Эрин Хантер - The Ultimate Guide

DEDICATED TO THE FOLLOWING

CLANMATES WHO HAVE PROVEN THEMSELVES TO BE THE ULTIMATE WARRIORS FANS!

Cameron Dresdner

Kelly Freer

Dailey Jackson

Ellie Lang-Ree

Cassidy Stoler

Danielle Truxhall

Audra Young

THERE WERE FOUR CLANS that lived in a forest. Each Clan defended a territory that best suited its hunting skills: Fleet-footed rabbit chasers lived on the moor below broad open skies; glossy-furred cats who were happy to get their paws wet in search of fish settled beside the river; stalkers of mice and squirrels made their home among dense trees and tangled undergrowth; and bold, cunning cats who had a taste for frogs patrolled the marshes fringed by brittle pine trees.

But no… there were originally five Clans. One Clan was forced out when Twolegs took over its territory. That Clan, the tree-hunters, created a new home far, far away in a sandy gorge.

And before those five Clans, there was a community of cats living deep in the mountains, beneath an endlessly tumbling waterfall. These cats had left their home beside a lake after a hard-won decision to find somewhere else to live, free from black-and-white dogs that were too easily diverted from chasing sheep into chasing cats instead.

Those four Clans that lived in the forest? They ended up beside the very same lake when Twolegs rampaged through their territories, flattening trees to make space for a new Thunderpath. With their distant ancestors lost from memory, the Clans believed they were the first cats to settle there, forging new paths among the trees and across the windy hills.

Everywhere the cats have been, there are layers upon layers of history—some known, some long-forgotten, and some discovered in the most unexpected ways—laid down by the paw steps of many generations. What shaped the lives of these proud and noble warriors? Come, walk among them for a while, and listen to their stories…

LIKE ALL OF THE Clans, ThunderClan has been shaped by the nature of its home, by the dense forest and prey-rich thickets that lie between its boundaries. My warriors are the most skilled predators of any Clan, able to make themselves silent and invisible in order to hunt the tiny furred and feathered creatures that live among us. They can stalk over fallen leaves and brittle twigs without making a sound, and from a standstill they can pounce with enough strength to bring down a full-grown rabbit.

We are descended from the cats who were most adept at hunting beneath the trees, who were undaunted by branches blocking out the sky and the need to fight enemies at close quarters when there was no open space in which to escape an attacker. This battling in close quarters gave us courage and confidence in our abilities to feed and defend ourselves, and we knew the forest was the right home for us.

It was the warrior code that let us grow as a Clan and maintain our beloved forest territory. No

Clan guards the code as passionately as ThunderClan. To our dying breath, we know it will protect us from injustice, cruelty, and needless battles. The code tells us to check our boundaries daily, and prohibits trespassing or hunting on another Clan’s territory, and we follow this. The other Clans might call us cowards for avoiding constant border skirmishes, but we would fight for our territory as fiercely as any of them—just not when a more peaceful answer can be found by obeying the code that we share.

When we lived in the forest beside Twolegplace, our greatest border quarrel was with RiverClan over Sunningrocks. When cats first came to the forest, these rocks were an island in the middle of the river, accessible only to those peculiar cats who were willing to swim to it. But the river changed its course, and the rocks were soon attached by dry land to ThunderClan territory. The only logical conclusion was that they should be absorbed into our borders. RiverClan, those fish-eating mouse-brains, insisted this was unfair and tried bitterly to reclaim Sunningrocks. We won more of those battles than we lost, which speaks for itself. When my warriors know they are in the right, they will fight like lions.

But we also know what it is like to be without the boundaries of a Clan. Living so close to Twolegplace in the forest, we met more kittypets than the other Clans, and had more rogues passing through. I tried to teach my Clan to treat these strangers as cats just like us before judging them for where they were born. Compared to some of the dark-hearted warriors clawing at our borders, there are better cats who have no belief in StarClan at all. Cats can learn to follow the warrior code, but they cannot always learn to have the compassion or courage that comes from faith.

LEADER OF THUNDERCLAN BEFORE Firestar, Bluestar was a proud and deeply committed warrior.

Once known as Bluefur, her early life was scarred by tragedy. Her mother was killed during a raid on WindClan and soon after, her sister, Snowfur, died on the Thunderpath. Isolated in her grief from her own Clanmates, Bluefur fell in love with a RiverClan warrior named Oakheart, but their brief relationship ended when Bluefur realized she could not be loyal to ThunderClan while her heart lay elsewhere. Unbeknownst to Bluefur, she was already expecting Oakheart’s kits.

Bluefur paid the highest possible price for her leadership, giving up her three tiny kits in order to become deputy instead of Thistleclaw, whom she feared would destroy ThunderClan with his dark-hearted ambition. Oakheart raised Stonefur and Mistyfoot, the two kits who survived, in his own

Clan. Bluefur told her Clanmates that her litter had been stolen by a starving badger, and then overcame her sadness to become deputy and leader as she had hoped.

When Bluestar was an apprentice, the ThunderClan medicine cat Goosefeather had delivered a prophecy to her: “You will blaze through the forest like fire; only water can destroy you.” During her leadership, as ThunderClan struggled against its rivals, Bluestar looked to another source of fire—the red-pelted kittypet Rusty—to save her beloved Clan. But Bluestar’s murderous deputy Tigerclaw continued to rage against ThunderClan even after becoming leader of ShadowClan. He set a pack of ravenous dogs to raid the camp, and Bluestar gave up her ninth life to lead the dogs over the edge of the gorge, dying for the last time in water, just as Goosefeather had foretold. StarClan showed enough mercy that Stonefur and Mistyfoot found Bluestar on RiverClan’s shore, and her final moments were spent making peace with her surviving children before she went to join her lost daughter, Mosskit, in StarClan.