When cats fall, they instinctively twist their bodies to land on their feet. Francesca wasn’t a cat; she was a frog. Francesca landed on the ground back-first with a thud.

Freddie followed a moment later, landing on his feet, but in a prickly bush – the kind where landing on your feet doesn’t help anything.

“Ughhh,” Francesca moaned.

“Owww!” she heard Freddie call from inside the prickly bush.

“Are you kidding me?!” she heard Roger the Raccoon say quietly from the branch of a maple tree a short distance away.

Montgomery the Moose had just attempted to follow Tommy, Jerry, and Montgomery the Mouse into a tall clump of grass by running headlong at it with his eyes closed. It was obviously ridiculous – he was a moose, after all, so Francesca was sure she would look over and see him in a heap on the ground, making his own moaning noises. But when she got up and hopped closer where she could get a better view, he was nowhere to be seen, and it was eerily quiet. Continue reading “Chapter Twenty-Nine: Whatever Happened to the Frogs?” →

The problem with an Unpredictable Horse was that, well, he was unpredictable. He always had been.

Of course, his name was not really Unpredictable Horse. His name was Ringo.

He grew up on a farm in Colorado in the late 1990s, along with two dozen other horses. While others would follow the humans around, and respond to calls and training, Ringo would look off into the vast skies to stare at the rock formations and mountains in the distance, and use his hooves to draw pictures of what he saw in the dirt.

When no humans were around, he would sometimes climb trees. It was hard to do at first – he was a horse after all. But even as a foal he was the most goat-like horse you could imagine, and just like a goat, he could climb. Continue reading “Prelude: The Origin of Ringo, the Unpredictable Horse, pt. I” →

Roger the Raccoon was hungry and thirsty. Since arriving in this land, all she could think about was finding her friends, but now her tummy was rumbling. She needed food.

The bushes weren’t a kind she recognized, and they were empty of fruit. She couldn’t find any insects either. But up ahead she saw some trees. Surely she’d find something there.

She climbed up one particularly odd tree – it had a tall bare trunk which suddenly bulged out at the top like it had exploded. There were giant leaf-like branches with dozens of long, thin leaves coming off each one. And below the leaves, tucked into the tree’s bulge like a nest of some kind, were enormous green seeds of some kind – bigger than any seeds she’d ever seen. Continue reading “Chapter Twenty-Three: The Coconut” →

Dear reader, magic is all around us. From the soft glow of a summer sunset through the leaves of a silhouetted maple tree to the fluttering of excitement in your chest when you feel truly known and understood by another person, magic is everywhere. Take a moment to look around you now – I’ll wait. Find some magic. It’s there.

The stories you are about to read are tales of magic. Magic not of wizards and wands, but the kind of magic that comes in moments of bravery, or silliness, or laughter. The kind of magic that comes in moments of adventure with true friends. Friends with their own stories and histories, friends that look and act very different from each other. Some large, some small. Some powerful, some not. Some joyful, some lonely. And all living in a world of magic and wonder. And I wonder, dear reader, as you meet the many characters that are to come, I wonder where you will see yourself in these stories? Who will remind you of yourself? I wonder if you were in these stories, what decisions would you make? And I wonder, if you were an adolescent male moose with enormous antlers, what would you do if your antlers got caught between some trees?

I ask this, because deep in the woods of Maine, Montgomery the Moose was stuck. Continue reading “Chapter One: Moose Meets Mouse” →