1 Summer's Last Day

The final days of summer brought one last hurrah of the heat that season brought and so, at Quebec Castle in Oshawa, Ontario, Captain Kull Smith had granted his students the day off from their schoolwork. Under Captain Smith's ownership Quebec Castle had become both museum of Egyptology and boarding school in addition to residence and so his students, twenty boys and twenty girls who were all ten years of age or close to, found themselves whatever struck their fancy. Ian, the son of Captain Smith's brother who was one of the students, was helping the gardener Mr. Robert Cook, for Ian loved gardening as much as he loved painting, yet even then, Ian was alone for all the other students were wearing had decided to swim in what was dubbed "Lake Quebec."

Captain Smith owned, among other animals, a pair of year-old caracals. A female Asiatic by appellation of Roxana and a male Northern, meaning he was from Northern Africa, named Alexander.

As a caracal, Alexander was a medium-sized cat with a robust build, long legs, a short face, long, black, tufted ears and long canine teeth. His coat was uniformly reddish-tan, with the ventral parts being lighter with small reddish markings and as a male, the larger of the two, he was twenty inches tall at the shoulder, forty-three inches in head and body length, and had a bushy tail of thirteen inches.

Following Hippolyta, his master's six-year-old daughter, as she picked flowers down by the river that flowed out of the lake, Alexander paused as the sixth-sense of the four-legged ones alerted him to the presence of another feline and it was not Roxana. It was the Canada lynx Miltiades, who was responsible for the death of the Southern caracal Darius, who had come before Alexander and Roxana.

It did not take Alexander long to notice Miltiades. The yellowish-brown feline had emerged from the underbrush nearest their side of the river and Alexander knew that Miltiades must have either swam over or found a crossing point, otherwise he would not be prowling on the side of the river that the country house was on.

As a Canada lynx, Miltiades was a somewhat larger cat than a caracal, still medium-sized yet he was two inches taller than a male a caracal like Alexander at the shoulders, yet in head-and-body length was shorter by an inch. His fur was long and dense, his triangular ears black and tufted and his paws broad and snowshoe-like. As for his limbs, the hindlimbs were longer than the forelimbs, resulting in a back that sloped downwards to the front. Over his left eye was a scar, left by Darius. The Canada Lynx may have given the Southern Caracal fatal wounds, but Darius had left his mark upon his adversary.

It had been Hippolyta whom Miltiades had seen first, intending to attack her. For what? For its own sake. Yet upon seeing Alexander, the Usurper Feline approached, growling at the caracal. The Pretender to the Throne had defeated the Emperor, he would not tolerate the presence of this new arrival, this Prince, this upstart. Miltiades might have been able to tolerate a female cat, even one of another species, but he could not tolerate the presence of another male, not even one of another species.

Narrowing his eyes and flattening his ears against his skull, Alexander stared down the Usurper, returning the growl. If Miltiades had not been a member of a completely different genus, Lynx opposed to Caracal, he would have been a perfect mirror for his eyes were narrowed and his ears flattened as well. When Hippolyta turned to the two, she turned to see Northern Caracal and Canadian Lynx come to blows. It was at that point the little girl went running to get hope. The wolfdog Cnut, her father with his Yumi, anything to help Alexander against Miltiades!