Chapter 1

I knew a man once. It was a long time ago. His name was Casper MacDoogle. He used to patronize the same bar I did. Of course he had been patronizing that bar several decades before I came along.

I was a young man in my early twenties, twenty-three to be exact, fresh from the battlefields of World War Two; he was old, gray, and wrinkled. He understood much of my angst for he was a World War One veteran himself. Neither of us was originally from New York, but that is where we found ourselves in those days.

He wasn't famous or rich, but to the people who knew him he affected their lives most profoundly. It wasn't the way he talked; he didn't believe in preaching, although his raspy voice was strangely soothing. It wasn't the way he looked for one might look upon him and look away with disgust, with his myriad colors of patched up clothing and his long gray scraggly beard and unkempt hair, saying what a bum.

With his right boot taped together so it wouldn't fall apart and the many scars across his face he looked like what most people choose to call worthless scum. He wasn't of course. He was just a man who had a less than favorable hand dealt to him and made something from it.

As old Casper used to like to say, "I bluffed my way through it."

But never once did he complain that life was unfair and never once did he let it affect his judgment when it came to making the decisions of everyday life.

To of have heard him telling stories about his life one might have fallen into a state of shock and disbelief. At first I found his stories hard to swallow, although nonetheless entertaining.

It wasn't that the stories couldn't have happened, it was just that I wasn't sure if I would have taken the same paths. But, now that I sit here old, gray and wrinkled myself, looking back upon my life fondly, I see him walking beside me and the parallels are there. His influence was profound and this is his story that is why I do not bother naming myself.

Born into a hard working family who made their living as craftsmen, the MacDoogle's supplied all the local villages with the wooden crafts needed to survive in a harsh climate.

They built doors that could stand up to the strong winds and keep out much of the cold. They built the handles for tools such as hammers, picks, shovels, and hoes that they used to extract what they needed to live from the land. They supplied the necessary furniture such as beds, chairs, stools, tables, storage cabinets and the like. And, from time to time, they even made statues to stand tall and proud to symbolize their way of life of pride and honor.

His life, Casper's that is, was not easy in the Highlands of Scotland and as an only male child in the late eighteen hundreds he was forced to grow up fast. His stories of his childhood in Scotland were amusing, but uneventful. He would sit there on his old familiar stool and get a child-like expression on his old haggard face as he began to tell a story of an eight-year-old boy who got to hang out with the men for the first time without his mum pestering him.

One of the older lads, maybe seventeen, was whooping and a hollering and saying, "I finally got me some."

All the men were patting him on the back saying, "Looks like old Timothy has grown up into a fine young man."

Casper being only eight-years-old didn't know what they were talking about, but he sure liked the attention the older boy was getting so he exuberantly yelled, "I'm gonna get me some too!"

The men burst out laughing. He turned bright red in the fading light of day. Through uncontrollable laughter one of the older folk said, "Earl, looks like your boy Casper is becoming a man faster still." And they laughed again.

However, it wasn't until he hit his teenage years that he truly started to show himself. Not so much of what he had been, but who he was going to be. By the age of fifteen he was nearly six feet tall and a handsome lad. A few years back they welcomed in the twentieth century.

High in the mountains the people chose mates early, more out of necessity than love, but he chose to wait until he found the lady to love like the ones he had heard about in the stories his mum read to him by candlelight during the cold winter days, about princesses falling in love with common boys.

He knew he was meant to be more than he could be in the desolate world of the Highlands of Scotland. His dreams told him so. His dreams showed him magical places and far off lands with strange people and customs; it was there he knew he would find his princess.

It wasn't until several days before his sixteenth birthday that the opportunity of change showed its ugly face. He was coming back from a hunting expedition with his same aged cousin Louie. Louie was smaller than he, maybe five foot eight, but he was stocky. With his shaggy brown hair and big brown eyes he looked like a wolverine and he could fight like one too. It was then, as they were approaching their village, that they noticed the pillars of black smoke coming from the village.