The problem with cats 1/8

George was whistling happily to himself, as he drove his horse and cart along the tracks and bridle ways leading to a new location for his expanding business empire. He was on his way to deliver a basket of homing pigeons to a customer and was already thinking how to spend his profits when they finally arrived.

Up until now, most of the money he’d received from carting goods between customers had been spent in clearing his debts. It had cost rather more than he’d thought to buy, feed and train the dozens of pigeons necessary for his business.

First of all he’d had to build a pigeon loft where his pigeons could live once they’d returned home. Phil at the timber yard had been very kind, giving him wood and advice about the job, while repairing his old knife sharpening cart and giving it a nice bright coat of paint.

As he’d hoped, farmers locally were quite happy to let him glean their fields for grain, although they did expect a small discount on his services as a result. After a few false starts the local pigeons realised they were going to be fed regularly if they just returned to the new pigeon loft when they were released, so now everyone was happy and the money was beginning to come in.

The only person who was not so happy with all the new arrangements, was his horse. He considered it very demeaning to have to pull a cart.

“It was necessary when we were trying to get home from Jennifer Jane’s world, but here it’s not at all the sort of work a respectable charger should be expected to do!”

“If you want to eat, you pull the cart,” George had replied. “I don’t hear you moaning about the extra oats and the lack of danger.”

The horse had just neighed sulkily and gone on pulling. After all he didn’t really have too many alternatives.

George had set up his headquarters in Lower Dene. It was fairly central in the area he was most familiar with and not too far away from Jennifer Jane if he needed any help or advice. He’d visited the village of Woodside a week ago, found that they were interested in his services and was now on his way with their first basket of pigeons.

From now on, all the money he received would be profit and he hoped he’d be able to use some of the money to expand the business by hiring another driver.

He arrived at a fork in the road just before a very large forest, where one arm of a signpost rather strangely read, ‘Woodside two miles,’ the other arm saying ‘Woodside fifteen miles.’ The first time he’d been this way he’d been riding his horse and not taken any notice of the distances and the horse had trotted along the longer road. It had seemed the better-kept surface, so he supposed that in the winter the shorter way through the woods became impassable.

This time as he was driving the cart, he thought it might be worthwhile taking the shorter route. The road surface shouldn’t be too bad at this time of the year and it might be as well to find out what conditions were like for the future.

He’d only gone about two hundred yards into the trees when a little old lady, wearing a cloak and with her head covered by a shawl, stepped out from behind a tree and stood in front of him, holding up her hand for him to stop.