"Stonepelt – NO!" That at least is something he understands. Stonepelt sat down and sneezed, apparently not appreciating that I had yelled at him for sniffing a deathberry. "Stonepelt, you and I have talked about those. Red berries are bad, they could kill you, they almost have before." Stonepelt grunted. I'm still not sure if he really understands me, but he listens, so I'm assuming so. I carefully clawed the little bundle of deathberries off the bush and buried it. "Stonepelt, let's go back to your cave now." He slowly stood up and I leaned against him so he wouldn't tip to one side as he walked. As we meandered back to his den, an abandoned fox cave, I heard a faint call in the distance.
"Whisperinggrass! Whisperinggrass!" I can tell it's my apprentice, Falconpaw. He's always looking for more training, a feat that's hard to do when I have Stonepelt to care for as well.
"Hurry!" I whisper urgently to Stonepelt. Falconpaw has already come close to discovering Stonepelt once too many times. Once I saw that Stonepelt was nicely hidden again, I raced back to camp to find Falconpaw standing on top of the apprentice den screaming his head off. "Get down from there!" I hissed at him. He was a fairly new apprentice, so I should probably cut him some slack. Still, climbing on top of an insecure den was a pretty bad idea, even for Falconpaw.
"Oh, good, you heard me." He stated happily as he bounded off the top of the rock.
I glared at him, "How could I not have?" He shrugged and I countinued, "Falconpaw, please don't do something like that again. You know how unstable the roof of that thing is. If it collapses you could kill yourself or some other apprentice that was inside. Promise me you won't do it again."
Falconpaw sighed."I promise. Can we go out hunting now? I want to try to catch some bids!" I couldn't deny such enthusiasm once he had been going on for moon about how he would catch the biggest one in the forest and whatever.
* * *
"That was very good Falconpaw," I complimented as we walked into camp, each carrying fresh-kill. Stormcloud, a pretty gray tabby she-cat and the third cat on our patrol said something I couldn't understand with the rabbit in her mouth. "Um... sorry Stormcloud, what was that?"
She dropped her bunny onto the fresh-kill pile. "I said that it looks like it's going to pour. " I looked up and saw she had spoken the truth. I could see the black clouds moving towards us. The storm didn't look like it would hit until sunset though, and I had to go tell Stonepelt, he hated storms.
"There's something I've got to do first," I muttered, dropping my blackbird and vole.
I bounded off to hear Stormcloud cry behind me "Whisperinggrass, Fernstar isn't going to be happy if your still out when the...." but her words died down as I sprinted out of camp.
When I got to Stonepelt, he was cowering in the corner of his pathetically small den, whimpering. He must have seen the clouds even though I always tell him not to come out of his cave. "Stonepelt, you know there's a storm coming and that I can't stay with you." He looked up, fear in his blue eyes and I licked his ear comfortingly. "Please just stay here, all right?" When he nodded I murmed "Bye," and slipped out of the small opening only to find myself looking into a tom's pair of amber eyes.
"Hello Whisperinggrass," he said.
"Oh no!" was my reply.
A/N: sorry that was short as well, I really wanted to continue writing it, but I also wanted to leave off the cliff hanger there. please R&R.