Bastian - Defender of Golden Downs — Wendy Lou Jones

Bastian - Defender of Golden Downs, is the second book in the Teddy and Louis series, continuing the story of Golden Downs by taking the reader into the lives of the ancestors of both Winston and Louis - a small red fox - more than 100 years earlier. From the moment Bastian, a black and red silver fox from Quebec Canada, found the stowaway, Louis Horatio Smyth, in his packing crate aboard the transatlantic freighter La' Bell St. Lawrence, now far out in the ocean, he had no way of knowing what a tangled web he had just walked into. Louis, the son of a respectable physician, Bartholomew Smyth of Golden Downs estate, was anything but responsible. A scheming teenage scamp, he lived by the seat of his pants through one misadventure after another - most of them with the female sex. With his last amorous romp, nearly sending Golden Down woodlands up in flames, Bartholomew sends Louis away to prep school in the hopes of molding him into a responsible gentleman. But Louis had other ideas from the start. Jumping the train, he becomes a stowaway on a ship, he believes, is heading for France - and more amour! Unfortunately, as with all his previous misadventures, this time he had literally 'missed the boat'. Nearly drawn, quartered, and fed to the sharks when they were discovered by Captain Jacque Maurice Du' Boise, Louis and his fox (Bastian) he named 'Skip', found there next destination unbelievably foreboding and hostile. With Bastian's help, they survive against all odds as their trek takes them about as far away from anything Canadian, or English, as either could have ever imagined. Saved from an untimely death on the point of a sword, Bastian leads Louis to their newest benefactor's heart - Harrotta Zabootoo, a tribal princess. But can even this turn of events jolt Louis into a single mature decision and decisive action so desperately needed? Once again, it is Bastian to the rescue, but this time he is not alone. Unbeknownst to the care-free Louis, back on English soil, an assassin is preparing to strike Louis' family on Golden Downs.