noticeably shorter we realized Bruno seemed to be getting tenser with each meeting, as he sat in troubled silence. Of course the reason was because bear hunting season was getting closer with an inevitable certainty. Bear hunting season takes place at in Chester at the same time as dear hunting season which is to say mid to late Autumn rather than late summer and early Autumn due to a rather obscure local option bear hunting law that has been on the books since 1853, a suggested reason for this is that this option made sense before the days of refrigeration. And as far as Chester was concerned if was not broken why fix it.

I won't say that Bruno was a magic or invisible bear or anything like that, but he had a stealth about him, he somehow blended in so that he might move relatively freely around Chester, how did it on Wall Street is another story.

On the Friday after the meeting Bruno brought his friend Merlin the Raccoon over to my quarters to meet me. How the made it up the outside covered stairway I will never without crashing through it I will never know, but they did.

For some reason Merlin was able to make deals with animals and give certain powers, nothing that would make them real dangerous, or turn the woods around Chester into combat zone, but stuff that would help then just a little when things got really tough for them, especially during hunting season.

For example, when Bill the possum asked Merlin for an AK47 machine gun, so he could shoot back at the hunters. Merlin though that was pretty funny a woods full of Possums armed wit AK47 in wait for the hunters. He told Bill to get real. But Merlin did give the animals ability to make their lives a little easier since life was so hard for them and as far hunters were concerned the odds were stacked against the animals. For example he made Skunks smell so bad dogs would run from them. Sometimes he would take the form of a bartender, and encourage the hunters to get sooo drunk that they were worthless in the woods the next day, other times he would make compass needles spin randomly.

Merlin was a really big Raccoon with a head as big as a German Shepherd . Merlin did not like humans very much and as we talked he would sort of loom up and fiercely hiss at me, then he would sort nervously apologize and tell me it was not my fault I was born human.