by Erin Hunter
“The kittypets!” Lionblaze hissed urgently into her ear. “You’re looking for the kittypets.”
Dovepaw flung herself back into the swirling chaos of the Twolegplace. This time she slowed down, listening at each corner, letting the images fill her mind until she could see the smallest details: the shadows of leaves on the dark green bushes, the wide pink faces of Twoleg kits, the gleam of sleeping monsters.
Cats. You’re looking for cats…. There’s one!
Dovepaw picked up the whisk of a tail, the sound of paw steps scrabbling up a wall and down onto some grass. Carefully focusing, she let her senses follow it and tasted the scent.
No, it’s not one of the kittypets we met. Too young and skittish.
As her senses reached out again, a meow a little farther away caught her attention. That sounds familiar…. Tracing the sound, she spotted Seville, the big ginger tom, calling out to Jigsaw as he basked in the sun. And Jigsaw is…Dovepaw heard the scrape of claws on wood, and she knew the fat black-and-brown tom was balancing on a fence above Seville.
“I’ve found them!” she exclaimed joyfully. Opening her eyes wide, she gazed at Lionblaze. “Come on!”
Taking the lead, she padded along the edge of the stream, past the place with the rabbits, until they reached a narrow path leading between two of the Twoleg nests. Dovepaw’s fur bristled as she emerged onto a Thunderpath; the reek of monsters and the noise of Twolegs in their dens flooded over her until all she wanted to do was turn tail and run back to the forest to stuff leaves into her ears and nose.
The growl of a monster sounded from farther down the Thunderpath. Dovepaw leaped back, crashing into Lionblaze. “Sorry!” she gasped as the sleek, brightly colored monster swept past. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Yes, you can.” Lionblaze pushed his nose into her shoulder fur. “You can do it for the Clans. Now, do we have to cross this Thunderpath?”
Dovepaw nodded. Her heart was thumping so hard she thought it would burst out of her chest as her mentor nudged her gently to the edge of the hard black strip.
“When I say run, run,” he instructed her. He looked carefully both ways, his ears pricked for the sound of monsters, then raised his tail. “Run!”
Biting back a yowl of terror, Dovepaw launched herself forward. Her pads skimmed the surface of the Thunderpath; then she was safely across, shivering as she pressed herself into the shelter of a hedge.
“Well done!” Lionblaze purred. “Now where do we go?”
Pull yourself together! Dovepaw told herself fiercely. “This way.” She led Lionblaze along the edge of the Thunderpath, slipping behind a tree to hide as a slow-moving monster prowled past. “Do you think it’s looking for us?” she whispered.
Lionblaze shrugged. “I doubt it. But no cat knows what monsters are thinking.”
Turning away from the Thunderpath, following her sense of Seville’s and Jigsaw’s presence, Dovepaw found herself in a maze of narrow paths between walls of red stone and high wooden fences. As she rounded a corner, she almost stepped on a sleeping kittypet; the black tom sprang up, hissing, and leaped onto a fence before vanishing into the next garden.
Dovepaw let out a gusty breath of relief, then jumped, startled by the sound of a dog barking behind the fence on the other side.
“It’s okay,” Lionblaze mewed, though Dovepaw saw that his neck fur was bristling. “It can’t get at us.”
“I hope you’re right,” Dovepaw muttered.
The crisscrossing paths didn’t seem to lead anywhere. Have I gotten us lost? Dovepaw wondered. Then, where two paths crossed, she scented the sharp tang of chopped grass and spotted a bush with strong-smelling red flowers. Yes! I’ve scented those before…and I remember that pattern of shadows the bush is casting on the path.
“We need to go around this corner,” she explained to Lionblaze over her shoulder as she quickened her pace. “Now over this wall…”
She leaped up, with her mentor beside her, and down onto a square of smooth green grass. Seville was basking at the foot of the fence on the other side.
“Hi, Seville!” Dovepaw called, racing across the grass to touch noses with the big orange tom.
Seville’s green eyes widened with surprise. “It’s the journeying cats!” he meowed. “What are you doing here? Did you find the animals you were looking for? Did you free the water?”
“We found the animals,” Lionblaze told him. “But we can’t free the water. We…we need help.”
