Noir is an intelligent black cat with amber eyes who lives in a warm, watercolor-like world. His favorite spot is the top of an old bookshelf in his owner's study, which serves as his private 'castle.' One afternoon, Noir's owner discovers a mysterious golden bookmark—a magical item that causes the story within a book to slightly overflow into reality. When a sudden wind carries the bookmark out the window, Noir embarks on his first adventure outside the house. Following clues through the town,
Noir the Cat and the Vanished Bookmark - Episode 12: Stella
The 1860s saw the United States consumed by a violent civil war, with the nation divided between North and South. The battlefields and military camps of that era—where soldiers' rations of hardtack and salted meat, along with fodder for horses, were stored in vast quantities—became breeding grounds for vermin on a staggering scale.
Moreover, among the troops, cats and dogs kept in the camps were cherished with surprising depth as "mascots"—symbols of good fortune—providing solace against the loneliness of the trenches and the ever-present fear of death. This is the record of one black cat's long journey alongside a Union infantry regiment.
*"Jet-Black Smoke and an Amber Star (Stella)"*
Samuel, a young Union soldier who had enlisted from a rural village in Ohio, first encountered the cat at a muddy frontline camp in Virginia.
The cat possessed a striking coat of jet-black short fur, the kind that could hide in the ashes of the campfire itself. With a lean, muscular frame and short fur that showed little dirt, she seemed tailored to survive the harshness of war itself. But what truly captured the soldiers' attention were the large eyes that gleamed brilliantly in the center of her face. When bathed in the slanting light of dusk falling across the battlefield, those eyes shone with the color of the finest amber, glowing mysteriously beyond the smoke of battle.
The soldiers named her **"Stella"**—the star—and formally welcomed her as the mascot of the 23rd Ohio Infantry Regiment.
Stella's work was brutal. She prowled the supply depot that sustained hundreds of soldiers' lives, methodically eliminating the rats that gnawed through leather sacks. For the soldiers of that era, having provisions fouled by vermin was not merely a matter of starvation; it meant the very real threat of deadly contagion—epidemic typhus and worse. Each morning when Stella laid out the rats she had killed before the tent, Samuel and the others would praise her: "Well done, Captain, our little captain!" and share with her their precious canned beef.
Yet Stella's true value lay in something that dwelled in those amber eyes: an uncanny gift of premonition.
September 1862. It was the night before what would come to be known in history as the Battle of Antietam—the bloodiest single day ever recorded.
Deep in the fog of Maryland, both armies fell silent as they prepared for the dawn assault. Samuel and his comrades, gripped by fear, had not slept a wink, clutching their rifles as they huddled in the trenches.
It was then that Stella, who had been curled in Samuel's lap, suddenly jolted to her feet.
With her short black fur standing on end to its limit and her tail swollen thick, Stella fixed her gaze on the eastern sky, still shrouded in fog where nothing was visible. Her amber eyes, whether from fear or excitement, were opened to their limits, flickering with an eerie light.
"Hey, Samuel—something's wrong with the cat," a senior soldier whispered.
The human ear heard nothing. But Stella had already perceived it—the subtle vibrations in the air from miles away, where Confederate artillerymen were lighting the fuses of their cannon. Her sensitive whiskers and paw pads had captured the tremor that shook the very atmosphere. Stella bit and pulled frantically at Samuel's clothing, then bolted toward the deeper shelter of an underground bunker.
"She's not crazy—enemy fire! Take cover!!"
Samuel shouted, and his comrades pressed their heads down into the mud—mere seconds before—
BOOOOOM!!!
With a tremendous roar that shook the earth itself, a fierce Confederate artillery shell scored a direct hit on the trench where they had just been. As explosions and earth rained down like a tempest, Samuel and his companions, positioned in the shelter Stella had indicated, miraculously escaped with only minor injuries.
"That amber gaze... it saved all our lives," Samuel whispered, cradling his head against the ringing in his ears. He held Stella, trembling slightly against his chest, tightly, so very tightly.
The fierce war raged for years, and Stella remained always at the side of the 23rd Ohio Regiment. With each battle she survived, her short black fur became streaked with soot, and small scars from honorable wounds marked her ears. Yet that amber gleam in her eyes never once dimmed.
Finally, in 1865, the long war came to an end.
The regiment's commanding officer—Rutherford B. Hayes, who would later become the 19th President of the United States—had taken a particular liking to Stella. As Samuel prepared to muster out, Hayes told him:
"Samuel, please take this faithful comrade back to your homeland. She has earned the right to smell the grass of a peaceful farm, not the acrid smoke of gunpowder."
Samuel placed Stella in a basket and returned to his family farm in Ohio.
There was no thunder of cannon, no hunger, no mud-soaked trenches. Only vast cornfields and verdant prairie stretching endlessly. Stella soon took a liking to the newly built wooden porch.
The black cat who had once shaken battlefields now basked in the dappled afternoon sunlight of peaceful America. Chasing mice through the grass, she appeared to be nothing more than an innocent house cat.
But at dusk, when the horizon burned crimson.
Stella would take her place on the porch's finest spot and gaze steadily toward the western sky. Her short black fur melted quietly into the darkness of the peaceful countryside night, and there, within her face, those amber eyes—the eyes that had once saved so many soldiers and witnessed tumultuous history—continued to shine more deeply and tenderly than any star in the night sky.
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