Climbs Quickly wondered how the two-legs could think they knew anything of a world most of them merely saw as they passed over faster than a winter wind, glimpsing what lay below only as a blur of green and brown. Perhaps the two-legs had senses he couldn’t guess at, just as most of them had no idea how the People used mind-speech.

In any case, today, Death Fang’s Bane and Shadowed Sunlight were traveling below the canopy-and not at too great a speed. Climbs Quickly, for one, was going to make the most of it.

Drawing in a luxuriously deep breath of the warm late-summer air, Climbs Quickly caught a new scent, one that shocked and appalled him as even that of the death fang had not…The scent of smoke and, behind it, the hot, brain-snapping odor of freshly burning fire.

Arboreal as they were, the People were all too aware of the danger brought by forest fire. It offered a danger to them greater than any death fang or snow hunter. Those could be escaped by flight into the upper branches or even-with cooperation-fought and killed, although rarely without injury, as his own scars attested. However, even the greatest cooperation could not fight a forest fire. The best the united strength of an entire clan could hope to achieve was to forestall the fire’s spread while the weak and young got away.

Climbs Quickly shivered inside his skin and breathed in the scent again. It was hard to pinpoint where it was coming from with so many conflicting winds, but he was a trained scout.

The course on which Death Fang’s Bane was taking the vehicle was erratic, but it did not seem to be going in the direction of the smoke and fire. For a moment, Climbs Quickly almost gave in to the impulse to ignore what he had smelled. After all, he was far away and this was nowhere near the range of his own Bright Water Clan.