“Do you mean our help?” a voice called from above. “Wow!”
Dovepaw looked up to see Jigsaw perched on top of the fence, his black-and-brown tabby pelt almost hidden in the shade of a holly tree. He jumped down, his fur fluffing up as he touched noses with Dovepaw and then Lionblaze.
Seville blinked, his eyes wary as he looked from Lionblaze to Dovepaw and then back again. “What exactly do you mean?” he rumbled.
“Do you know where Snowdrop is?” Lionblaze asked, avoiding the question. “We looked for you at the place with the rabbits, but we couldn’t find any of you.”
“I’m the only one who lives there,” Jigsaw explained. “Snowdrop’s housefolk live on the other side of that birch tree.” He pointed with his tail at a tall tree over a wooden fence. “How did you find us?” he added, narrowing his eyes.
“Oh, it was easy,” Lionblaze replied. “We’re Clan cats, remember.” He shot an amused glance at Dovepaw.
“Wow!” Jigsaw’s eyes gleamed. “I’ll go get Snowdrop for you,” he offered. “She’ll kill us if she misses a chance to help real wild cats.” Without waiting for a reply, he scrambled up to the top of the fence and disappeared.
Seville stretched, gesturing with his tail to the patch of sun-warmed grass beside him. “Lie down and rest,” he invited the Clan cats. “It’s lovely and sunny here.”
“We’ve had enough sun lately, thanks,” Lionblaze replied.
He turned to gaze out over the garden, clearly keeping watch for dogs and Twolegs, while Dovepaw tore at the grass with her front claws. Several moons seemed to pass before Jigsaw plopped down beside them, with Snowdrop following.
“Hi there!” the white she-cat greeted them, running up to Lionblaze to touch his ear with her nose. “It’s great to see you again.” Suddenly she backed off a pace, her lip curling as if she’d scented something foul. “You’re not going to make me eat fur and bones, are you?”
“No,” Lionblaze mewed. “We’ve come to ask for your help.”
“Great!” Snowdrop purred. “What do you want us to do?”
“We can fight, watch!” Jigsaw added. He leaped at Snowdrop, trying to wrap his forepaws around her neck. Snowdrop reared up on her hind paws and lost her balance as she aimed a blow at Jigsaw’s ear. Both cats toppled over onto the grass in a heap of fur.
Seville rolled his eyes.
“Er…that’s great,” Lionblaze meowed. “But we don’t need you to fight, actually. We need you to dismantle a dam.”
Snowdrop sat up, shaking scraps of grass off her pelt. “What’s a dam?”
Lionblaze described the huge mound of logs blocking the stream. “We fought the beavers, but they were too strong for us,” he explained. “So some of us are going to lure them away while the rest take the dam apart and free the water.”
Jigsaw blinked. “Will it be dangerous?”
Lionblaze nodded. “Yes,” he mewed.
The black-and-brown tabby’s eyes gleamed brighter still. “Good! We’re awfully bored, lying around here all day.”
Dovepaw’s conscience pricked her like a thorn in her pad. “This isn’t going to be fun,” she warned the kittypets. “A—a cat died.”
Snowdrop gasped and Jigsaw’s neck fur stood on end.
“But we won’t be fighting the beavers again,” Lionblaze reassured them, with a glare at his apprentice.
Dovepaw met his gaze. “We can’t ask them to come with us unless they know what might happen.” But what if they don’t come? she asked he
rself anxiously. What will we do then?
“We’ll come, won’t we, Jigsaw?” Snowdrop meowed.
Jigsaw nodded, though he looked less certain.
Seville let out a grunt and rose to his paws, arching his back in a long stretch. “I can’t let you young ’uns go off on your own,” he growled. “Who knows what you might get up to? I’ll come, too.”
“Thank you,” Dovepaw mewed. “Our Clans thank you.”
“Follow us.” Jigsaw bounced on his paws. “We know a quick way back to the stream.”
Dovepaw was amazed at how confident the kittypets were as they traveled through the Twolegplace. When they came to a Thunderpath, Jigsaw jumped right over a sleeping monster, leaving dusty pad marks on its gleaming snout. Seville and Snowdrop followed, then turned to wait for the Clan cats on the other side of the Thunderpath.
