He had only just finished when the scent of squirrel flooded over him; the creature was bounding over the grass toward a tree a few fox-lengths away. Firestar shot out of the bushes, racing at an angle to intercept the squirrel at the foot of the tree, where he killed it with a swift bite to the throat.
Turning back to the thicket, he fixed his gaze on a gorse bush whose branches were waving wildly. “I know you’re there,” he meowed. “Do you want to come out and try for yourselves?”
For a heartbeat there was silence. Then Cherry pushed her way out through the gorse branches with Boris a couple of pawsteps behind her. “I told you he’d hear you!” she snapped over her shoulder at her brother.
“I could hear both of you,” Firestar told her. “Rampaging through the thicket like a couple of foxes in a fit. I’m surprised there was any prey left at all. Come on,” he added in a friendlier tone. “I’ll show you what to do.”
Cherry exchanged a glance with her brother, then ran up to Firestar with her tail in the air. “Can you really teach us to hunt like that?”
Boris followed more slowly. “Why did you bury the mouse and the blackbird?” he asked. “Don’t you want to eat them?”
Firestar dropped the squirrel. “Yes,” he explained, “but not yet. We bury fresh-kill to hide the scent so other predators don’t find it before we’re ready to take it back to the camp.”
“But what’s the point of taking it back?” Cherry persisted.
“Why not eat it here and save yourself the trouble?”
Firestar’s memory winged back to one of his first lessons as an apprentice:
Cherry and Boris glanced at each other again, round-eyed.
Firestar wondered if they’d understood what he had told them.
“Okay, let’s start,” he meowed. “What can you scent?”
Cherry let out a little
“Apart from me and Boris.” Firestar sighed. “What about prey?”
Both young cats stood still, drawing in air over their scent glands. At least they seemed to be concentrating hard.
Firestar picked up his squirrel and took it across to his other fresh-kill, so they wouldn’t confuse its scent with the prey they were searching for.
When he returned, Boris bounced up to him with a triumphant gleam in his eyes. “Mouse! I can smell mouse.”
“Well-done,” mewed Firestar. “But you won’t smell it for long if you go thumping about like that. A mouse can feel your pawsteps through the ground long before it hears you or smells you. Remember how I crept up on the mouse I caught?”
“I remember!” Cherry boasted. She dropped into the hunter’s crouch and glided forward, only stopping to sneeze when a drooping grass stem tickled her nose. “Mouse dung!” she spat.
“That wasn’t bad at all,” Firestar told her. The crouch wasn’t quite right, and she would have to learn to set her paws down much more lightly if she hoped to catch a mouse, but for a first effort it was promising. “Boris, you try.”
The young tabby wasn’t as eager to show off as his sister, and his greater weight made it harder for him to step lightly, but he was doing his best.
“Like this.” Firestar began to stalk forward, and the two kittypets followed his movements with fierce concentration.
Then he spotted a mouse just beyond a clump of dry bracken, and pointed to it with his tail. With a twitch of his ears he told Cherry to try catching it.
Her eyes glittered with excitement. Breathlessly trying to get her movements right, she crept closer and closer, but with her gaze fixed on the mouse she didn’t notice that the arching fronds of bracken were in her way. She blundered into them, and their shadow swept back and forth over the mouse.
An instant later it was gone.
Cherry sat up, her tail lashing. “I’ll never get it right!” she wailed.
“Yes, you will,” Firestar reassured her, while her brother rested his tail across her shoulders. “It was just bad luck about the bracken.”
He glanced around, tasting the air again. He wanted at least one of the kittypets to make a catch before their lesson was over. The only prey he could spot was a squirrel on the lowest branch of a nearby tree.
“What about that?” he suggested, wondering if Cherry would make another of her spectacular leaps. “Do you think you can catch it?”
“I can!” Cherry charged off, with Boris a mouse-length behind her. Reaching the tree, she leaped up, forepaws extended, and snagged one claw in the squirrel’s tail. It fell to the ground, where Boris pounced on it and killed it by biting its throat. Cherry stood staring in astonishment, as if she couldn’t believe they had really caught something.
“Well done!” Firestar exclaimed. “Great catch, both of you!
Can you both jump like that?”