Free Spirit Walker by Michelle Paver Page B

louder, smells sharper, as they always did when it began to growl.
     
At last Wolf caught the scent of his pack-brother. He could have howled for joy. Filled with new purpose, he ran on, and the prey ran with him, desperate to escape, and sensing that Wolf wasn't hunting them. A beaver slid off a riverbank and swam for its den. A red deer doe raced with her fawn for the safety of the thickets.
    Suddenly the Thunderer vented its fury. The Wet burst upon the Forest, flattening bracken and bending trees like grass. A deafening crash--and down from the Up came the Bright Beast-That-Bites-Hot, missing Wolf by a pounce, and hitting a pine tree instead. The tree screamed. The Bright Beast swallowed it whole. Wolf swerved--but one of the Bright Beast's cubs fell in front of him and bit him on the forepaw. With a yelp he leaped high--then raced away with the stink of dying tree in his nose.
    He felt as frightened as a cub. He wanted his mother. He wanted Tall Tailless. He was all alone, and very, very scared.
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Renn was all alone in the Forest, and getting scared.
She'd slipped away from the camp two days before, and still hadn't found Torak. Twice she'd heard the demented shrieks of the sick echoing through the trees, and once she'd caught a rustling overhead. It felt as if every bush, every tree, concealed a tokoroth.
    And now the storm was coming. The World Spirit was angry.
Through a gap in the branches she saw a heavy bank of wolf-gray cloud, and heard a rumble of thunder. She was already within striking range. She must take cover.
The valley she was crossing had granite crags on its eastern side, and she saw some promising dots of darkness that might be caves. She ran, snatching up sticks of firewood as she went.
     
The storm burst with appalling suddenness. The World Spirit hammered at the clouds, splitting them open to let loose the rain, hurling dazzling arrows of lightning upon the Forest. Renn caught the flare of a tree going up in flames in the distance. If she wasn't careful, she'd be next.
     
At last she found a cave--but wet as she was, she hung back. A cave can be a shelter or a death trap, so she checked for signs of bear or boar, and that the roof was high enough: otherwise the lightning might find its way down a crack, and through her head. When she was sure it was safe, she plunged in. 108
     
She was shaking with cold and desperate for a fire, but first she saw to her bow. Pulling it out of its salmon-skin wrapping, she hung it on a tree root jutting from the cave wall. After that she propped up her arrows to dry, so that they wouldn't warp. Then she woke up a fire.
     
Out in the Forest, the storm raged. Renn wondered where Torak was, and if he'd found shelter.
    Tracking him from the Raven camp had not been easy, and to begin with she'd had to guess. She'd reasoned that he'd stayed off the main clan trails, which left a number of choices. Bears and other hunters tend to stay down by the rivers where the prey comes to drink, which means that elk and deer trails are higher up the slopes. After what had happened last autumn, Renn had guessed that Torak would want to avoid bears, which meant he'd probably have taken the prey trails.
She'd been proven right when she'd found his shelter, but it had given her a shock to see it crushed beneath an ash tree. A huge relief to find no body inside; and she'd quickly located the remains of the new shelter beside it. She'd known it was his because he made his fires in a star pattern, which wasn't the Raven way.
    Next morning she'd lost the trail again. A boar had obliterated the tracks.
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The fire spat, jolting her back to the present.
Her wounded hand throbbed. As she huddled closer to the flames, she pictured the tokoroth's sharp brown teeth; heard again that malevolent hiss. . . . "Something to eat," she said to chase away the thought.
Her pack contained dried elk meat, smoked salmon from the racks, and salmon cakes--although in a fit of mischief she hadn't taken