Free The Cats of Tanglewood Forest by Charles De Lint Page B

while they figured out what to do. It was a deep, deep well, dark down there at the bottom where the little girl was stuck, with smooth sides going all the way up so she couldn’t climb out. Butshe could see a little circle way up that she knew was the sky, and she could hear the bear people talking. When they finally decided that they might as well just eat her, she knew she was in real trouble.”
    “What did she do?” Lillian had to ask.
    John smiled. “Well, what the bears didn’t know was that the little girl was the daughter of the great spider spirit. When Old Man Night finally rolled his big black blanket across the sky, she called out to all the little spider spirits that make their homes in the dark, dark wool of Old Man Night’s blanket. Answering her call, they dropped down from the sky in the thousands, and every place they dropped from, there was a little hole left behind that we still see in the night skies to this day.
    “But that night they wove their webs and made a ladder so that the little girl could climb out of the well, and they wrapped all the sleeping bears in their webs so that they couldn’t move. They couldn’t even breathe.
    “Then the little girl ate them, one by one.”
    “She ate them all?” Lillian asked.
    John nodded.
    “Oh, she was mad, mad, and she would’ve eatenevery one, except for a couple had been off hunting and spent the night in a cave. Imagine coming home to
that
.”
    He looked around carefully, as though he was afraid of being overheard, then leaned in closer to Lillian.
    “I’ve heard tell,” he said in a soft voice, “that Aunt Nancy was that same little girl, and she’s still mad at those bears.”
    Lillian’s eyes opened wide. “Really?”
    “Did you ever see all those spiderwebs up in the rafters of her cabin?”
    “Yes, but—”
    Then she caught the flicker of a smile in the corner of John’s mouth.
    “Oh, you!” she cried, and punched him in the shoulder.
    John and Davy fell back on the grass, laughing. The dogs jumped up and ran around in circles, barking.
    “I still don’t see what any of that’s got to do with me,” Lillian said when things had calmed down.
    Davy’s eyebrows rose. “You mean besides being a little girl walking up to a cave full of bears and asking them for their advice?”
    “You can try and scare me,” Lillian told him, “but Aunt Nancy was mostly pretty nice to me. She’s stern and kind of spooky, but she’s not really mean.”
    “I suppose that’s true,” John said with a grin. “Especially the stern and spooky part.”
    Lillian ignored his tease. “Talking to these bear people’s the only thing anyone’s said might help me,” she said. “And when was the last time you heard about a bear going after somebody unless they got between a mother and her cubs? It’s not like the bears in these hills are all fierce the way grizzlies are supposed to be.”
    “Maybe so,” Davy said, “but I still wouldn’t be doing it.”
    They hiked on for a while, kicking up fallen pine needles as they followed the trail through a section of sprucy-pine forest. Cantankerous squirrels scolded them from the safety of tree boughs, but the three paid them no mind.
    Once Lillian thought she caught a glimpse of Big Orange watching them from the top of a ridge, but John said it was just a fox, adding, “He’s lucky the dogs didn’t catch wind of him.”
    After a while they came out from under the woodsinto a wide meadow that stretched to the far tree line in waves of golden-brown grass and purple asters. A crow croaked from the trees behind them before it sailed over the meadow. Lillian watched it vanish into the tops of the tall sprucy-pine.

    When they reached the far side of the meadow the boys stopped. The dogs came back, pushing muzzles against their legs as if to ask, What’s the holdup?
    “This is as far as we can go,” Davy said.
    “We’d come all the way,” John said, “but whenAunt Nancy lays down the law, you