Firestar’s Quest

Chapter 15

Abandoning his prey, Firestar rushed to her side and looked down.

The sides of the gorge sloped down steeply to a narrow, bone-dry valley strewn with reddish rocks. There wasn’t even a trickle of water.

His heart began to pound. “We must have passed the place where SkyClan camped,” he mewed to Sandstorm. “The gray-and-white cat told me to follow the river.”

Sandstorm’s tail lashed. “Mouse dung! We’d better climb down and head back along the gorge.”

Firestar took the lead as they climbed carefully down the steep cliff. Loose pebbles skidded beneath their paws; Firestar tried not to think about slipping all the way down in a flailing tangle of legs and tail, ending up broken at the bottom. He tried to step lightly, picking his way from one jutting rock to the next and using his tail for balance.

By now the sun was high in the sky, and the rocky sides of the gorge reflected the heat. The hot ground scorched Firestar’s paws. Panting, he felt as if his fur were about to burst into flame. He disturbed a lizard basking on a rock; it whisked down a crack when his shadow fell on it.

“At least we won’t starve,” he commented, pointing at the creature with his tail.

Sandstorm wrinkled her nose. “Only ShadowClan eat scaly things,” she meowed. “I’d have to be really hungry before I tried it.”

At last they reached the bottom of the gorge and began padding back the way they had come, weaving among the boulders. Firestar’s pelt prickled; nothing grew in this part of the gorge except for a few clumps of wiry grass and stunted bushes; there was no shelter, no undergrowth to conceal the cats from hostile eyes.

“It’s a good thing we’re not black or white,” Sandstorm murmured. “At least our pelts will help to hide us.”

Firestar nodded tensely. “Stay alert. We don’t know what might be lurking down here.”

As the sun slid down the sky, the shadow of the cliff fell across them. Firestar breathed more easily as the air grew cooler. He began to make out the sound of water up ahead.

He took a deep breath, detecting the first traces of moisture in the dry air.

Sandstorm’s tail went up. “I can hear the river!”

Wishing for the soft ground of the forest instead of these sharp pebbles, Firestar picked up the pace until he and Sandstorm were bounding among the rocks. Rounding a bend, he stopped dead when he saw a pile of reddish boulders blocking the gorge. The lapping of water was louder, but he couldn’t see it.

He scrambled up the pile of rocks, claws scraping on the crumbling stone, and peered cautiously over the top. Directly below him, water flowed smoothly out of a gaping black hole into a round pool before winding away down the gorge and out of sight.

Sandstorm clambered up beside Firestar. “So this is where the river begins.”

Firestar glanced around, half expecting to see the pale shapes of SkyClan warriors watching him from the cliffs.

There were no cats in sight, but halfway up the side of the gorge he spotted several caves, dark, narrow openings tucked underneath the cliff. Narrow trails zigzagged across the cliff face, leading from one cave to the next.

Firestar remembered his dream of waking among SkyClan warriors in a sandy cave. The deputy’s words echoed once more in his mind. This is our home now. You know where to go.

“We are here,” he told Sandstorm quietly.

“You think SkyClan lived in those caves?” Sandstorm sounded dubious. “Climbing up and down the cliffs every day?”

“I think so.”

Sandstorm rose to her paws. “Okay, but I’m not going to look until we’ve had a drink. My mouth feels as dry as the gorge.”

She began to pick her way down the pile of boulders on the other side, following the river until she reached the pool where the river flowed out. Firestar joined her as she crouched down and began to lap. The water was icy cold; it soaked through his scorched fur and Firestar thought that he would never want to stop drinking.

The water flowed swiftly but without making a sound. A blue-green light sparkled under the surface, but further under the heap of boulders everything was dark. The cave gaped like an open mouth, silently waiting…

Firestar shivered and sat up, shaking droplets from his whiskers. Sandstorm was staring at something on the dried mud beside the pool.

“Look at that,” she mewed.

In the mud were the clear pawprints of a cat! “It could be a rogue, just passing through,” Firestar pointed out, “or even an adventurous kittypet.”

Sandstorm sniffed. “Very adventurous, for a kittypet. Let’s have a look at those caves.”

The side of the gorge was even steeper here than where they had climbed down. Firestar struggled to keep his footing among the loose pebbles, convinced he was about to slip.

After the first few tail-lengths he left the shadows behind, and the blazing heat struck him like a blow. Dust puffed up under his paws, making him as thirsty as ever.

But when he reached the first of the trails, the going became easier. It looked as if the cliff face had been scraped out to expose a flattened trail that led back and forth in a gentle slope, connecting each of the caves. Firestar headed for the highest entrance, which also looked to be the biggest. He pressed close to the cliff, avoiding the drop on the other side. Sandstorm was just behind him, puffing her breath out in a sigh of relief as she followed him onto the level floor of the cave.

