way to the back. Lillian would never have noticed it at all if she hadn’t been chasing that errant spider.
    The tray had clearly been untouched and forgotten for a very long time. Each little bottlehad a label on it, but they were too covered in dust to read. When she blew the dust away she still couldn’t read the labels because they weren’t written in English. The only thing she could tell was that they all seemed to say the same thing. She felt she’d seen a bottle like this somewhere else in Mother Manan’s house, but she couldn’t remember where.
    It wasn’t until after dinner, when she was turning down Mother Manan’s bed, that she remembered where she’d seen the tincture bottle. She stood with her back to the bed and looked at the long tapestry that ran from one end of the wall to the other.
    It told a story, but she didn’t understand what the story was.
    But there was the tincture bottle. On the left sideof the tapestry, a bear, standing upright, was looking at a man dressed in what looked like Kickaha hunting leathers. In the next section he was giving the man a small brown bottle. In the last section the man stood in a meadow with his arms held out straight from his sides. Birds were sitting on his head and all along his arms, with still more fluttering around him.

    Mother Manan came in while she was still looking at it.
    “We don’t have stories like this,” Lillian said. “Not back where I’m from.”
    “Why would you? To your kind the animal people are only good for their fur and their meat.”
    Lillian didn’t bother to correct her, but she knew hunting and farming weren’t so black and white for everybody. And didn’t the bear people keep chickens and pigs and cows?
    “So what’s happening in the story?” Lillian asked.
    For a moment she didn’t think Mother Manan would answer.
    “That happened a long time ago,” she finally said. “At the beginning of time, all the people could talk to each other—animals, and even people like you. But the years went by and your people forgot the oldlanguage and started hunting the animal people. There was a long war in these hills between the bears and