Page 33 of The Wisteria Tree Cottage

‘I will tell her, I promise, but it may take me a few days to tell her in the right way. Will you promise not to say anything to her until I do? I think this kind of thing is better coming from me than you.’

Star clearly thought about this for a moment then drew a cross over her heart. ‘I promise.’

She spotted the other feeding station and ran on through the trees as if this big heavy conversation hadn’t just happened.

‘Look, this plate is empty too,’ Star said, excitedly, running towards it, but Bear suddenly caught her arm and held her back.

‘Hang on, there’s a paw print on the ground,’ he said, pointing at the perfect print in the mud immediately in front of the plate.

‘There is!’ she gasped, crouching down to look at it. ‘What animal could it be?’

‘Well, it’s fairly big so I’m guessing a badger,’ Bear said, taking his phone out of his pocket and looking up various paw prints. ‘No, actually the badger print is more hand-like with the narrower toe pads and much wider overall, see it’s very different to this.’

Star looked at his phone and the paw print and nodded.

‘But the fox print is much smaller than this, the pads are smaller and the surface area of the print is much smaller.’

‘What else could it be?’ Star said.

Bear thought for a moment about all the possible animals it could be without saying out loud what he was thinking, which was that this particular paw print looked like it belonged to a very large dog… or a wolf. He scanned through various UK animal prints on his phone, almost everything else besides a fox and a badger had much smaller prints. Suddenly he had an idea.

‘It could be an otter,’ Bear said. ‘We have them in Bosherston Lakes, which isn’t far from here. I’ve never seen an otter in the woods but that’s not to say they haven’t wandered a bit further afield from their usual stomping ground.’

He felt like he was now clutching at straws. The otters at Bosherston liked lakes and rivers, he couldn’t imagine they would suddenly decide to swim in the sea instead, that felt like a very different habitat than what they were used to. And then what, one day, as they were floating past one of the beaches they decided to go for a wander in the woods? It was getting more and more unrealistic the longer he thought about it.

He found an otter print on his phone and held it up next to the paw print on the ground. ‘What do you think?’ Bear said, hopefully, but even he could see the prints were markedly different.

Star screwed up her little face. ‘That’s not an otter print.’

‘No, I don’t suppose it is.’

They were silent for a moment as they stared at it.

‘Could it be a wolf print?’ Star asked, reverentially, as if asking if it was a unicorn’s.

He didn’t want to dampen her enthusiasm but he refused to believe there was an actual wolf wandering around the woods.

‘Maybe it was just a pet dog owned by one of our guests,’ Bear said, because that was much more likely.

Star let out a tiny sigh of disappointment. ‘You’re probably right but if the thing that has eaten all our food turns out to be a pet dog, I won’t be happy.’

‘No, I’m sure that’s not the case. But there’s only one way to find out, we set up the webcams and see what we capture. I’m hoping they arrive today but if not they’ll definitely be here tomorrow.’ He noticed she still looked a little bit sad that the paw print wasn’t a wolf’s. ‘Listen, if the wolf is out here, we’ll capture him on the camera. We’ll put food out again to attract him tonight and that way he’ll definitely be back when we set up the webcams tonight or tomorrow and we’ll see him if he comes.’

Star nodded, the smile back on her face, and he vowed to himself that when the camera invariably picked up foxes, badgers, pet dogs and no wolves, he would find the nearest zoo or wildlife park with wolves and take Star to see them.

CHAPTERTWENTY

‘So tell me all about your date last night,’ Indigo said as she walked into the office and sat down.

Meadow smiled. Bear was still checking out all the food stations with Star so she was free to talk.

‘My date was a complete disaster, he turned up with his mum and she was awful. I got out of there as quick as I could.’

‘Hang on, this morning you said it was utterly lovely.’

‘The utterly lovely part was after I had escaped out of the bathroom window. Bear took me on a date to show me what my first date should have been like. We went to a restaurant, we held hands, we talked non-stop all night and at the end of our meal he even danced with me. It couldn’t have been more perfect.’

‘Aww. Bear is just so lovely, isn’t he?’ Indigo said.

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