Those who shout abuse at a cat must be prepared for everything, maybe even for the cat putting a spell on them … A modern fairytale with all the typical ingredients: tests of courage, seductions, incantations – and a silly protagonist who turns out to be wise in the end.

This unique picture story from the late great artist F.K. Waechter tells a timeless story in intense, powerful strokes.

F.K. Waechter was one of the most astounding and versatile artists of our times. His award-winning books are beautiful, his cartoons humorous and to the point. Yet with this impressive posthumous find, Waechter once again breaks down all genre boundaries and will thrill readers with his dark and memorable fable of a hellish hound.

»I write and draw for all those who were once five years old, who still remember it and would like to live to ninety-nine.«
F.K. Waechter

A sleepy village in an indefinite time and place – what spectacular things can possibly happen? A group of mourners eat butter-cream cake at a funeral feast, young lads get blind drunk and stagger through the streets… Unremarkable enough, if it were not for this wondrous bird. A buzzard, omnipresent, hovering above the village, fields and treetops. Nothing escapes its sharp eyes, and the villagers are uncannily aware that something even more mysterious is lurking above the crooked roofs. Wit and satire dance lightly through the pages of Waechter's new picture book, and he tells his story in wonderfully simple yet trenchant pictures and short, pithy sentences.

In fairy stories it was thrown against the wall and changed into a prince; in the Middle Ages it was burned as ›unchaste‹ – now it is threatened by extinction. But hardly anyone knows that it is to this animal that we owe two of the most beautiful things in the world: music and love.

The classic, already remodelled in a classical way. A delightful standard work of anti-authorian education. A riotous nostalgic book on the '68 movement.