Harold's Forest Days (part 1)
Co-written (and originally suggested by) Brian. We decided to try writing a story without chatgpt, like the guy who decided to walk to the south pole without dogs.
We decided to try writing a story without chatgpt, like the guy who decided to walk to the south pole without dogs
Long ago, when there were more trees and cats were generally more familiar with them than they are now, there was a grey cat with black and white spots named Harold.
Most of Harold's friends - and he had many of them - called him Harry. Harry didn't get out as much in his old age as he once did, but his spirit was as stiff as his whiskers, and even the squirrels were surprised at how far he could travel, now that he used a cane as he went. Harry the cat lived in a house carved out of a tree in the Oakmore Forest, and the wooden shelves of his house (most of which were carved straight out of the treetrunk) were filled with all the most beautiful items that he had discovered in his forest adventures as a young cat: Leather boots abandoned by woodsmen; pine cones, pine needles, and maple leaves covered in sap; and smooth river stones, which were Harold's favorite artifacts of the forest. They were always cool to the touch, which - despite his better judgment, and steadfast aversion to superstition - Harry attributed to the rejuvenating temperament of the Oakmond River, where he had many fond memories of fishing and swimming as a kitten. Whenever his friends, such as Boris Beaver or Timothy "Tabby Tim" Tabonius, attempted to measure the specific heat capacity of his river stones, Harold insisted that they mustn't, and patiently explained that his belief that these rocks were unusually cool was a placebo belief that he held to help with his writing, which was his favourite pastime since reaching old age.
And Harry wrote the most wonderful stories. The children of the forest were always delighted when he would arrive at Story Stump on Sunday mornings to share his newest tales, and their parents loved his stories, too. The knowing wink Harry made towards the children in their laughter belied the wholesome moral content of his fables, which without fail inspired the young ones to adopt an upright moral character in their own lives. After hearing the splendid Legend of Randall the Raccoon, the children rushed to the Nor'western cliffs to cast stones at the moss and lichen, a-tittering with glee: "why, if I only practice my marksmanship with patience and firm dedication, I can be a hero just like Randall!"
Harry usually dressed in a dusty brown fishing hat and a red plaid shirt. He liked to brew tea and write by candlelight in his home, especially in the early winter when it was cold enough to enjoy a cozy solitude, blanketed away from the approaching frost. Deep winter has its own charms - the animals of the forest relish in defying the long, dark nights by gathering for firelit dinners and music making - but for a writer brimming over with memories, longingly seeking their way onto pages and into ears, those nights with his piping hot tea, rolling candlewax, and scratching quill were always the most prized treasure of his retirement.
Harry’s friend Tabby Tim was the youngster of the group. There was only a few years’ gap between Tabby Tim, Boris Beaver and Harry, but it had seemed larger when they all had fewer years to go around. They had all been friends for many years now, but Boris and Harry had never entirely stopped teasing Tabby Tim for his youth and inexperience. Tim had a workshop at home, which he liked to tinker around in. In his younger days he had used it to make many tools for all the animals of the forest (the ever-handy raccoons had found these tools especially useful), but nowadays he spent most of his time making toys for his many grandchildren. After listening to Harry tell the story of Randall the Raccoon or Rutherford the Resplendent Rabbit, they would play with Tim’s toy slingshots and wooden swords for hours. Sometimes he even made music boxes, although he only let the grandchildren have them for a little bit at a time, worrying that they would break their delicate mechanisms.
Boris Beaver was Harry’s oldest friend. He lived in a dam on the Oakmont river, which his grandfather had built with his own paws when courting Boris’s grandmother. Boris himself was a confirmed lifelong bachelor and liked it that way - he was a good friend, but he enjoyed his solitude times in his den, especially in early spring when he could lie in the dark, listening to the music of the river. Boris loved music of all kinds - he sang as he walked through the forest trees, even now that his voice was weaker than it had once been. He seemed to play every instrument - he had a harmonica, a fiddle, and even a small flute he brought out on special occasions. When he played you could hear every sound of the forest in his music - the shiver of the wind in the trees, the crack of the ice in the river, even the calm, quiet sound of sunlight falling on leaves in midsummer.
Harry and his friends sometimes went on long walks through the forest. On special occasions, they even chained a few of those walks together, staying in inns and meeting friends both new and old. They never did this during the holidays, which they liked spending quietly at home, with each other and maybe a few relations. But after the holidays, early into the new year, they would always go on an especially long trip - it was a quiet time for the inns, which would always have spare rooms (and could use the business), and they always met the most interesting people travelling late after the holidays, wandering raccoon merchants on their way back from faraway lands and rabbit seamstresses searching for new cloth. Once they even met a Hyrax engineer, constantly muttering under his breath about support strata and stress tensors, although they never found out what he was going on about. Tabby Tim thought he wanted to build a bridge over the Oakmont river, but Boris said he couldn’t imagine why or how anyone would do that. Harry didn’t know, but he kept his eye out for a new bridge after that, just in case he saw the Hyrax building it.
It was towards the end of one of these journeys, just after they decided to turn back and start the long walk home, when they saw the quill in the oak leaves
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(To be continued)