Firestar stared around him. He had been here before. The cave was several times the size of his den in the ThunderClan camp. Inside it was cool and shadowy, with sheer walls and a sandy floor. It was sheltered from rain or blistering heat, and it would be difficult for enemies to reach.

For a few heartbeats he stood still, imagining how the SkyClan cats would have felt when they reached this refuge.

Had they been joyful to find shelter, or wary of danger lurking in the shadows? Had they longed for their camp in the forest? Or were they just too tired to care? For a moment they were all around him again; he could hear their mews and feel their pelts brushing against his own.

“What do you think of those?” Sandstorm asked, pointing with her tail to a few shallow scrapes in the floor at the back of the cave. “Filled with moss and bracken, they’d make pretty good nests.”

“Yes, but where would they find moss and bracken around here?” Firestar asked. “I didn’t see any growing in the gorge.”

“There might be some on the cliffs.”

Firestar nodded, tasting the air again. The cave was full of animal scents: he could discern mouse and vole, and even cat, but none of them smelled fresh. He padded forward, nosing around the scrapes Sandstorm had spotted; only the memory of his dream assured him that they really were nests, not just natural dips in the cave floor.

“Let’s go and explore some of the other caves.” Firestar headed for the entrance, only to stop dead a tail-length inside. His heart had started to thump again. “Look at that,” he whispered.

At one side of the entrance was a narrow column of rock, attached on one side to the cave wall. Thickly scored down the lower half were the marks of claws. Hardly daring to breathe, Firestar padded across, raised his forepaws, and placed his own claws in the marks.

“A perfect fit!” Sandstorm breathed.

She was right. Firestar’s claws slipped into the marks as if he had made them himself. He shivered to think that his paws were resting where those other cats had been, so long ago.

“Look at those other marks.” Sandstorm padded up to the stone trunk and laid one paw against it, close to the bottom.

For the first time Firestar noticed some tiny scratches running sideways across the trunk. “Maybe kits made them.”

Sandstorm looked doubtful. “Why would they scratch crosswise, instead of up and down?”

Firestar shrugged. “Why do kits do anything? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. This is the place,” he meowed, suddenly more confident than ever. “This is where SkyClan made their camp.”

Sandstorm’s green eyes glinted. “Then where are they now?”

They spent the rest of the day exploring the other caves.

Firestar’s paws tingled as they kept discovering more of the claw marks, proof that all these caves had once been inhabited by cats.

“Look!” Sandstorm murmured in the next cave they visited, resting her tail tip gently against the wall. “Nothing but tiny marks! This must have been the nursery.”

Firestar glanced back at the entrance; a boulder blocked most of it, hiding it from hostile eyes and keeping it cool even in blazing sunlight. “The kits and their mothers would have been safe here.”

Sandstorm padded farther into the cave, her pale ginger pelt a blur in the shadows. “There are bigger scrapes in the floor, too,” she reported. “Just the right size for a queen and her litter.”

Further down the cliff face they found smaller caves that might have been dens for the apprentices, the medicine cat, and the Clan leader. Finally they returned to the first cave.

“I guess this was the warriors’ den,” Firestar meowed, not wanting to bring up his dream. “There’s plenty of space, and it’s near the top of the cliff. They’d be able to protect the rest of the Clan if foxes or Twolegs tried to get down.”

Sandstorm thoughtfully tasted the air. “There’s cat scent here,” she announced. “Not fresh, but it’s all we’ve smelled so far. I think at least one cat was here in the last moon or so.”

Firestar padded slowly around the cave and spotted something white glimmering in a crevice between a boulder and the wall. He poked one paw into the gap and drew out a heap of tiny white bones. “A mouse or a vole,” he commented to Sandstorm, who had come to have a look. “You’re right; cats have been here, but it doesn’t look as if they live here permanently. If they did, the scent would be fresh.”

“I wonder why they come?” Sandstorm didn’t sound as if she expected an answer, and Firestar couldn’t give her one.

By now the sun had gone down and the gorge was filled with shadows. They climbed the last few tail-lengths to the cliff top and hunted among the bushes along the edge. When they had eaten, they returned to the warriors’ den for the night.

“I’m so exhausted, I could sleep for a moon.” Sandstorm sighed, turning around in one of the shallow scrapes and curling up with her tail over her nose.

Her steady breathing soon told Firestar that she was asleep. He sat beside her, gazing around the cave and picturing the way it had been in his dream: warm, breathing bodies in nests of moss and bracken, and one cat, awake as he was, on watch.

He blinked, and the cats vanished. Pale silver light from the half-moon washed into the cave, lapping at his fur. But there was no sound, no flicker of a pale pelt to disturb the shadows.

Did SkyClan scatter too long ago? he wondered. Is there any hope of finding their descendants? Or have I come too late?