“Come on!” Seville called. “I thought you were in a hurry!”
Lionblaze gave Dovepaw a sidelong look. “Are we going to let those kittypets think we’re scared of monsters?”
“No way,” Dovepaw replied. Even if we are!
Lionblaze bunched his muscles and leaped up onto the monster’s hindquarters. Dovepaw followed, trying not to flinch as her pads struck the smooth, hot surface. She jumped onto its back, then down onto its snout. In a heartbeat, she was on the ground, panting with relief. Glancing back once she reached the other side of the Thunderpath, she realized that the monster hadn’t woken up, even after five cats had leaped over it.
Maybe monsters are stupid.
By now Dovepaw was completely lost, but she didn’t have time to stop and sense the direction they should be going. Then she spotted a line of trees, and through them the streambed. They emerged from the maze of the Twolegplace a few fox-lengths upstream from the place with the rabbits.
“Which way now?” Seville asked.
“Just keep following the stream,” Lionblaze replied. He took the lead, picking up the pace until he was racing up the channel.
“Hey, take it easy,” Jigsaw protested, wincing as he held up a paw. “These stones are sharp.”
“Okay, sorry.” Lionblaze slowed to a steady trot.
Dovepaw brought up the rear to make sure that none of the kittypets was falling behind. She could feel the tension rising as they drew closer to the dam—not just from the kittypets, from the air itself, as if something huge was about to happen. Above them, clouds were piling up in the sky, covering the sun, and a claw scratch of lightning flickered on the horizon. As they padded through the copse, Dovepaw could see how spooked the kittypets were, jumping whenever the branches rattled in the rising wind.
Putting on a spurt, she caught up to Jigsaw and fell into step beside him. “Are you okay?”
The tom’s only reply was a tense nod.
I hope that’s true, Dovepaw thought. Guilt and fear squirmed beneath her fur.
Oh, StarClan, am I taking more cats into a battle from which they’ll never return?
CHAPTER 22
Lionblaze jumped up onto the bank of the stream and turned to look back down at his ragged patrol. Seville, Snowdrop, and Jigsaw were standing with their mouths wide open as they stared up at the dam.
“That’s seriously huge!” Jigsaw breathed.
Snowdrop blinked at Lionblaze. “You really think we can move that?”
Lionblaze nodded, trying to hide his own doubts and give the kittypets confidence. “With all of us working together, yes, I do.”
“Come on,” Dovepaw urged them, leaping up to stand beside Lionblaze. “Let’s go find the others.”
Lionblaze led the way up the slope and into the clearing where he had left the other Clan cats. Pushing through the undergrowth into the open, he halted, eyes wide with surprise at the sight of a pile of logs in the middle of the clearing. Sedgewhisker was just heaving a branch onto the top of the stack, before leaping lightly down.
“Hi, you’re back,” she panted.
“I figured if we could stack branches, we could work out how to pull them apart,” Toadfoot explained, padding over to meet Lionblaze. His pelt was covered with scraps of twig and bark and he was breathing hard.
“Good idea,” Lionblaze meowed admiringly. “You’re doing a great job.”
At the opposite side of the clearing Petalfur was dragging a branch that was far, far bigger than she was. She didn’t stop until she reached the stack of logs and pushed her branch up to the foot of it. Then she limped wearily across the clearing to join Lionblaze and the others; her eyes as she gazed at the new arrivals were old and full of determination.
As Tigerheart and Whitetail trotted up with Woody, Lionblaze began to introduce the kittypets.
“I’m not a Clan cat,” Woody explained. “I’m just passing through.”
“I think I’ve seen you before, in the woods,” Seville meowed; he looked relieved to meet a cat who was even slightly familiar.
“We’ve got to discuss the plan,” Toadfoot announced as soon as the introductions were over. “We need to decide—”
“Hunt first,” Whitetail interrupted with a flick of her tail. “We can’t do this if we don’t eat and rest for a bit.”
Toadfoot looked briefly offended at being contradicted, then gave the WindClan she-cat a nod. “Okay,” he agreed. “But we’d better be quick about it.”
