Cinderpaw narrowed her eyes to peer through the branches. “How do you know it’s not a squirrel hole?”
“Smell!” Fireheart told her.
Cinderpaw sniffed loudly but shook her head, her eyes curious as she looked up at Fireheart.
“I’ll show you what squirrels smell like another time,” Fireheart meowed. “You won’t smell any around here. No squirrel would dare make its nest so near an owl hole. Look at the ground; what do you see?”
Cinderpaw looked down, puzzled. “Leaves?”
“Try burrowing under the leaves.”
The forest floor was carpeted with brown oak leaves, crisp with frost. Cinderpaw began snuffling among them and then shoved her nose in right up to her ears. When she sat up there was something the size and shape of a pinecone in her mouth. “Yuck, smells like crowfood!” she spat. Fireheart purred with amusement.
“You knew it was there, didn’t you?”
“Bluestar played the same trick on me when I was an apprentice. You’ll never forget the stench.”
“What is it?”
“An owl pod,” Fireheart explained. He remembered what Bluestar had told him. “Owls eat the same prey as us, but they can’t digest the bones and fur, so their bellies roll the leftovers into pods and they spit them out. If you find one of those under a tree, it means you’ve found an owl.”
“Why would you want to find an owl?” squeaked Cinderpaw in alarm. Fireheart’s whiskers twitched as he looked into her wide eyes, as blue as her mother’s. Frostfur must have told her the elders’ tale of how owls carried off young kits who strayed from their mother’s side.
“Owls get a better view of the forest than we do. On windy nights, when scents are hard to follow, you can look out for owls and follow where they hunt.” Cinderpaw’s eyes were still wide, but the fear had left them, and she nodded. She does listen sometimes! Fireheart thought with relief.
“Where next?” mewed Cinderpaw.
“The Great Sycamore,” Fireheart decided. They traveled through the woods as the sun rose into the pale blue sky, crossing a Twoleg path and another tiny stream. Eventually they arrived at the sycamore tree.
“It’s huge!” Cinderpaw gasped.
“Smallear says he climbed to the top branch when he was an apprentice,” Fireheart meowed.
“No way!” mewed Cinderpaw.
“Mind you, when Smallear was an apprentice, this tree was probably only a sapling!” Fireheart joked. He was still gazing up when a rustling sound behind him told him Cinderpaw had dashed off again. He sighed and chased after her through the bracken. His nose detected a familiar scent that made him nervous. Cinderpaw was heading toward Snakerocks.
Adders! Fireheart picked up his pace.
He emerged from the trees and looked around anxiously. Cinderpaw was standing on a boulder at the bottom of the steep, rocky slope. “Come on; I’ll race you to the top!” she mewed.
Fireheart froze, horror-struck, as she crouched, ready to spring onto the next boulder. “Cinderpaw! Get down from there!” he yowled.
He held his breath as Cinderpaw turned and scrambled down again. She stood trembling, her fur on end, as Fireheart rushed over to her. “This place is called Snakerocks,” he puffed.
Cinderpaw looked up at him, her eyes huge. “Snakerocks?”
“Adders live up there. A bite from one of those would kill a cat as small as you!” Fireheart gave Cinderpaw a quick lick on top of her head. “Come on. Let’s have a look at the Thunderpath.”
Cinderpaw stopped shaking at once. “The Thunderpath?”
“Yep,” meowed Fireheart. “Follow me!” He led Cinderpaw through the ferns, along a trail that skirted Snakerocks and took them to the part of the forest where the Thunderpath cut through like a hard, gray river of stone.
Fireheart kept one eye on Cinderpaw as they peered out from the edge of the forest. He could see from her twitching tail that Cinderpaw was desperate to creep forward and sniff the Thunderpath ahead of them. A familiar roar was beginning to ruffle his ear fur, and he could feel the ground trembling beneath his paws. “Stay where you are!” he warned. “There’s a monster coming.”
Cinderpaw opened her mouth a little. “Yuck!” she mewed, screwing up her nose and flattening her ears. The rumbling noise was coming closer, and a shape appeared on the horizon. “Is that a monster?” she mewed. Fireheart nodded.
Cinderpaw unsheathed her claws to grip the earth as the monster roared closer. She shut her eyes tight as it charged past, stirring the air around them into a storm of wind and thunder. She kept her eyes shut until the noise had faded into the distance.
Fireheart shook his head to clear his scent glands. “Sniff the air,” he meowed. “Can you smell anything apart from the Thunderpath stench?” He waited while Cinderpaw lifted her head and took several deep breaths.
After a few moments she mewed, “I remember that scent from when Brokenstar attacked our camp. And it was on the kits he took, when you brought them home. It’s ShadowClan! Is that their territory, beyond the Thunderpath?”
“Yes,” Fireheart answered, feeling his fur tingle at the thought of being so close to hostile Clan territory. “We’d better get out of here.”
He decided to take Cinderpaw the long way home past Twolegplace, so she could see Tallpines and the Treecut place.
As they padded beneath the thin pine trees, the scents of Twolegplace made Fireheart uneasy, even though he’d lived in a place not far from there as a kit. “Stay alert,” he warned Cinderpaw as she crept along behind him. “Twolegs sometimes walk here with dogs.”
The two cats crouched under the trees to look at the fences that bordered the Twoleg territory. The crisp air carried a scent to Fireheart’s nose that stirred an odd feeling of warmth inside him, although he didn’t know why.
“Look!” Cinderpaw pointed with her nose at a she-cat padding across the forest floor. The light brown tabby had a distinctive white chest and white front paws. Her belly was swollen, heavy with unborn kits.
“Kittypet!” sneered Cinderpaw, her fur fluffed out. “Let’s chase her out!”
Fireheart expected to feel the familiar rush of aggression at the sight of a stranger on ThunderClan territory, but his hackles stayed flat. For some reason he couldn’t understand, he knew this cat wasn’t a threat. Before Cinderpaw could attack, Fireheart deliberately brushed against a stalk of crunchy bracken.
The she-cat looked up, disturbed by the crackling noise. Her eyes widened with alarm; then she whipped around and set off at a lumbering pace, out of the trees. Within moments she was heaving herself over one of the Twoleg fences.
“Rats!” complained Cinderpaw. “I wanted to chase her! I bet Brackenpaw will have chased hundreds of things today.”
“Yeah, but he probably didn’t nearly get bitten by an adder,” replied Fireheart, twitching his tail at her. “Now come on; I’m getting hungry.”
Cinderpaw followed him through Tallpines, grumbling about the pine needles pricking her paws. Fireheart warned her to keep quiet, since there was no undergrowth here to hide in and he felt every Clan cat’s discomfort at being in the open. They followed one of the stinking tracks gouged out by the Treecut monster and stopped at the edge of the Treecut place. It was silent, as Fireheart knew it would be until next greenleaf. Until then, only the track marks—deep and wide and frozen into the soil—would remind ThunderClan of the monster that lived in their forest.
By the time they arrived back at camp, Fireheart was exhausted; his muscles were still weary from the long journey with WindClan. Cinderpaw looked tired too. She stifled a yawn and padded away to find Brackenpaw.
Fireheart spotted Graystripe beckoning to him from beside the nettle clump.
“Here, I’ve got you some fresh-kill,” Graystripe meowed. He hooked a dead mouse with his claw and flung it toward Fireheart.