The first thing Abigail noticed about being outside was that it was wet. Very wet. She’d often seen the rain on the shop window. The water used to slide down the glass and over the pavement, but she hadn’t realised how cold it would feel on her fur! Shivering she shrank up against the bricks under the window. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Abigail started to think about life outside the shop a lot.  At night she sat on the shelf at the side of the window, behind the big box of dinosaurs, looking out onto the streetand watching the cars drive by with their bright yellow headlights.  Sometimes people, big and small, walked by.  But she never saw any bears. Not one.

Abigail always knew that something was different about her. She felt it from the pink pads of her paws, right through to the curls of blonde fur on her ears. She hadn’t always felt like this. In fact she couldn’t remember feeling much at all but then in a hazy, strange way, she became aware of a tingling in her paws, a twitching of her nose.