The Burning Horizon

by Erin Hunter

  Ashia should be here, Lusa thought woozily. And Yogi and King . . . Where are they all? And is that fruit I smell?

  Her senses were drifting away when she felt flat-face paws pushing at her, and she realized that they were rolling her onto a flat, shiny pelt. A moment later she felt herself being dragged over the bumpy ground. As she lurched to one side, she let out a groan and felt a flat-face paw, warm and hairless, touching the side of her face. The female flat-face made a sound that Lusa guessed was meant to be soothing.

  This is all wrong, Lusa thought. I should be running away, finding the others. . . .

  But her head hurt so much, and she didn’t even have the strength to raise a paw. Everything around her was blurred, and with a long sigh Lusa let herself slip into the waiting shadows. As she drifted into sleep, she heard a bear roar at the very edge of her hearing. She tried to stir, but the darkness tugged at her limbs and dragged her down. . . .

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Toklo

  Rock-hard paws slammed into Toklo on all sides. Vines clung to his legs, and the air throbbed with the screeches of mules and the yells of the flat-face with the firestick. In the chaos he had lost sight of the other bears.

  Enough!

  Toklo braced himself, standing solidly on all four paws. Drawing air into his lungs, he let out a massive bellow.

  The mules scattered, panic-stricken, scrabbling and screeching as they tried to get away from him. He spotted Yakone through the shifting mass of bodies; the white bear was untangling a vine that was wrapped around Kallik’s legs. There was no sign of Lusa, but Toklo guessed that she must be hidden somewhere among the mules. “This way!” he roared.

  Toklo saw Kallik break away, but Yakone was blocked by a huge black mule. Teeth snapping, eyes rolling, it lashed out at him with sharp paws. Yakone tried to dodge around it, but it charged at him and he tripped over a trailing vine. The mule’s flailing hooves kicked him hard in the side.

  Realizing that Yakone wasn’t following her, Kallik veered back, while Toklo halted and roared again with all his strength. The black mule by Yakone panicked even more, sidestepping so that Yakone could scramble to his paws and flee.

  With both white bears now hard on his paws, Toklo charged into the bushes at the far side of the trail. Well, that was a disaster, he thought sourly.

  Hearing the others crashing through the undergrowth behind him, he plunged deeper into the bushes, the shouts of the flat-faces and whinnies of the mules fading behind him as he forced his way through. Toklo’s ears were ringing, he felt battered, and every hair on his pelt was on end. He halted, panting, in a clearing surrounded by dense trees and waited for the others to catch up with him.

  Within moments, Kallik and Yakone pushed their way into the open. Yakone was limping, but Toklo noticed with relief that his injured paw wasn’t bleeding.

  “Where’s Lusa?” he asked when the black bear didn’t follow the two white bears out of the undergrowth.

  Kallik and Yakone gazed around in bewilderment. “I thought she was with you,” Kallik said.

  Toklo shook his head. “She must be around here somewhere,” he said, trying to ignore the first faint stirrings of anxiety. “I didn’t see her out there. Let’s wait for her here and give her a chance to catch up.”

  Both white bears flopped down with huffs of relief and began checking each other over for injuries.

  “Are you both okay?” Toklo asked them. “Are you hurt?”

  Kallik raised a paw to rub the side of her head; Toklo saw that one of her eyes was almost closed. “I got knocked over when a mule ran into me, but the pain’s not so bad now,” she replied. “I think I’m okay. Yakone, I saw you take a bad kick.”

  “Stupid mule,” Yakone growled. “But it’s nothing. Don’t worry.” He began to lick Kallik’s damaged eye, drawing his tongue across it with strong, gentle strokes.

  Toklo sat beside them, noticing for the first time a gash in one of his forelegs. His pelt around it was matted with blood, but the bleeding had stopped. He felt as if every inch of him was covered with bumps and scrapes, but as he flexed his muscles he realized he wasn’t badly hurt. “We need Lusa here to find the right kind of herbs for healing,” he murmured.

  Where is she? His anxiety returned, stronger now, like a claw striking deep into his belly. Raising his head, he listened for the sound of Lusa’s paws breaking through the undergrowth, and sniffed to pick up a trace of her scent. But there was nothing.

