The Chiefest Cat in the World

       Kitty had to suffer the smug yellow tomcat on their way to another outpost, during the night, and on another track to the place they called Keuruu. Loud-Woman was suffering too: she had to follow the lead and instructions of the strangers, retold by Half-Cat in short or by Grumpy-Glum and Biggest-One in detail. In order not to look at the proud banner of the yellow tail brandished ahead, Kitty was looking around. They said Keuruu was near, so where were the sentinels? If Kitty got the human talks right, there should be some guys like her friend Chiefgull, guarding any settlement with lots of mages—that's what weird people like Half-Cat or Grumpy-Glum are called. Kitty wondered if the local sentinels would be cool like Chiefgull or lame like those grouses. Yet none came their way even when the joint group was entering a space between two no-nonsense palisades. Loud-Woman shared her sentiments and wondered aloud if those sentinels would peck, bite, or what. Half-Cat and Grumpy-Glum just smirked. Soon Kitty found out what they meant. In a small, warm hall at the checkpoint, all travellers, one by one, were ordered to stand still no matter what. Kitty did, or tried to, but then she was diverted by a familiar buzz, a tiny gust over her head fur, and then something bit her ear! She snapped back and nearly caught a tiny midge. The smug yellow tomcat snorted and told her she was lucky to miss the sentinel. Then Long-Braidy squealed in surprise, Loud-Woman cursed, Biggest-One grunted, and Soap-Smelling did all sorts of those sounds and started a grumbling bout that Lalli could have at least warned him that the sentinels were flies! And that Eyes of Flies was lame. For once, Kitty agreed with him on both matters. Then the local humans took Long-Braidy and Grumpy-Glum away from her team. For quarantine, they said. For a long time. It meant Kitty had to stay and wait. Alright, she didn’t mind having some rest and exploring a new place. There might be new exciting things to do and eat! As long as the smug yellow tomcat was busy anywhere out of her sight. Well. Kitty disliked the place the next day. First, it was full of grade B cats, she felt one of many and not a unique battle hero, like in the settlement they had left. And the yellow smug tomcat was not the only grade A around, too. Quite a number of cats wore closed collars and had the same condescending look as they passed Kitty by. Some ignored her, some didn’t, and she didn't know which was worse. After the fifth “hey kid, wanna a piece of advice?” she wanted to growl and fight. She had enough of that in the cat school long ago. And what if any of those cheeky cats took away her humans?! It seemed that some cats knew Half-Cat and talked to him too off-paw to Kitty’s liking. And some local humans felt like Half-Cat and even hissed at Kitty for no reason! Then it turned out that the sneaky yellow tomcat had more ways to spoil Kitty’s mood. Once he waylaid her in a side lane, came up so close that he almost pressed her into a house wall, and purred, “Hey, pretty-pants, wanna have kittens from a grade A sire? They can even earn grade A that’s out of reach to you.” Her traitorous tail vibrated and pleaded to let him pretty please, but her pride said no, or, rather, Naaw! Kitty slapped the cheeky doormat and ran away to hide on Biggest-One. No, she must do something to lead her team away, and really quickly. Luckily, some of her humans shared her opinion. Soap-Smelling didn’t like that they were put into a 10-bed room for visitors with no privacy at all. Loud-Woman didn’t like that no giants attacked the fort. Half-Cat didn’t enjoy being asked and talked to by the locals. Biggest-One didn’t complain but winced every time his comrades were saying that local food was mediocre but still better than his cooking. He even started wincing every time Kitty climbed him, and that was whenever she saw a grade A cat at the horison. Usually he let her ride him, but once he said, “No, Missekat, you cannot follow us into sauna,” and Loud-Woman tore Kitty off his collar and dumped into snow before the porch of a large wooden house. Usually, Kitty didn’t even want to go to that “sauna” thing, it smelled strange and puffed gusts of such humid air that Kitty’s fur got all dewy or hoarfrosty. But now it was a trifle compared to the yellow tomcat squinting at her from a roof across the street. So, Kitty sneaked behind her humans, right on their heels, and she was inside already when the closing door grabbed her tail tip. It hurt like she didn’t know what, so she screamed, and her good Loud-Woman understood at once what had happened, and kicked the door open, and shouted at Biggest-One to look under his feet. Kitty felt like a half of her tail was torn away. She hid under a bench and pawed Biggest-One when he tried to drag her outside. He still got her out to gawk at her disgraced tail and then had the temerity to say that Kitty lost just a small tuft of fur from her tail’s end. “Just”?! Kitty would have to hide her curtailed tail from other cats for the rest of her life, and he called it “just”?! She ran to Loud-Woman to hide between her boots and cry. But later, in private, Kitty told her tail that it served him right for his sympathy with that yellow tomcat. Also, more local humans understood her team than in the village before and were even offering them a job here—but to single humans, not to the team as a whole. And Biggest-One said