Pepper sat blinking up at the angry tom as he hissed at her and put his paw on her head to make her lie on her side in submission. “You will not approach the great Powhatan until I say you’re ready. You have a lot to learn. Can you even hunt?”
“Of course I can.” Pepper told him of the small green grasshopper she’d caught all by herself. She’d also snagged a dragonfly, even though her brother Morton claimed he had already broken its wing.
“Well, you’ll have to be able to hunt mice and rats before the great Chief will take you. He wants a cat more than anything, but who needs a useless kitten?”
Pepper barely heard the insult. Otter planned to give her to this Chief Powhatan? She was not to choose her own person? She had heard of humans taking kittens from their parents and forcing them to live with someone. Pepper just never thought it would happen to her. Cats usually chose their people and became bonded with them for life.
Otter could sense her thoughts. “You’d be lucky to find as fine a human as Wahansunacock, the great Chief of the Powhatan Nation. He has done what no other man has been able to. He has united thirty tribes of Algonquian speakers into one confederacy. As for the Chesapeake who refused to join, he wiped their seed from the earth and they are no more.”
By the end of his lecture, Pepper had curled herself up into a tiny ball of despair. Terror filled her. How would she ever make a bond with such a formidable human?
Otter looked down at her cowering form. “Get up now. These people don’t cower and mewl like infants. You have a lot to learn before you meet the Chief. He is stern, but he likes to laugh, and treats those he loves very well. But he doesn’t deal with babies, human or feline. You’ll be presented to him like all his children, when you’re old enough to fend for yourself and be useful around the village.
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