Guardians of Ga'Hoole 08 - The Outcast

buried. But it is also possible that a vicious, tyrannical owl might try to retrieve the ember, and it would have to be killed immediately. The powers of the ember are too great for it to fall into dangerous talons.”
    “But how do they know if it is a good or a bad owl?”
    “I don’t know,” Gwyndor replied. “They say it’s in the gnaw wolf’s bones—their own bones and the ones they gnaw for the cairns. It’s a kind of code that has been passed down for centuries through the MacDuncan clan. That is why it is so important that only MacDuncans guard the ember.”
    Above them, owls wheeled in the sky, plunging to catch the edge embers, as they were called, that ran off the spills on the slopes of the volcanoes. There were other owls as well, mostly Rogue smiths hoping to strike a deal with the colliers for bonk coals. But the land was bleak and the dire wolves that slinked between the cairns did not have the easy camaraderie that Coryn had seen among the wolves of a clan. Perhaps it was because as young pups and yearlings, they had always been the lowest-rankingmembers, scorned yet feared, destined to always live at the edges of wolf society.
    He already missed Hamish and wondered if he would be permitted to visit his wolf friend. He had not dared to ask when Fengo and Banquo has led him away. Fengo! Where had he heard that name before?
    They were perched on a ridge now, and Otulissa had been observing the owls careening overhead, riding the hot drafty winds. She was saying that she had yet to see a bonk caught on the fly just as Coryn remembered where he had heard the name. It was spoken by the mystic rabbit in the Shadow Forest. The one who could find messages and visions in the designs of a spiderweb. The name “Fengo” had shown up in the web that the rabbit was reading, and she had told Coryn. The frustrating thing about the information in a web was that it never told the whole story. It seemed to Coryn that was always the way it was for him. He never got the whole story—not from the scrooms, not from Mist, not from the web-reading rabbit, and not even when he eavesdropped on parents telling the legends of Ga’Hoole to their young chicks before bedding down for the day. Always, either sleep or a squabble in the hollow would interrupt the storytelling, so Coryn would be left only with fragments. Why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing? Am I really to be the teacher of a new king?
    “No, I’m the teacher,” Otulissa’s shrill voice blasted in his ear slit. He thought he had been thinking to himself but apparently he had said something out loud. “Coryn, have you heard anything I’ve said?”
    “Oh, sorry, Otulissa.”
    “I was saying that not one of the colliers out there,” she nodded toward the nearest volcano, “not a single one has caught a bonk coal on the fly, which is a shame. Bonk coals retain their strength if caught on the fly and not scavenged from the ground. Very inferior grade of bonk, ground bonk is. Am I not right, Gwyndor?”
    “Oh, yes, ma’am, very inferior.” She’s mighty picky, Gwyndor thought. I’d take any bonk coal, ground or on the fly.
    “But first we should start you with harvesting ground coals. Catching on the fly is very difficult. Now watch me scoop up a ground coal, and please note the position of it in my beak when I come back. It is called the ‘Classic Grank Grip,’ named, of course, for the first collier.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Now, before I lift off, I want to always check for wind direction.” This was exactly what Otulissa now did. Then she circled overhead and called down, “You want the wind behind you when you begin to spiral in to collect the coal. You do not want the coal blown into your face. All right, here I go!”
    Otulissa made a wide circle overhead, banked and turned, and began her spiral. She swooped in on a glistening orange coal bed at the base of one of the rivers of embers that ran down the slope. In no time, she was back with the coal in her beak. She faced front, then twisted her neck to the side and flipped her head almost completely around and back so Coryn could observe the Classic Grank Grip from all angles. After this, she dropped the coal into Gwyndor’s bucket. “Sorry, Gwyndor,” she sniffed. “Very inferior, class B, if that.”
    “Never you mind, ma’am. I’ll take any bonk I can get.” Otulissa gave the Rogue smith a withering look as if to say, What’s happened to quality these