  “Lusa!” he called. “We’re over here!”

  There was no reply.

  “Maybe she ended up farther down the trail,” Kallik said. Her voice was confident, but Toklo could hear the concern underneath it. “She’ll need time to get back.”

  Toklo tried to distract himself by cleaning his matted pelt, breaking off now and then to listen for Lusa. But the small black bear still didn’t appear. She should have found us by now, he thought.

  Kallik rose to her paws and called out Lusa’s name again, but there was no response.

  “She’s not coming,” Yakone said at last.

  Now real fear bit into Toklo like a coyote’s jaws. “Stay where you are,” he ordered the others, and headed back the way they had come. “Lusa! Lusa!” he called again as loud as he dared, not wanting to attract the attention of the flat-face with the firestick.

  Kallik and Yakone hadn’t obeyed his order, catching up with him at the edge of the trail. By this time the mules and flat-faces had gone, leaving behind them trampled undergrowth and scraps of broken vines.

  “Let’s spread out, and then meet back here, beside this juniper bush,” Kallik said. “Surely Lusa crossed the trail . . . she can’t be far away. Maybe she got stuck in some brambles.”

  “Okay, we’ll meet when the sun gets to the top of those trees,” Toklo agreed, pointing with his paw.

  Kallik and Yakone took off along the trail in different directions, while Toklo headed farther into the trees. He expected to find Lusa battling her way through the undergrowth, looking for him and the others. But though he searched under bushes and in thickets of bramble, calling Lusa’s name, he found no trace of her, not even her scent.

  Deeper anxiety still welled up inside him when he reached the meeting point to discover that no one else had been able to track down the little black bear.

  Kallik voiced Toklo’s own fear. “What if she was badly hurt? Too badly to travel on her own?” The white bear was ignoring her own eye injury.

  “You might be right,” Toklo admitted grimly. “We’ll have to search harder, and look for places she might try to hide if she was injured.”

  “And we should look for scraps of fur or traces of blood,” Kallik added, looking sick.

  “Okay, but let’s stay together this time,” Yakone suggested. “We don’t want to lose each other as well.”

  Together the bears headed away from the trail this time, deeper into the forest. Toklo began peering up trees, in case Lusa had tried to climb away from danger.

  Their hopes rose when they came upon a steep ravine, its sides covered with rocks and thick bushes. But though they searched carefully on both sides, from the top to the bottom, peering under every bush and behind every boulder, there was no sign of Lusa.

  “Maybe she didn’t cross the trail,” Kallik said as they headed wearily back to their starting point. “Maybe we should be looking on the other side.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” Toklo objected. “Lusa knew what the plan was.”

  “Do you have any better ideas?” Kallik challenged him.

  Toklo’s shoulders sagged. “No,” he admitted.

  They went back to the path and Kallik and Yakone exchanged a glance, then headed along the trail in the direction the mules had been traveling. Toklo watched them for a moment as they sniffed carefully at the stones and the vegetation beside the path. Then he crossed the trail, making for the thorn thicket where they had hidden from the mules and the flat-faces.

  Maybe I can follow Lusa’s
scent from there, he thought.

  But before Toklo reached the thicket, he halted at the sound of Kallik calling his name.

  “Hey, we’ve picked up Lusa’s scent!” Yakone told him. “It leads up into the trees, here on the far side.”

  “She didn’t cross with us,” Kallik murmured as Toklo hurried to join her and Yakone.

  “Look at this,” Yakone said, pointing with his snout to a spot beside the trail. Trampled ferns and a scrap of broken vine showed that some kind of scuffle had happened there, and a few of the fern fronds were flecked with blood.

  “She must have been injured!” Kallik exclaimed.

  Toklo picked up the rising anxiety in Kallik’s voice and fought to keep himself calm. “Come on,” he said. “She couldn’t have gone far. She’d know we’d look for her.”

  Yakone led the way along Lusa’s scent trail, back toward the edge of the brown bear’s territory that they had passed earlier in the day. The trail was strong and full of Lusa’s fear-scent.

