Day two- Lyn Fountain

My very good friend Teresa told me about Bridge House Publishing, and I particularly liked the idea of the animal anthology. For several weeks I couldn’t think of anything to write. Having just moved out of Norwich and into the Norfolk countryside I was exploring the woods on my doorstep, racking my brains, and suddenly I realised the story was there; all around me. It was early autumn and there’d been no rain for weeks and weeks. Every single dew pond, ditch and stream, around which in the spring I’d seen frogs, toads, grass snakes, deer, foxes and birds gather and drink, had completely dried up. Now all the wildlife seemed to have disappeared, and it worried me terribly how the creatures were managing for water. Swarms of angry buzzing insects had driven walkers from the woods in the summer, and when it was finally safe to go back in, the undisturbed vegetation had run riot. What a wonderful secret place, I thought, for a wild creature to live in peace and security. It might even be home to a wild big cat…



But why would a big cat be roaming in the woods? How had it got there? Would local people be delighted (like me), or would they be scared? I’d seen marksmen in the area carrying rifles, and sometimes the woods are closed for deer culls. It was all too easy to imagine someone hunting ‘my’ big cat. Tomorrow I’ll be publishing an extract from my story, ‘The Last Big Cat’.