Smoke Mountain by Erin Hunter Page A

them, because there’s enough of that smell to make my nose hurt.’
    Kallik nodded. ‘I know what you mean. It feels like burning inside my nose.’
    â€˜Yeah, exactly!’ Lusa agreed. ‘How do flat-faces live with them? I’d want to plug my nose with leaves if I had to be that close to firebeasts all the time.’
    â€˜We should figure out where the smell is coming from, so we can stay far away from it.’
    â€˜Except –’ Lusa broke off and started again.‘Well, flat-faces have food.’ She wriggled, looking embarrassed. ‘I mean, we’re all hungry, and shouldn’t we eat wherever we can? Besides, it’s the only kind of hunting I’m any good at.’
    â€˜Lusa! Kallik!’ Toklo called. Ahead of them, the stream turned left and wound around a tall, grassy hill. Ujurak and Taqqiq waded into the water and started lapping up the sparkling drops. Toklo was standing at the top of the rise above the stream. A kind of orange glow lit up the sky behind him, but it wasn’t the sun, which Kallik could see going down behind the trees in the distance. She hurried up to him with Lusa close behind her.
    â€˜Look,’ Toklo said, pointing with his nose.
    Kallik’s heart leaped with mingled fright and excitement. At the edge of the sky loomed the jagged shapes of mountains, vast and tipped with snow. Even from here she thought she could see tendrils of smoke rising from them.
    â€˜Smoke Mountain,’ Lusa breathed. ‘The old bear spoke of one mountain. Look, there are loads of them!’
    â€˜Dumb old bear,’ Taqqiq muttered.
    â€˜Taqqiq, that’s not nice,’ Kallik said.
    â€˜It’s true though,’ Taqqiq replied. ‘He didn’t know what he was talking about.’
    â€˜It doesn’t matter if it was one mountain or loads of mountains anyway,’ Toklo said. ‘We’re following the river.’
    â€˜Qopuk was right!’ Kallik gasped. ‘There’s the Big River!’
    At the foot of the mountains, gleaming orange in the last rays of the setting sun, was a wide stretch of water. Kallik could see the shapes of no-claw dens clustered along the shore. Floating firebeasts belched smoke as they drifted down the river, and odd no-claw constructions poked out of the earth on both banks, tall and spindly but nothing like trees.
    â€˜It’s so far,’ Lusa said. ‘Even to get to the Big River – and then to get to the other side where the Wilderness is . . . it looks impossible!’
    â€˜We’ll do it one pawstep at a time,’ Toklo told her. Of all of them, he seemed the least awestruck by what stretched in front of them. ‘The way you found me, remember?’
    Kallik’s gaze drifted to the sweep of marshy brown reeds just below them. The stream wandered through the reeds and disappeared under a largeBlackPath. Only a short distance away, on the other side of the swampy terrain, was a long, low no-claw den that vibrated with noise. ‘First we have to get past that,’ she said.
    The den stood by itself beside the BlackPath with no other dens anywhere nearby. Bright fire-globes shone from inside and on top of the den, lighting up the flat black earth around it. Several of the biggest firebeasts Kallik had ever seen were huddled outside, side by side, their eyes dark. They were twice the height of a full-grown bear on its hindlegs, silver like water, with tall black or red snouts. These big ones must be a different kind of firebeast than the littler ones that were all one colour, Kallik though, as different as she was from Lusa.
    She stretched her neck up to see to the other side of the BlackPath. The stream emerged again in the middle of some thornbushes over there, then wandered in and out of sight between scattered scrawny trees. If they could get past the den and across the BlackPath, they could keep following the stream straight to the Big River.
    An