he’d consider the offer! Loud-Woman and Kitty were shocked. Then, some girls talked to Soap-Smelling a lot and offered him to stay, too. Kitty was shocked, and Half-Cat was not around to share her feelings! But in the case of Soap-Smelling, she knew what to do. The guy had been complaining about the check by Eyes of Flies more than anyone else. So, at night, Kitty pin-clawed his leg to imitate some insect bites. The next day, Soap-Smelling was complaining about bugs, but the spoilsport Biggest-One stared at Kitty and offered Soap-Smelling a miraculous ointment to keep any bugs at bay. It stank miraculously, and Kitty couldn’t bring herself anywhere near Soap-Smelling. Okaay, Kitty was going to extremes. She found a sheep pad out in the fields, gathered some fleas, and brought them back, itching and biting herself. It made her stop every now and then to scratch, and thus, before she could reach the dorms, she was caught by Biggest-One and got washed! In a bucket! With soap! How dare he! What’s worse, now that she knew how fleas felt, she could not bring herself to try it again. But Soap-Smelling was impressed even with the tale of Kitty’s fleas, aghast and eager to leave no matter where and to bring Half-Cat with him. Where, by the way? At lunch, Loud-Woman was advertising snowmobile caravans to “Pori” where Swedish “icebreaker” would guide ships over sea to Sweden, which was next to Norway and mountains. Loud-Woman was going to the pier every day to check the timetable. Also, she asked Biggest-One to help her with kidnapping later on. She planned to carry Half-Cat (Twig, as she called him), while Biggest-One was supposed to drag Grumpy-Glum, and then Soap-Smelling and Long-Braidy would follow them on their own. Kitty was very glad to see such understanding of her feelings. They just had to wait until their non-immune mages were released and cleared for travel. Meanwhile, Kitty visited them every now and then, trying to veer from as many cats as possible so that no one saw her tail. She couldn’t get past quarantine cats, though. The worst! They only let her see one human at a time, she could go to the other only after a cat-on-duty licked her all over. Kitty would grit her teeth, set back her ears, and overbear it. Her humans better appreciate what she was going through for their sake! Long-Braidy was frisky and chatty, by the way, and Grumpy-Glum was, well, even more grumpy and gloomy than usually. Beside visits to the quarantine, Kitty was going to the pier together with Loud-Woman, checking on Soap-Smelling looking for Half-Cat, trying to find Half-Cat (impossible if he didn’t want to be found), and thinking about how to make stoic Biggest-One hate this place. Should she steal his socks? Put a mouse into his pocket? Pee into his boots? Blame some local cat on all of that? And how to do any of that without meeting (or even being seen by) other cats? With such a tight schedule, she forgot to count days, and one early morning she came to the quarantine only to find the cubicles of her humans empty. The cat-on-duty told her that their holdup time had expired at 5 a.m. and they had left at once. Alright. She had eyes, ears, and a nose, and her stray humans could not go far. They couldn’t leave the fenced island, right? And she went out to the inner gate. The path before it was quite well-trodden, but outside (inside, to be more exact) of the gate, she found two trails. A narrower, longer stride should be Long-Braidy, and deeper-shorter, better seen on the stale snow, Grumpy-Glum. And the traces smelled quite like them. Kitty followed the trail, happy that the two were walking side by side quite closely. What she wasn’t happy about was that they turned towards the houses where grade A cats mingled. No, then the humans (their traces) went to the houses with timber, machines, and such. Behind one shack, the traces stopped facing each other. Not as close as Soap-Smelling and Half-Cat when licking each other, but Long-Braidy was long enough to lean and reach. Kitty rejoiced for a second that her pairing efforts had an effect, but then she saw the trace go further. And now it was strange. Almost like Grumpy-Glum had dragged Long-Braidy. What the meow? Was Long-Braidy ill? Steady, Grumpy-Glum would take care of him, right? But the trail didn’t go back to quarantine or forth to offices or dorms. It went to the farthest barn. Kitty ran over there, but the barn door was closed. She had to climb the roof and crawl through a vent inside. Grumpy-Glum was there. He was laying Long-Braidy into a long wooden crater stuffed with straw, with a braid wound around his head, body covered with a padded coat and wound in wire with pine cones, moss tufts, and dry leaves tied to it. Then he closed the box with a lid and knocked some nails into it along the edges as quietly as possible. Not very quiet it was, but still, Long-Braidy didn’t wake up. Kitty didn’t like it. Neither her tail did, it plummeted right and left to get a better look from behind her. Kitty remembered how long ago her humans had brought Soft-Chatty, wet and reeking of Monsters, un-waking, and then put her into a bag and under stones and burned her. Long-Braidy didn’t smell of Monsters, more like grass, but Kitty’s skin crawled. And she leapt from the roof beam onto Grumpy-Glum and then onto the crater and yelled at him what the pluck he was doing with HER human without her permission. Grumpy-Glum started and mentioned some “perkele”, but then he recognised