Prelude

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B.  I blinked my eyes in surprise. B. The first human letter to unravel  itself to me. B. I tried to read the next letter in the word. I cocked  my huge, brown furred head. The next letter reminded me of my turquoise  eyes or the round grey tunnel I had used, on my last distance hunt, to  escape a gang of wild butt sniffers. O. O is the next letter! I  concentrated on the last. Images of tree branches forking in two  directions sprang into my mind. I squinted in the fading daylight as my  eyes adjusted to the change. Y…Y…Y.

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I  sat on my haunches. I glanced from the picture on the page and tried to  correlate the image to the three letters. B…O…Y. An old story floated  into my memory. Miah, the Elder of my mother’s den, had told me a tale  once, well, more times than that actually, about the humans who had once  inhabited this vast frozen waste.

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“The  planet was infested by them,” he had croaked. “Ugly, hairless creatures  with no respect for us, butt sniffers, scurriers, or any living  creature.” He scratched his ear. A sure sign he was annoyed. “They  didn’t even respect each other. Always stealing, killing, digging up the  land with huge metal monsters and covering it with sprawling solid  rocks.

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Their offspring, the girls and boys, weren’t any better.”

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B.O.Y. Boy. A small male human. Child. Kitten.

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Kitten! A human male kitten!

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Excited, I twitched my bushy tail. Now, I needed to figure out the next word.