The Fourth Apprentice

Woody followed them and sat down with his tail wrapped around his paws. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he observed with a yawn.

Lionblaze drew a deep breath, knowing that if some cat didn’t come up with a plan then they would all give up and go home. “Woody, do the beavers sleep at night?”

The loner shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s when I’m asleep, too. The Twolegs would know.”

“Yes, but we can’t ask them,” Toadfoot snapped, curling his lips back from his teeth.

“At least the Twolegs won’t be around when it’s dark,” Lionblaze meowed. “And the beavers might be asleep. I think that would be the best time to attack.”

The air tingled with tension as the cats looked at one another. Petalfur and Rippletail stared through the trees in the direction of the pool.

“That’s ours,” Rippletail murmured.

Lionblaze knew that they couldn’t leave now. After they had come all this way, they had to do something to get the water back, for the sake of their Clans.

“Look,” he began, scraping up a few twigs into a heap. “This is the dam. Here’s the pool, and this”—he drew a long scrape in the earth—“is the streambed on the other side.”

“We should divide ourselves up,” Toadfoot mewed, touching the ground with one paw on each side of the heap of twigs. “Attack from two directions at once.”

Lionblaze nodded. “Good idea. Once we’re on top of the dam, we start to take it apart until the water can get through. Woody, do you know if the dam is hollow? Would the beavers be hiding inside it?”

Woody shook his head. “No idea. And don’t think that I’m going to take part in this attack,” he added. “This is your battle, not mine.”

“We wouldn’t ask you to,” Lionblaze responded, though he felt a twinge of regret. Woody would be a valuable ally to have on their side.

“Okay, let’s hunt now,” Toadfoot suggested. “Then we’ll get some rest until nightfall.”

“But don’t go off alone,” Lionblaze warned. “And if you see a beaver, yowl to warn the rest of us.”

He padded into the woods with Dovepaw at his side, and he halted after a few tail-lengths to taste the air. “I can’t scent anything except beavers,” he complained.

“Same here,” Dovepaw meowed. “Look at this.” She stopped in front of a large pile of mud mixed with twigs and grass. Large paw prints were set into the dried mud. “I wonder what it’s for?”

Lionblaze padded up and gave it a cautious sniff, recoiling a pace or two at the strong reek of musky, fishy beaver scent. “Maybe it’s a scent marker,” he guessed. “If we get farther away from it, we might be able to pick up some prey.”

To his relief, the beaver scent faded as they stalked farther into the woods and left the last of the felled trees behind. Lionblaze began to recognize the familiar scents of mouse and squirrel. Hearing a scuffling sound from underneath a bush, he pinpointed a mouse and glided up to it, careful to set his paws down lightly. The mouse tried to dart off at the last moment, but Lionblaze trapped it under his paw and killed it with a bite to the back of the neck.

“I’ve got one, too!” Dovepaw announced, trotting up with a mouse in her jaws.

Lionblaze scraped earth over the fresh-kill. “The hunting is much better here,” he commented, pleased that they had found prey so quickly. “I suppose it’s because the water is so near.”

It didn’t take much longer for him to catch a squirrel and Dovepaw to track down a couple more mice.

“I never knew hunting could be this easy,” she mumbled around her mouthful of fresh-kill as they carried the prey back to the stream.

Lionblaze realized that Dovepaw had still been a kit when the drought began. She’d never known what it was like to hunt when there was plenty of prey. “It’ll be like this in the forest once we bring the water back,” he promised.

Back in the undergrowth above the pool, they found that the other cats had all hunted well, and for once the patrol was full-fed when they settled down to sleep until nightfall.

“I’ll keep watch,” Dovepaw offered. Her eyes were wide and her whiskers quivered.

“No, you need to rest,” Lionblaze told her. “I’ll keep watch.”

“But I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep,” Dovepaw protested in a whisper, glancing at the rest of the patrol to make sure they couldn’t overhear. “I can still hear the beavers, gnawing and scraping…”

“Then block your senses like you did before,” Lionblaze told her. “We know the beavers are here now, so we don’t need you to be on the alert all the time.” When she still looked unconvinced, he bent his head and gave her ear an approving lick. “You’ve done well, Dovepaw. You were right! The stream has been blocked by brown animals—and we can do something about that. When we defeat the beavers and release the water, the Clans will owe everything to you.”

Dovepaw sighed. “I hope that’s going to happen.” Without arguing anymore she curled up; after a few moments Lionblaze realized she was asleep.