Cougar of Spirit Lake
by
Linnette Eller
Cougar of Spirit Lake
by Linnette Eller
Edited by
Barb Druesedow
Copyright 2011 Linnette Eller,
All rights reserved.
Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com
ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-0601-5
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
A moment for gratitude and appreciation…..
I would like to thank my friends and family for the encouragement to publish this book. Janeal Eller, my sister, who designed the cover that I dearly love! My great friends Barb and Julie who helped with such kind words and suggestions! Jessica, my daughter, who waited page by page to read what I had written.
I could never have done it without all of you!
CHAPTER ONE
The huge green eyes missed nothing as the mountain lion sat very still. Watching. Silently watching…....
The girl was watching the cat. Whatever he was looking at so intently was beyond her range of vision. Little did she realize the resemblance between them. Yet anyone looking at the two would have seen it immediately. The sleek animal with its golden fur revealing platinum highlights and the beautiful young woman with the strawberry blonde locks made unusually striking by the shimmering white-gold streaks running throughout. Her eyes were a rare tawny green in color, nearly identical to that of the beautiful beast.
Beauty observing, beauty. The girl unaware of the link between herself and the magnificent animal, but the cat knowing…all knowing.
The cat waited ever so patiently. The girl suspended in the mist-filled space between sleep and waking, drifting in a dream, a dream of the cat. In her dream, the animal looking intently at a place she could not see, could not comprehend. He was looking at a time beyond the present, a place whose time had not yet come, but it would, and he would wait patiently. He had waited patiently for years, and he knew that what was to come was soon to be.
Innocently, the girl slumbered in the world of dreams unaware of what the all-knowing cat was watching. Indeed, it was the girl herself, he was watching, but in a different time and a different place. Watching...waiting...and knowing.
Slowly, the girl came fully awake, trying in vain to hold on to the dream. Trying to keep the dream with her this time. She remained motionless in her bed willing the dream to remain, willing herself to remember all that the dream contained. These elusive dreams that were intangible and even mysterious. These dreams of the cat, always of a cat, yet somehow she knew that it was not just any cat, but always the very same cat in all of these dreams.
Jessica had told her parents of the dreams long ago. Her mother had explained that she too, had seen a giant cat, a mountain lion. It was on the morning of Jessica's birth she had seen just such a cat. It was all very strange, but considering the long and difficult labor, Lilly Ferrall had endured bringing her first-born into the world it was probably just a figment of her imagination caused by the sheer exhaustion. At any rate, this is what she had told Jessica. Lilly herself had always said she ‘wondered’, but deep down, she was absolutely convinced she had seen the cat in the room as plainly as she had seen the bed, chair, or lamp. He was sitting patiently, utterly still. Only when Lilly had taken Jessica into her arms for the very first time did she see the cat move. She had looked directly at the cat, deep into those green-gold eyes, and she could swear he smiled at her.
All very ridiculous of course, after all cats did not smile.
She was never, in all the years since that day, able to convince herself that she imagined the entire thing. As Jessica had grown, Lilly had time and again noticed the striking similarity of Jessica's eyes to those of the cat. Not just any cat, not like any drawings she had ever seen of a mountain lion. No.
That cat.
The dreams of the cat had started for Jessica when she was only a toddler. Lilly knew then that in some way there was a link between her daughter and that giant feline. She had discussed it on more than one occasion with her husband, John.
John Ferrall admired his wife greatly and set great store by her ideas and quick mind. Both were well educated having come from wealthy families who believed in educating their children. When Lilly told him about seeing the cat in the bedroom on the morning of Jessica's birth, John did not discount it. As time passed, they talked of it more often because of the dreams their small daughter began having. Still, they couldn't answer what it could mean or why it should have happened. John had told Lilly that many strange things happened in this world for which there were no explanations and this certainly was one of those instances.
They felt it odd that even when she was small Jessica had no fear of the dreams. When she was older, she had tried to describe the feelings that the dreams left with her upon waking. The only word she could find to fit the feelings was protected. The cat made her feel as though he were her protector. It sounded odd even to her when she said it, but the feeling of being safe and protected always lingered with her after waking from one of her dreams.
Although Lilly and John could not understand why there would be a connection between their daughter and the cat, they were relieved that the dreams were not nightmares for her. They had remarked more than once to each other how she reminded them of a golden kitten. Her unique green eyes, so large and ever so slightly slanting at the edges, the masses of tawny golden hair falling in shimmering curls to her waist. Now that she was nearly a grown woman she even walked with the lithe grace of the golden feline. The resemblance came through even in the pet name that had come to them almost automatically. The name they had called her since she was just a baby, and still did call her... Little Cat.
Jessica at the moment did indeed resemble her namesake as she stretched and arched her back luxuriating in the soft warmth of her feather bed. At last fully awake with the last remnants of the dream still echoing softly through her mind.
It was the cat again, always the same cat. Jessica could not have told you how she knew it was the very same cat, and you could never convince her it was not. She knew. She knew without question and without doubt, it was always the very same cat.
How strange it was to dream of this huge cat when in reality she had never seen a mountain lion. When she had wondered if the animal from her dreams was what a mountain lion actually looked like her mother had given her a book she had ordered for her. Jessica had felt a certain breathless anticipation as she opened the book. There, staring out from the page at her was a cat exactly like the one that had always walked silently through her dreams. She thought it so strange that she had been able to visualize so exactly in her dreams an animal she had never seen before in her waking hours. Yet there was no disputing that the drawing on the page was the exact
