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I am fond of the occasional walk through the woods. During the summer, I reside in a little hut not far from the West coast so I can focus on my writing. The smell of warm pine and fresh sea salt is perhaps the most familiar scent to me; it is home. You may have read my other works which were penned in that little wooden shack. It is quite quaint, but very sweet, with just the basic amenities: a mattress, a kettle, a sink, and a desk. It is all I need to write.

One disadvantage of the shack, however, is the lack of air conditioning. California has a certain tendency to get quite hot, and the shack soon becomes a sauna of hot wood and tar. Perhaps some of you may quite fantasise over such a relaxing space—my lizard friends certainly do—but I am not so lucky to be a heat-dweller.

We otters must keep cool; it is just in our nature. The hut is a demonstrable hindrance to this idiosyncrasy, and thus I am forced to compensate.

So yes, I am fond of the occasional walk through the woods, where it may still be several degrees hotter than comfortable, but at least smoked otter is off the menu. Well, my dear reader, it is on one of these pleasant summer walks, the orange sun glowing sweetly over the tall peaks of the deciduous trees, that I tripped up.

How odd. I was not clumsy, nor unobservant. I knew the woods like the back of my paw; the roots of the trees were mere twigs to my ample feet stepping by them. I probably could lead a hoard of blindfolded moles (overkill, I understand) from one side to the other expertly. As I said, it was home.

I turned sharply around on my feet and crouched down to see where the ground was slightly raised. My eyebrows heightened as I dug around in the dirt to find the source. The soil was that podzolic type, where it felt more like sand and looked like plum pudding. I made a mental note to buy plum pudding.

After a furious minute of digging through the twisted roots and greeting the earthworms that came to say hello, I found the culprit. It was unusual in the sense that, actually, it did not make any sense at all.

It was a book. Well, a notepad. The pages were browned and tarnished as little flaps of paper were ripped off and several lines of text were illegible as rips ran through the paragraphs. The back cover had a plastic wrapper over the cardboard to make it look presentable, but the plastic was peeling away revealing the muddy insides. It looked ancient, like a relic long forgotten to the past.

I will not lie and say that I was nonchalant about it. I am a historian, after all. I quite audibly giggled at the sight and clapped my paws in delight. Perhaps this would be the next big discovery. I could be the next Sonic Fox and break headlines left right and centre.

I ask you, my dear reader, the following question I was asking myself at this point. Should I leave for a museum as soon as I could, so that it could be thoroughly investigated and kept safe, stored in records for generations to come? Or should I read through it first to see if I could make out any coherent parts and take the credit for myself?

The second option was evidently the one I decided to follow. I was only a fickle otter, and the premise of mystery intrigued me beyond anything I had ever experienced. I sucked my cheeks in and stood up tall, proud, and flicked open the front cover.

Have you ever read a scientific thesis? If not, I will save you the bother: it is a lot of made-up words and scribblings. As I skimmed the text in the notepad, I was reminded of such documents. It had terrible handwriting, every letter crowded and mismatched, like an assortment of newspaper clippings put together again.

I was disappointed and let out a long sigh. I supposed it was time to hand it in and be responsible. I looked at it sadly once more as the thought of its uselessness flooded my brain. No one would want to store it; that is why it was buried.

I got onto my bicycle and placed the dirty notepad in the basket at the front. It hung with a page hanging in the air in perfect equilibrium, the wind stopping it from falling over. It was as if it was staring at me mockingly. I clamped the book shut and began to ride to the local registry centre.

Once I was outside the building, a greyscale modern thing which sucked the life out of the surroundings, I decided to look at the book once more. I picked it up and opened it to a random page near the middle.

I was glad I did so. It was on this second reading, where the handwriting was slightly more distinguishable, that I realised it was written in English. That's the old language most of the humans used to speak, by the by.

I hopped off my bike and triumphantly jumped into the air with a rather vulgar “yeah!" before cycling back to the cabin and starting work on a long, hard project.

Of course, that is what you are reading now. I have taken the effort to painstakingly translate each and every paragraph from the notebook, written by a scrumpy narcissistic human adult named Tobias Stavrakos. I've also added several of my own annotations for clarification about the matter so that we can all piece together this fantastic piece of history.

If you are morally pretentious then you may be asking what happened to the original book. If it bothers you that much, then you may find it at any time hung up on the wall at the California Institute of Human History. Whilst you're there, make sure you read the big plaque next to it that says “DISCOVERED BY LUTHER THE OTTER" for me.

With that said, thank you for joining me on this journey, my lovely reader. Let us begin with the first entry…