  “I need to find some herbs to help her.” Kallik was glancing from side to side as they followed Lusa’s scent into the trees. “But Lusa knows so much more about them than I do!” There was a sharp edge of panic in her voice.

  “There’s still daylight left,” Toklo said encouragingly. “We need to find Lusa as fast as we can. Then she’ll be able to tell us what herbs she needs.”

  Pressing on into the undergrowth, they kept on following Lusa’s scent trail. To Toklo’s relief, it soon veered away in another direction. Thank the spirits! he thought. I was afraid she might have wandered into that other bear’s territory.

  Toklo spotted tufts of black fur clinging to a berry bush. “Look,” he grunted, pointing to it with his snout. “We’re on the right track.”

  As he spoke, Toklo heard the cough of a waking firebeast, then a gentle roar as it moved off. Though it was faint in the distance, his fur prickled. “Is there a BlackPath in this part of the forest?”

  Yakone let out a low growl. “There are BlackPaths everywhere.”

  Up ahead, the undergrowth thinned out, and light trickled through the gaps in the trees. Toklo caught glimpses of firebeasts running back and forth and realized that a huge BlackPath cut through the forest.

  “What if Lusa was hurt by a firebeast?” Kallik’s voice quivered. “If she was badly injured by a mule, she might have stumbled onto the BlackPath without knowing where she was.”

  Toklo ran forward toward the BlackPath; Kallik kept pace with him while Yakone, still limping, dropped a little way behind. On the BlackPath, firebeasts charged in both directions, the rumbling of their bellies loud and threatening. Their acrid scent filled the air, and their bright, unnatural colors dazzled Toklo’s eyes.

  “Now what?” he asked. “Do we follow this BlackPath?”

  “What good would it do?” Kallik retorted. “How can we listen for Lusa, or pick up her scent, with all the racket and reek from the firebeasts?”

  Toklo’s shoulders sagged. “You’re right.”

  All three bears backed up into the forest again, looking around vainly for Lusa. Then Toklo spotted a flattened patch of grass underneath a tree and bounded over to it. “Lusa’s scent is here!” he reported with a flicker of excitement. “She must have lain down to rest.”

  Kallik and Yakone padded over to inspect the flattened grass for themselves.

  “But she’s not here now,” Yakone said worriedly. “So where did she go?”

  Closing her eyes, Kallik lifted her snout into the air and stood still, concentrating. Toklo waited impatiently; he knew Kallik could pick up the scent of a seal across empty ice. If any bear could track Lusa, she could.

  Finally Kallik shook her head. “I can hardly pick up Lusa’s scent at all,” she admitted. “It’s these spirit-cursed firebeasts. Their awful reek swamps everything else. I’m going to cross the BlackPath and see if I can find her trail on the other side.”

  Yakone opened his jaws to protest, then hesitated. “Be careful,” was all he said.

  Toklo followed Kallik to the edge of the BlackPath, where she crouched, waiting while the glittering firebeasts flashed to and fro. At last there was a lull.

  “Now!” Toklo said.

  Kallik plunged forward, her paws pushing her along in massive leaps until she reached the far side of the BlackPath. Toklo watched her through the racing firebeasts as she nosed among the stones and vegetation at the edge of the hard black surface, his claws digging into the ground with anxiety. She wandered in both directions for many bearlengths, eventually returning to a spot just across from Toklo. She waited for a gap in firebeasts, then bounded back to him.

  “Well?” Toklo asked urgently.

  Kallik fixed Toklo with a sorrowful gaze. “Nothing,” she reported. “Lusa didn’t cross here.”

  “Then what happened to her?”

  Before Kallik could reply, Toklo heard Yakone calling to them, a note of excitement in his voice. “Kallik! Toklo! Come here!”

  “He’s found her!” Kallik gasped.

  She galloped back into the trees, with Toklo hard on her paws, but when they reached Yakone, standing beside the flattened grass they had found earlier, the white male was alone.

  “I managed to pick up Lusa’s scent from here,” Yakone said, while Toklo struggled with crushing disappointment. “Though it’s very faint, it goes this way . . . and look at how the grass stems are pressed down. Then here . . .”

