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wanting to earn my keep and said, “I will have supper prepared when you return.” This just got me some soft smiles from the men as they went off to a hard day's work.

Chapter 5 – Growing Up
    That was my life after that. I sometimes forgot they were not my big brothers by blood. They taught me about woodland survival and all the basics a person must know to survive in the harsh realities of the world. But most of all they taught me how to laugh... and to curse like a woodsman.
    They were always doing things to accommodate me that made me feel proud to have them as my brothers. Early on, they came home with a chair, exhausted from felling dozens of oaks. I know it is stupid of me, but having four chairs at the table, instead of three, made me feel as if I truly belonged there and I cried over it. My three bears getting distressed thinking they had done something wrong.
    Soon there were four beds in the cabin, though more often than not I would wake up on the floor, kept warm and safe enveloped in the fur of my brothers. Then one day when I returned from getting supplies in the market in Chernivtsi with Pavel, Vladimir and Andrei surprised me with a proper outhouse back behind the cottage.
    They were always doing little things like that for me. The biggest of which was the root cellar we put in when I was fifteen so that I could raise chickens and goats to have fresh eggs and milk and have a place to hide them on Wolf Moons as my brothers patrolled the area. I think they believed I would feel safer knowing it was there for myself. The silly boys actually thought a cellar was safer than having three ungodly huge bears protecting me from the wolves.
    Over the years, the fatalities on Wolf Moons were rising in the area because my bears didn’t stray far from the cottage or my side, and the village below was suffering because of it. I insisted my brothers teach me to fight and defend myself. I was not a small girl at fifteen, I was taller and stronger than most girls my age. Probably because I had to wrestle three oafs, especially trying to get them to do the chores around the property. It got more difficult when they were in bear form, but I knew their ticklish spots so wound up triumphant in most arguments.
    Little Bear got reprimanded by me a lot, and I had to slap his muzzle from time to time to make him behave. To an outsider, seeing a young woman chastising three unnaturally large Kodiak's would have seemed insane, but to me, they were just my misbehaving brothers who couldn't quite understand that their dirty clothes went in the wicker basket by the door so I could wash them, not on the floor.
    The boys in the village were starting to notice me, I didn't know when it had happened, but it seems that I had grown up and was becoming the woman I am now. I was what the Englishmen in the town called a tomboy. Always roughhousing with the boys like I did my brothers. And it was becoming abundantly clear that I also had the eye for the fairer sex like my brothers.
    Unfortunately, as I developed the boys in town started looking at me differently, and some found out that a girl who was raised by bears was more than adequately up to the task of protecting herself and her honor. My brothers would never interfere as I gave the boys bloody noses. I heard the baker ask them, “Aren't you going to step in and defend her honor?”
    Little Bear would laugh heartily as he responded, “What, and get a bloody nose of my own from our little Kat for interfering?”
    I became good with the blade which the boys had traded for my sixteenth birthday. A silver plated blade said to have belonged to the first female Wolf Hunter, Nicole of Arad. When they taught me all they could, I traded fresh eggs and goat cheese to the smithy, Orrick, who had been a knight for the courts in France, for lessons with my blade.
    On my eighteenth birthday, a Wolf Moon, I stepped out of the cottage to right a wrong that my being there had caused to the village