Guardians of Ga'Hoole 03 - The Rescue

wet little form.
    “Martin here!” gasped the little owl. He hung limply in the beak of the seagull.

CHAPTER FOUR
The Spirit Woods
    I ’m not sure if it was the impact on the water or the stench that got me, but I’m still feeling a bit dizzy. I have to say, however, that seagull stench is now my favorite fragrance.” Martin turned and nodded at Smatt, the seagull who had rescued him.
    “Aw, it warn’t nothin’.” The seagull ducked his head modestly.
    When he had first vanished, Martin had been sucked straight up, but it was a narrow funnel of warm air and almost immediately it had swirled into a bank of cold air that created a downdraft, and Martin had plunged into the sea. Smatt, who had been navigating between these funnels of warm and cold air, plunged in after him and grabbed him in his beak as he might have grabbed a fish—although Martin was considerably smaller than any fish that seagulls normally ate.
    They had lighted down now on the mainland, in a wooded area on a peninsula that fingered out into the sea.It seemed, for the moment, calm. Although Soren, as he glanced around, found the forest quite strange. All the trees were white-barked and not one had a single leaf. Indeed, although it was night, this forest had a kind of luminance that made the moon pale by comparison.
    “I would guess,” said Otulissa as she studied the sky, “that we are between rain bands here.” For some reason this rankled Soren. It sounded to him as if Otulissa was trying to sum up the weather situation the way Ezylryb would have, being the most knowledgeable owl of all about weather. Poot, who had succeeded him as chaw captain, really had very little knowledge in comparison, but he was a great flier. Now it seemed as if Otulissa had become the self-appointed weather expert.
    Poot looked around uneasily. “That, or a spirit woods.”
    A chill ran through them all. “A spirit woods?” Martin said softly. “I’ve heard of them.”
    “Yeah, you’ve heard of them. You don’t necessarily want to spend the night in them,” Poot replied.
    “I don’t know, Poot,” Ruby spoke in a nervous low voice, “whether we’ve got much choice. I mean that hurricane’s still going. I’ve seen the worst of it. It’s not something you want to mess with.”
    “Well, folks.” Smatt began to lift his wings. A fetid smell wafted toward them. “I think I’ll be clearing outnow.” The seagull looked apprehensively at Poot. In a flash he had lifted off and vanished.
    “What are we gonna do, Poot?” Silver asked, a slight tremor in his voice.
    “Not much choice, as Ruby said. Just hope we don’t disturb any scrooms.”
    “Scrooms!” Nut Beam and Silver wailed.
    “Well, I don’t believe in them,” Martin said and stomped his small talons into the moss-covered ground. Then, as if to prove it, he lifted off and began to search for a tree to light down in.
    “You mind what tree you choose. You don’t want to disturb a scroom,” Poot called after him. But Soren thought that maybe after having been sucked up in a rain band, then dropped into the sea, a scroom was nothing to Martin.
    Scrooms were disembodied spirits of owls who had died and had not quite made it all the way to glaumora, which was the special owl heaven where the souls of owls went. Nut Beam and Silver, however, had begun to cry uncontrollably.
    “Pull yourselves together, both of you,” Otulissa exploded angrily. “There’s no such thing as scrooms. An atmospheric disturbance. False light. That’s all. Strix Emerilla has written about it in a very erudite book entitled, Spectroscopic Anomalies: Shifts in Shape and Light.”
    “Yes, there are scrooms!” the two owlets hooted back shrilly.
    “My grandma said so,” Nut Beam said defiantly and stomped a small talon on the moss.
    “I’ve heard enough about your grandmas,” Otulissa snapped. “Poot, how long do we have to stay here?”
    “Until the hurricane blows through. Can’t take these young’uns”—he nodded toward Silver and Nut Beam—“out in this. Too inexperienced.”
    “You’re making us stay here—with scrooms?” Nut Beam protested. And as if on cue, Silver started to wail again.
    Ruby flew up and then lighted directly in front of the two owlets. She looked almost twice her size as her rust-colored feathers had puffed up in the manner of owls who are extremely angry. In the pale eerie white of the forest, Ruby looked like a ball of red-hot embers. “I’m fed up with all