The whole group had returned from the Ice Cave, and the jars and boxes were secured in the village storehouse.
Now, the box marked ‘IMMEDIATE’ was sitting in the middle of Isis’s cabin.
“I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here,” Isis said in mock seriousness, addressing the cats in the room.
“Well,” Piper said, “either we’re all suspects in a murder mystery, or we’re here to see what’s in this two-hundred-year-old box.”
“It does involve a cat wielding an ax,” Isis replied with a grin. “Cisco, honey, would you like to break the seal on the box?”
“So, I’m the prime suspect?” Cisco said, stepping forward with his copper ax. “Okay, we all know how I opened the box from the Hidden Village. Everyone stand back and let me at it.”
Using a mallet to force the blade of his ax into the seam of the box, Cisco worked his way all the way around.
“Jax, grab that end,” Piper said, as she got a good grip on her end of the lid. “Let’s lift it together.”
With some wiggling and a final jerk, the lid came free.
The light from the open doorway lit the interior of the box.
“Oh, look,” Chantel said, leaning forward to look inside, “a box full of boxes.”
“These cats were certainly organized,” Benji said, picking up the first box. “If this was on top, it must be what they wanted us to look at first.”
Opening the box, he showed it to Chantel. “It’s full of papers. That’s your department.”
“Let me have a look,” she said, holding up a sheet in each hand.
“I’m not sure,” she said, handing them to Jax and Piper. “What do you think?”
“These have to be maps,” Jax said, rotating the sheet he held.
“They look like small sections of a larger map,” Piper said, taking Jax’s sheet and holding it next to the one she was holding. “See how these lines match up.”
“Let’s pull out some more and see if we can find anything that looks familiar.”
“Okay,” Isis said, “We know these cats were intelligent, logical, and organized. It seems to me that the map on the top sheet would be centered on this valley. If they all connect, we may have a map of the whole territory.”
“That’s good,” Cisco said, “but why was it so important to give us a map of the territory?”
“It must be to show us something important that we wouldn’t already know,” Isis said.
“Let’s get systematic about this,” Chantel said. “First of all, is that first sheet actually a map of this valley?”
Piper and Jax studied the sheet and finally started identifying features that matched areas in the valley.
“Yep, this is a map of our valley,” Piper concluded. “Now we have a place to start.”
They cleared an area in the center of the room and started laying out connecting map sections.
“Okay,” Benji said, pointing to places on the map. “If this is our valley, then that would put our village right about here, next to the main stream. The cliffs are here, and the Old Tribes village was right here.”
“So, this heavy line is the main trail out of the valley,” Jax said, tracing the line from one sheet to another. “And that leads us to Golden Oaks, and I’ll bet if we add more sheets we’ll end up at Falling Waters.”
They soon had enough of the map put together that they had identified Falling Waters, Sunny Meadows, Fiery Mountain, and even the Teacher’s village.
“Okay, before we get too carried away,” Chantel said, “let’s examine what we have here.” She gestured to what they had laid out so far. “Let’s see what’s on the map that we don’t know about.”
“Look at these letters in the corners of each sheet. It looks like they tell which sheets fit together. There are more letters that seem to refer to something else, and they’re different on each sheet. I’ll write down each combination and see if they show up anywhere else.”
“Let’s give these a closer look,” Jax said, studying the map of their valley.
“See here, up by the cliffs, there’s one of those thin lines heading off to the north,” he said. “I’ll bet that’s the Hidden Village where it ends. And look at the edge of that area. There’s a small blue dot. That might be a spring. They used the same blue color when they drew in the main stream flowing through the valley.”
“Okay, so thick lines are main trails, thin lines are small or hidden trails, and blue means water,” Piper said, leaning over his shoulder studying the map.
“See here, those jagged lines on the south side of the valley must be the mountains, and look at those thin lines running up from the valley floor, nearly to the mountains,” she said with a satisfied smile. “It looks like they end right about where we found the History Tree and the Ice Cave. There’s even a blue dot at the Ice Cave.”
“It sure would have been handy to have this map when we were searching for those sites,” Benji said, unconsciously rubbing his knee. “Would have been less painful too.”
“It’s one of those circle things,” Cisco said. “We couldn’t use the map to find the Ice Cave because we didn’t have the map until we found the Ice Cave.”
“There’s bound to be things on the other maps that we don’t know about, that could be helpful,” Isis said. “Or at least interesting. Let’s look at the rest.”
Studying the maps all the way up to the Fiery Village, they saw that the main trails were basically the same as they are now, but there were many of the thin lines that they didn’t know about. Then, as they were tracing the main trail from the Sunny Meadows Village, headed toward Fiery Village, four cats all pointed at once.
“That line leaving the main trail has to be that shortcut that we’ve been taking,” Cisco declared, with Jax, Piper, and Benji all agreeing.
Carefully following the thin line, “and that’s the spot where we found the copper nuggets,” Cisco said.
“And my gold dust,” Piper added.
Jax started to say something, but Piper stopped him. “And no, I still don’t know what I’m going to use it for.”
“I just have a feeling,” she said.
“So, that means the thin lines on the other maps are hidden shortcuts or maybe hidden trails to unknown sites,” Cisco stated.
“We’ve got a lot of exploring to do,” Piper said, giving Jax a nudge.
“If those are shortcuts, that will cut days off the travel time between villages,” Isis said.
“I can picture, during a crisis, you could set up a relay of runners to cover long distances very quickly using those shortcuts.”
“There’s a lot of details in these maps,” Chantel said. “I think we should list them all and try to account for each one.”
“Also, if we’re going to go off exploring,” Jax said, “we’re going to need at least rudimentary copies of these maps to take with us.”
“If there is a group out there who means us harm,” Isis said, “I’d hate for them to get a hold of one of those copies.”
“We could use regular paint to show the well-known features and use our blue light-visible paints for the features we want to keep hidden.”
“Let me know which areas you want to explore first,” Chantel said to Jax and Piper. “And my group will make you copies of the maps you’ll need.”
“Alright,” Isis said, “I can see we could spend days and days going through the contents of this box and getting nothing else done. I suggest that Cisco and I catalog the contents of the box, and then we can have another meeting.”
“You’ve got your work cut out for you,” Jax said, “and while you’re doing that, Piper and I will start exploring to do as soon as Chantel can get us some copies of those maps.”
“I’ll get my ladies on copying the maps you need,” Chantel said. “With all of them working on it, it won’t take too long.”
“And Isis and Cisco, thanks for taking on the detail work. Let me know if I can be of any help.”