  Yakone led the way back toward the BlackPath and halted to sniff the ground, where Toklo saw the deep grooves of a firebeast’s rolling paws and another tiny tuft of black fur on the spiky leaves of a thistle. “This is where the trail stops,” Yakone finished.

  Toklo stared at the fur, so close to the twin gouge marks in the soft earth. “Was Lusa taken away by a firebeast?” he asked hoarsely.

  Kallik and Yakone stared at him in dismay. “It seems like the only way her trail could have gotten so cold, so quickly,” Yakone responded at last. “Look at those tracks. The firebeast stopped, grabbed Lusa, and then went off that way, back to the BlackPath.”

  “But why would it do something like that?” Kallik whimpered. “Lusa knows not to attract the attention of a firebeast.”

  Toklo grunted. “I was taken by a firebeast once, remember? Flat-faces dragged me onto its back.”

  “That’s right,” said Kallik. “We followed its tracks and found you where it had crashed into the river.”

  Yakone blinked. “Wow. Well, if you were able to rescue Toklo then, we must be able to save Lusa now.”

  “It won’t be so easy,” Kallik warned, frowning at the BlackPath. “There are no tracks this time.”

  “That doesn’t mean we can’t try,” Toklo insisted.

  Kallik pressed against Yakone. “We shouldn’t have let Lusa out of our sight on the mule track.”

  “Whatever’s happened, whatever we should have done, we’ll get her back,” Toklo growled.

  His words were nearly drowned by the roar of the biggest firebeast Toklo had ever seen. It was so long that he wondered if it might be half firesnake. It charged along the BlackPath, bellowing as it drooled out clouds of choking black smoke. Toklo coughed as the hideous fumes caught in his throat, and he recoiled into the trees with Kallik and Yakone at his side.

  “That looked big enough to swallow Lusa whole!” Kallik exclaimed, staring after the huge beast in dismay.

  “For a firebeast, it was slow,” Yakone said thoughtfully. “But it still ran a lot faster than any bear ever could. If Lusa was taken away by one of those, and it left no tracks, do we have any chance of catching up with her?”

  “Of course we do,” Toklo grunted, refusing to admit, even to himself, that Yakone was voicing his own fears. “We haven’t come this far only to lose each other now.” And I did not leave the place that will be my home only to lose one of my best friends.

  He sniffed at the air again, desperately trying to sift through the firebeast scents to find Lusa’s. After a moment th
e two white bears padded up to him.

  Kallik rested her chin on the top of his head. “It’ll be okay,” she whispered.

  But it sounded more like a question than reassurance. Toklo felt his shoulders slump.

  The silence dragged on until Yakone broke it abruptly. “Which way should we head now?”

  Fury surged up inside Toklo and he rounded on the white male, almost knocking Kallik over. “What are you saying?” he demanded. “Are you suggesting we continue our journey without Lusa?”

  “Of course not!” Yakone growled. “That’s not what I meant at all! But you can’t pretend that we don’t have a difficult job ahead of us. No, not difficult; practically impossible. So we need to be realistic. Charging after Lusa without stopping to think about what we’re doing could get us into even bigger trouble. You can see how dangerous these mountains are, with all the flat-faces and firebeasts.”

  Kallik shifted her paws nervously as Yakone spoke. She looked worried that claws would come out. I’m not the one starting a fight, Toklo thought irritably. But maybe Yakone has a point. . . .

  “Come on,” Toklo grunted. “Let’s climb to higher ground. If she wasn’t taken by a firebeast, we might be able to spot Lusa from up there.” He tried to sound hopeful, but he knew his words were empty.

  “Okay,” Yakone agreed. “And let’s hunt while we’re doing that. We need to keep our strength up.”

  Toklo headed for a fern-covered slope that led back into the forest, and the white bears followed him. But the ascent was steep, the ferns hiding stones where the bears stubbed their paws. In spite of the shade of the trees, the air was hot and stifling. A narrow stream cut across the slope, with a much higher bank on the far side. Leaping across it drained what little strength they had left. Toklo couldn’t remember feeling so exhausted, but they had to keep going.

  As they plodded on, all three bears tried to stay alert for the signs of prey, but though Toklo picked up traces of birds or small animals, there was nothing that would fill the bellies of three hungry bears.