To Lionblaze’s relief, there was still plenty of prey in the woods, and it wasn’t long before the cats had gathered in the clearing again, crouching to eat their catch.
“We’ve already eaten, thanks,” Seville mewed when Whitetail offered him a mouse.
Snowdrop drew back, her green eyes wide with horror, but Jigsaw looked cautiously interested, and he leaned over to sniff the squirrel Dovepaw had caught.
“Go on, take a bite,” she encouraged him.
Jigsaw hesitated, then buried his teeth in the squirrel and tore off a mouthful.
“What do you think?” Dovepaw asked as he gulped it down.
“Er…not bad,” the tabby tom replied. “Just a bit…fluffy.” Night was falling by the time the cats had finished eating. The moon shone fitfully from behind drifting banks of cloud, and the air felt damp and heavy.
“I think Whitetail and Sedgewhisker should be the ones to lure the beavers away,” Lionblaze began as the rest of the cats clustered around him beneath the trees.
“Why?” The tip of Whitetail’s tail twitched. “We’re not scared to work on the dam.” Sedgewhisker nodded.
“Because WindClan cats are the fastest runners,” Toadfoot replied. “We all have to do what we’re best at.”
“Oh…okay.” Whitetail looked satisfied.
“I’ll come with you,” Woody meowed. “I know these woods. We’ll start off from the beavers’ lodge, and then go this way….” Picking up a twig in his jaws, he traced a line in the leaf-mold to represent the stream, and then a winding route through the trees. “There’s plenty of cover; they’ll have no idea what’s happening back at the dam,” he added, dropping the twig.
“That’s great, Woody,” Lionblaze told him.
“We’ll distract the beavers for as long as we possibly can,” Whitetail mewed.
“And if they do decide to come back, I’ll run ahead and warn you,” Sedgewhisker added.
Lionblaze nodded, with a sideways glance at Dovepaw. She can use her senses to track the beavers, too.
“So what about the dam?” Tigerheart prompted. “Once the beavers are out of the way—what then?”
“We’d be better off tackling it from the other side,” Lionblaze meowed. “That way we’ll be even farther from the beavers.”
“That’s a good idea,” Petalfur agreed. “And I’ve been thinking. Look at this.” She pointed with her paw to a small pile of twigs. “It’s easiest to knock the top logs off the dam”—she demonstrated by swiping at the topmost twig with a claw—“but if we can somehow get inside and shift the logs farther down, then the whole thing might collapse.” Delicately she removed a twig from the middle of
her pile, and the heap crumbled, sending twigs rolling down the slope. “The weight of water would crush it.”
“Brilliant!” Tigerheart exclaimed.
“Hang on a moment.” Seville, the orange kittypet, spoke up. “You want us to go inside the dam and collapse it…and we would still be inside it, yes?”
Lionblaze nodded. “It’s risky, but it looks like it’s the only way.” He hesitated, gazing around at the worried faces of his friends. “We’ll just have to see what it’s like when we get there,” he ended with a shrug.
With a last glance at their companions, Whitetail, Sedgewhisker, and Woody headed upstream toward the lodge, while Lionblaze led the rest of the cats across the stream below the dam to the bank on the opposite side. Farther up the slope, they could see the Twoleg pelt-dens glowing with light and echoing with murmuring voices.
“What about them?” Toadfoot asked, flicking his tail in the direction of the pelt-dens.
Lionblaze paused at the bottom of the dam. “There’s nothing we can do about them,” he replied at last. “We don’t have enough cats to distract them. We’ll just have to hope that they don’t cause any trouble.”
“Hope’s the easy part,” Toadfoot responded caustically.
Lionblaze’s pelt prickled with tension as he waited for the signal from Whitetail. He could tell that the other cats felt the same. Dovepaw was scraping at the ground with the tips of her claws, while Tigerheart’s tail twitched back and forth. All three kittypets looked terrified, their eyes wide and their ears laid back.
Come on, Whitetail, Lionblaze urged. Get a move on, before one of us starts to panic.
“Remember,” he mewed aloud. “No cat is to fight. If the beavers come back and challenge you, don’t try to be a hero. We’ve learned that lesson the hard way.”