Once upon a time, shortly after Bella had moved into the wizard’s tower, she began exploring in the human village. She wanted to explore the village so that she could find food there, not just in the surrounding rainforest.
One morning, at six o’clock, Bella went outside and started to look around. Soon enough she was exploring everywhere. There were little huts that looked like piles of sticks with tiny windows and with campfires in the middle of each one.
And there were some spears along the edge of the one that Bella first passed by. She looked inside, and there were some people cooking animals. This made her sad and sick so she stopped looking in, especially because there were also lots of blankets and pillows made out of animal skin and furs.
As she wandered on, Bella saw more and more human houses and less and less trees. She also noticed that the buildings were getting higher and no longer looked like piles of sticks. Instead of walking along a dirt road, Bella was now scampering along a paved road. A car rumbled past as she hid in the bushes. After a few more minutes of walking, this road even had a sidewalk.
The human village had just been on the outside of a much bigger city. In the city, the houses were much different then the ones in the village. They were made of stone and glass. And they were very tall with thousands of windows. The stone was usually white and the glass inside the window frame was usually blue. There were barely any trees except for in certain patches of wide-open grass. And there were streets criss-crossing everywhere, all with sidewalks along them. Here there were many cars on the road.
Bella noticed that this was when many people were getting outside to do stuff. For example, to walk along the streets very fast and not even look where they were stepping. Bella nearly got squashed a couple of times.
So she decided to walk on the dirt that was right next to the sidewalk, which was lined with bushes. She scurried right underneath. As she walked, she went from side to side, looking for food in the bushes.
Suddenly she spotted a bright red berry in one of the upper reaches of the hedge. So she climbed up and it was a big, red, plump guarana berry on a vine that was weaving through the bushes. Then she put the guarana berry in one of the folds of her cheek and kept climbing along the vine and spotting more of the red berries. A couple of times her head popped out of the bushes by accident because the vine grew super close to the top of the bushes. Then she had to quickly duck back down so that no humans would see her or try to chase her. Because a chase would be exhausting.
As she came to each berry, Bella had to whap her tail against it a few times to loosen the stem, and then she had to catch it before it fell. She then put it in her cheek flap with the other berries. Soon, both of her cheek flaps were full, and so was one of her paws. So she decided to head back to the tower.
But suddenly, something caught her eye. It was a big wall across the street. The wall was in the shape of a big circle. Bella decided to explore it. Bella could not see through or over the wall so she decided to climb it.
First, she waited until there was a gap of people that were walking along on the sidewalk. Then, she quickly scurried out from under the bushes, across the sidewalk and the street to the big wall.
At the wall, Bella jumped onto a ledge in it and started climbing. The wall was very rough. It was hard to climb because of how steep it was. But it was also thick and sloppy, which meant that there were lots of handholds. Finally, finally, finally, she reached the top. From there she could see what was inside the wall.
Bella felt sick. Inside the wall there were some cages with animals inside of them including: leopards, snakes, and even some monkeys. The animals looked very sad or depressed, and a few of them even seemed angry. It didn’t seem like they were taken care of, they looked like they were starved. Bella was too sad to pay any attention to the details of this horrible place but she knew that the animals were trapped. She didn’t want the people who imprisoned the animals to find her, so she quickly scurried down the wall and back into the bushes on the other side of the street.
Now she was sad and hungry for the food that she had collected. She noticed that she had dropped a lot of berries because she had needed all four of her paws to climb up the wall. So Bella picked up the berries that she had dropped and started going back to the Wizard’s Tower.
It seemed to take shorter than before on her way there. In her room in the tower she deposited her berries onto her little rock ledge table. Most of the berries she stowed away in her sack. And then she wondered what she was going to sit on. She had just moved in two days before and hadn’t really had time to use a chair. But now that she was settled down she could think about actual stuff like a pillow and a chair.
So Bella went outside to look for something that would work as a chair. First she looked underneath the bushes by the tower to see if there were any branches she could whittle into the shape of a chair, but there was nothing underneath the bushes. And she didn’t want to break off a branch because that might hurt the whole line of bushes. Next, she looked around to see if there was anything or anywhere that she could look for stuff. And she spotted the perfect spot.
It was one of those patches of grass that she had noticed before. It had more trees than the others. And then, the idea struck her; her idea was to get some bark from underneath a tree and to chip that into a chair with her teeth. Her two front teeth, because mice are good at chipping things with their two front teeth.
So Bella scurried over to a fallen log in the middle of the park. She checked all around it and soon found a pile of wood chips partway underneath the log. She picked out a piece of bark that was just a little bit bigger than her. As she started to drag it back to her house, she heard a sniffing sound.
“I wonder what that could be” she thought. And just as she turned around to see what it was, the cat pounced to the spot where she had been a moment ago but she had scurried away too quickly. The cat looked around in confusion, spotted her and captured Bella between her two paws. Luckily the cat’s paws were wide and the claws spaced apart, and there was just enough time for Bella to scurry out from between the cat’s paws.
“HEY!” squeaked Bella. “What are you doing!?! Why are you trying to catch me?”
“Well” said the Cat, pausing for a second, he was a brown tabby with black stripes along his back, and a black tip on his tail. And he had small pitch black pupils in big, old eyes. “Because first of all, it’s fun to chase someone who is scared of me, and second of all because mice are delicious.” He licked his lips, staring hungrily at where Bella was. Actually the spot where Bella used to be. When he had been talking about how he liked to eat mice she had scurried quickly away into the highest place she could get, which was a very tall bush, and swiftly camouflaged herself in the bluish gray flowers of this particular bush.
“Hey” meowed the cat, “where did you go?…Did you go this way?” He looked behind him and just as he did that a robin landed on the ground. “Yum,” he said, licking his lips. He pounced on the bird, and the chase was on.
“Whew” sighed Bella. She had very nearly gotten eaten! Still, she felt sad for that robin.
. . .
That night, after she had put her chair in the right place, eaten dinner and found a pillow, she went to bed. “I promise,” thought Bella as she snuggled up underneath her grass blanket, “that I will someday go back to that city and free all of those sad animals so they can live a happy life in the wild.
