Эрин Хантер - The Fourth Apprentice

“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.”

“Right,” Toadfoot agreed. “If the beavers attack, run. Climb a tree. I don’t think they can—”

A piercing yowl from across the stream interrupted him.

“Something’s happening,” Lionblaze murmured, with a glance at Dovepaw.

She nodded. “The beavers are moving inside their den,” she whispered, so faintly that no other cat could hear.

Lionblaze peered upstream toward the lodge. At first the night was so black that he could see nothing. Then the moon drifted out from behind a cloud, and he spotted movement beside the mound of sticks. The beavers’ heads broke the surface of the pool and they scrambled up onto the outside of the lodge, their bodies swarming over the logs like bulky shadows.

On the bank, Lionblaze made out Whitetail’s pale pelt, with Woody and Sedgewhisker dark shadows beside her. He could just hear their mocking hisses, taunting the beavers to draw them off their den and away from the pool. One of the beavers grunted, then waddled down the hill of sticks and onto the bank. It started bustling toward the cats, its tail whispering over the leaves. The other beavers followed, clumsy but surprisingly fast. Sedgewhisker darted forward and dealt the leader a swift blow on the nose before dancing away again.

“Great StarClan!” Toadfoot spat. “Has she no sense?”

The beavers lumbered in pursuit as Whitetail and the others slipped back into the trees, drawing them deeper into the forest. Within a few heartbeats, Lionblaze lost sight of them.

“Go!” Toadfoot hissed.

As the cats jumped up onto the dam, a claw of lightning split the sky from top to bottom, and thunder cracked above their heads. Snowdrop flinched, pressing herself to the log where she was balancing, then forced herself to her paws again and kept climbing.

“We should split up,” Petalfur panted. “Some cat should come with me and start looking for a gap where we can get inside. The rest of you can start pushing logs off the top.”

“I’ll come with you,” Toadfoot offered.

Petalfur led the way across the dam, just above the level of the pool, with Toadfoot following her. Lionblaze watched as she halted and started prodding one of the logs; then he headed for the top of the barrier. Lightning crackled out again; Lionblaze was almost deafened by the roll of thunder that followed it, and his ears kept ringing afterward. He shook his head impatiently. Then fat drops of rain began to fall, splashing on the logs and on the cats’ pelts.

“This is all we need,” Tigerheart grumbled.

“We’d have been happy about it back at the lake,” Dovepaw pointed out. “I hope it rains there, too.”

As Lionblaze scrambled over the topmost log and stood looking down at the pool, the clouds burst. Rain poured down in a hissing screen that blotted out everything except the logs beneath his paws. His pelt was drenched within heartbeats; he shivered as the cold rain reached his skin.

“Okay,” he yowled, raising his voice to be heard above the drumming of the raindrops. “See if you can loosen some of these logs and branches. Push them down into the streambed.”

He grabbed a long, thin branch in his jaws and hurled it down, then bent his head to grapple with a bigger log. Jigsaw pushed at it from the other end; it rolled slowly to the edge and landed in the stream with a satisfying crash.

“Yes!” Jigsaw yowled.

Farther along the dam Tigerheart and Snowdrop were struggling with a tree trunk, while Seville was showering down twigs and smaller branches into the streambed. Dovepaw was crouched close to Lionblaze, her eyes closed; he guessed she was sending out her senses to find out what the beavers were doing.