caroworld

Mia was a small, black cat who was endowed with not nine, but ten lives.

She didn't know this, nor did she know she was an extraordinary cat, but then who knows anything about why one is born one way and another another way?

So Mia went about her life with about as much thought into it as you put into yours.

The night Mia was born her mother, Lilia, paced around the gypsy camp where she'd been staying that winter. The Gypsys were passionate roamers and throughout her life Lilia had met up with the different caravans, begging out her small existence and being alternatively cursed or showered with affection depending on whose tent she visited.

The night we are interested in was still and cold. Lilia paced uncomfortably. The Roma children watched her strange behavior curiously and Sren, a young Roma woman, told them to make a bed for her. The children brought warm scarves and straw and assembled the pile on a dry patch of ground. Sren built a fire nearby and shooed the children away.

But Lilia ignored the warm, dry bed and went into the nearby forrest to have her kittens. As the night drew on the weather grew colder and colder and a thick fog invaded the trees, the same fog which gave the forrest its name -- Hidden Forrest.

When Sren awoke the next morning and found the make-shift bed empty, she cursed Lilia for her idiocy. Lilia and her new kittens could not be found anywhere in the camp, so the worried children began a search party.

They did not find any kittens or any sign of Lilia that day.

That night the camp packed up and began to move south towards Italy.