The Mice of Logham Woods
Angela Moss
Paperback
(CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, Nov. 14, 2016)
The future of the Logham wood mice is under threat. Unless they are soon able to find sufficient supplies of nuts, berries and seeds to ensure their survival through the cold winter months, their future looks bleak. Their leader, Straight Nose, is well aware of the problem, but is strangely unwilling to discuss the matter openly; in fact, he seems to believe that he is the only one to realize that there is a problem at all. In this he is very much mistaken: there is general unease about the situation, but, perhaps due to their tradition of absolute loyalty to their leader, the mice remain silent. Only one of them, Late Again and brother to Straight Nose, feels obliged to persuade the clan to take an active approach to dealing with the problem. This is all the more astonishing as Late Again is considered rather an outsider in the mouse community; his name says it all – he regularly oversleeps -, which is something that self-respecting mice just can’t abide. The reason for him taking the initiative is that he has had a mysterious dream three days running and finds an unexpected ally in the medicine mouse, Hearts Ease, a dedicated and highly respected member of the clan, who has had exactly the same dream for three days as well. The unlikely allies manage to persuade Straight Nose that all the mice should have the chance to debate whether the dream should be acted upon, as, if things were to go wrong, the consequences could be dire. Then an emergency necessitates the cancelling of the planned assembly: Straight Nose’s children, Sharp Ears and his sister Curly, are missing from their beds and nowhere to be found. What follows is a dangerous search in broad daylight for the missing pair, who unfortunately come face to face with the mice’s dreaded enemy called ‘the monster’, and which results in a heartbreaking find for the search party. There follows a meeting with a forthright house mouse with rather uncouth manners and an encounter with giants, which unexpectedly gives rise to the hope that there may be a positive outcome to the clan’s search for the resources they so desperately need.