Being a hollow-guard requires incredible skill and strength. One must trust their instincts, even on the smallest of hunches. They must also be fierce and unyielding, willing to lay their life down for the Tribe of Soaring Oaks.
As of late, many ha...
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The forest did not mourn the same lives as the Tribe, so when Fern Beneath Old Beech was borne into camp, heart still and eyes closed, only the Tribe cried out. The Tribe wailed, aching for a life long lost. It howled, wishing for a way to alter fate long set. It suffered, burying a cat long revered.
Yet the forest did nothing but hold its stoic silence. The oaks the Tribe took its name from so long ago didn't so much as creak, and the cool, twisting winds of early autumn ceased altogether. Nothing moved, nothing stirred, nothing lived but the Tribe of Soaring Oaks.
It was living poorly at that.
Fern was not the first cat to die. She was the first prey-hunter to die, yes, but not the first cat. Before had come six of the Tribe's finest hollow-guards, struck down in their prime.
Mauled, really, if Drift of Red Leaf was honest with himself. He'd seen every one of his fallen Tribemates up close, and had even been the cat to discover the body in one case. They were all the same: bloodied, broken, with fur torn out and great gaping wounds in the shape of hungry jaws.
Like the rest of the Tribe, Drift blamed the wolves. In the past, the grey beasts kept to their packs, hunting animals that would fill their bellies, which cats did not. Cats had no fear of being devoured by the wolves, and needed only to refrain from going out of their way to encounter a pack. The packs and the Tribe, with only a few rare cases of foul crossings, lived separate lives, seated expertly on two sides of a fragile balance by some higher power.
But then the first lone wolf roamed too close to the hollow. It attacked no one, but Drift remembered it clearly all the same. Hackles raised, young heart pounding in his chest, he locked eyes with the wolf for the scant few seconds the creature deemed him of interest.
It snarled.
He snarled back.
And then it was gone, a ghost of the misty spring morning. Drift reported it to the Poolteller, eager to prove his worth as a watchful, valiant hollow-guard who was unafraid to look death in the eye. He had identified a threat to his Tribe, and was now ensuring the Tribe's preparedness for the future.
This was the old Poolteller, though, the one who died days before the first attack. He asked his hollow-guards to be more vigilant, but did no more. A wandering wolf was no threat to him or his Tribe. It would move on to richer grounds in search of a pack, as all wolves do.
Seven attacks and one new Poolteller later, the wolf appeared to have no intention of leaving. Similarly, the to-bes had no intention of becoming hollow-guards. As a result, the guards dwindled and the shifts thinned. By the time a break in the deaths arrived, the guards were so scarce that the Poolteller could only afford one cat per shift assignment each morning. Dawn to sunhigh was the preferred shift, if only because the world was filled with light, and danger could be seen coming from afar. It was also a warm shift, something coveted with the full onset of autumn. Sunhigh to dusk was popular for similar reasons, though cats preferred to witness the sunrise, not the sunset. However, sunset was better than keeping watch from dusk to moonhigh, and that was in turn superior to standing guard from moonhigh until dawn.
The dark hours were the dangerous ones. Cats failed to return from the darkest shift more than any other, and every time the Poolteller assigned Drift the watch from moonhigh until dawn, Drift shuddered, imagining his body hanging limply from the slavering fangs of a wolf.
He imagined it especially clearly as the wolf stared at him, too.
