Thomasina - The Cat Who Thought She Was God Read Online Free PDF Page A

that he had a problem on his hands connected with the eventual disposition of his charge, since take it home he could not, owing to house laws on the importation of animals, while at the same time to abandon it as recommended by the veterinarian was unthinkable. It was Geordie’s first encounter with the chilly and uncooperative attitude of the world toward one who has taken the fatal step of accepting a responsibility.
    His seemingly unguided wanderings had taken him to the edge of the town, that is, to the back of it, where the houses ended abruptly and the several farms and meadows began, beyond which lay the dark and mysterious woods covering the hill of Glen Ardrath, where the Red Witch lived, and he realized that he had thought of this fearful alternative as a possible solution but had quickly rejected it as altogether too frightening and dangerous.
    Yet now that he was there by the bridge crossing the river Ardrath, that peaceful stream flowing into Loch Fyne, but which was fed by the tumbling mountain torrents that came frothing down out of the glen, the prospect of paying her a visit seemed awesomely and repellently attractive and exciting. For it was a fact that the townspeople avoided the lair, or vicinity of the Red Witch, who was also known as Daft Lori, or sometimes even Mad Lori, and most certainly small boys, fed on old wives’ tales and fairy-book pictures of hook-nosed crones riding on brooms, avoided the neighborhood except when in considerable company.
    But there were two sides to the estimate of the so-called Red Witch of Glen Ardrath, one in which the picture was supplied by the superheated imagination reacting to the word witch, and the other was that she was a harmless woman who lived alone in a crofter’s cottage up in the hills, where she made a living by weaving on a hand loom, conversed with birds and animals whom she nursed, mothered, and fed, and communed with the angels and the Little Folk with which the glen was peopled.
    Geordie was aware of both of these tales. If it was true that the roe deer came down from the flanks of Ben Inver to feed out of her hand, the birds settled on her head and shoulders, the trout and salmon rose from the sunny shallows of the burn at her call, and that in the stables behind the cottage where she lived there were sick beasties she found in the woods or up the rocky glen, or who came to her driven by instinct to seek human help and whom she tended back to health, why then it might well be worth the risk to deposit his frog with her. At any rate it appeared to be a legitimate excuse for the having of a tremendous adventure, whatever came of it.
    He crossed the saddleback bridge over the river and commenced the climb to the forest at the entrance to Glen Ardrath, past the gray bones of Castle Ardrath, of which the circular inner keep and part of the stone curtain was all that had remained standing.
    The home of the Red Witch was supposed to be situated a mile or more up the glen where the forest was heaviest and it took considerable courage for a small boy alone, even though panoplied as a Wolf Cub and filled with some of their woods lore, to enter the darkening area of lichened oak, spreading beech, and somber fir and to push his way through the head-high bracken. He tamed his apprehensions by looking for and identifying the summer wild flowers in full blossom of July that cropped up beside the path he was following; purple thrift and scarlet pimpernel, yellow broom and the pink of the wild dog rose that grew entangled with the white-flowering bramble which in the late summer and fall would yield the sweetest blackberries. He recognized purple columbine, red campion, and the blue harebell, the true bluebell of Scotland, growing in profusion in a glade that seemed made by the traditional fairy ring of trees growing about a circle carpeted with flowers and warmed by shafts of sunlight that penetrated through the branches of the trees.
    From there the hill climbed