Kitty, told her to shut up and get out, and then his scary-bird shiny-shadow attacked Kitty, all claws and beak, and eyes. Kitty bristled, her tail lost its spirit and drove her out through a hole in the wall she hadn’t noticed before. How dared he?! After she worked so hard to save his stupid head and to make him friends with everyone! No, she wouldn’t let this fly. And Kitty dashed to report this shit to the chief officer, that is, to Loud-Woman. She ran fast like the noise-hating summer Monster and blazed her natural siren in advance. Loud-Woman sprang up at once, good girl. Biggest-One was slower but took his gun, Half-Cat appeared from nowhere and disappeared ahead of them, and Soap-Smelling dallied as usual, but alright, he’d always catch up. Kitty led the way to the barns, but Grumpy-Glum was gone. Yet he left a distinct trail of a laden sled, and Kitty’s troops caught up with him at the pier, right where Loud-Woman had been going every day. Grumpy-Glum was standing by the booth with timetables and swearing. Kitty bristled with indignation. How dared he be angry when he was at fault? Now she had some swear sounds for him, too! She yelled at him to her heart's content and demanded to open the crater. Biggest-One inquired about it, and Grumpy-Glum deflated, said it didn’t matter now, pointed at a notice on the booth, and waved the crater off. Loud-Woman and Soap-Smelling pried the crater open with their daggers. “Why is it so familiar?” Soap-Smelling mused as he looked inside and found Long-Braidy there. Kitty jumped in to check on Long-Braidy; he was sleeping despite all the ruckus. Loud-Woman was yelling what the Hel was with that kidnapping and murder, and Grumpy-Glum was yelling back that he was precisely preventing a murder and undoing a kidnapping because, first, their mad trip would most certainly end badly for a non-immune kid, and second, it was them who kidnapped the kid while Grumpy-Glum wanted to send him home the same way Long-Braidy had gotten into trouble, by mail under sleeping spell—or at least he wanted to, but now this—he glared at the billboard. Biggest-One was retelling their words all along and asked in the end about “this”. It turned out to be a note that ferries to “Sweden” were suspended until spring because the pack ice was too strong for an icebreaker and too uneven for snowmobiles. Now Loud-Woman was shouting even louder and asking “gods” why the Hel she couldn’t get home; her usual stuff. Kitty got bored and played with the grass and threads on the Long-Braidy, and broke some, and then suddenly Long-Braidy sat up dropping her, shivered, and asked what’s going on, and Kitty commanded everyone to snap out of that nonsense, and Loud-Woman translated her, not exactly though; she ordered them to go to the canteen all together. A good idea; Kitty was already hungry, cold, and tired. Grumpy-Glum tried to sneak away, but Half-Cat glared at him and pushed him forward so that Biggest-One didn’t have to drag him as Loud-Woman had planned. It was a very sad and quiet breakfast, until Loud-Woman glanced at the far wall with a large piece of paper showing lots of lines and some letters. It was a “map” thing; people used them to know where to go. Loud-Woman stared at it for some time, then beamed and jumped from her place to run to that wall. “Hey, hey,” she raised her voice above the buzz of locals and their spoons. “Do you know what it is?” “I believe this region had once been called Lapland”, Biggest-One replied. Other Kitty’s humans were watching silently as they ate. Well, Grumpy-Glum didn’t look, he was busy sulking. And Long-Braidy didn’t look, he was looking sad and scraping his plate with a spoon idly, without eating. “That’s just land,” Loud-Woman corrected her aide. “Walkable. And it links this swamp to Norway.” She dragged her finger over the lines and letters. “Instead of rusting and rotting here, we can walk home and be the first ones to use this way! We’ll go down into legends once again!” “ ‘kay, why not?" Soap-Smelling added through porridge in his mouth. “Sweden is close there, too. Two weeks, maybe?” But Biggest-One frowned and replied that the trip would be much longer and much more dangerous without a cattank, marine support, or radio. Loud-Woman asked him to trust the team but agreed that the road would indeed be longer, but the fame was totally worth it, and winter was harsher up in the north, not the mushy drizzle like in Denmark a year ago, so trolls and most of monsters wouldn’t be a big issue. That’s the spirit! Kitty went to rub at Loud-Woman’s legs to tell her she’s the most best girl. Kitty agreed with the plan. Grumpy-Glum didn’t; nothing new. Half-Cat was looking at Soap-Smelling and Grumpy-Glum in turns. The first told him to join the company, and the second, to stay in Keuruu. Kitty ran over the table to Half-Cat’s lap to remind him whose opinion was ultimate. Of course, he chose to go. Grumpy-Glum flinched. And Long-Braidy looked down into his plate and said he’d go to Norway, fine, if Sigrun promised to enrol him in the military. Grumpy-Glum flinched but didn’t protest and even offered to travel to—he pointed to another place on the map—Kajaani with the next military snowmobile caravan. Hired as extra guards, maybe. Good point, Loud-Woman noted, and dragged the whole company to the den of human officers. With Grumpy-Glum as a mediator. Kitty was once again assured she was absolutely right to assign Loud-Woman as her chief human deputy.