Lone Wolf

the extremely intelligent owls who lived on the island in the middle of the Sea of Hoolemere in a tree called the Great Ga'Hoole Tree. He also remembered her saying that Hoole was an ancient wolf word for "owl." The name did not seem strange to him but had an oddly familiar ring. As he traced the paintings on the cave walls that twisted and turned down often into deeper recesses and then rose once more, opening into huge galleries with soaring spaces, he followed the spirit of Hoole, who led the wolves  to a land he began to recognize as the Beyond. It was a land as wild and desolate as the wolves had ever seen and strange, too, for there was both fire and ice. Hoole had guided them into the eastern region of the Beyond where there was a ring of volcanoes. That was where Fengo and his Clan of Clans first settled.
    The cave itself was a maze of tunnels and passageways. It was easy to get lost. And Faolan did for several days. He was never aware of being very hungry. There was water but precious little food. A rat or two, and bats as well. He became quite proficient at plucking off the bats as they slept in their curious upside-down positions. What really fed him were the stories and the paintings themselves, which he found extraordinarily beautiful. He began to develop a discerning eye and a deep appreciation for how the artist expressed the sensations of motion, speed, and weight all on a flat surface.
    What still perplexed him, however, was the spiraling design, the same as that on the pad of his splayed paw. He had spotted this design intermittently during his explorations.
    Sometimes the passages were blocked. The first time this happened Faolan was quite upset because he was just getting to an interesting part in Fengo's story, after he and  his clan had been in the Beyond for several years and he had met an owl who was said to be the first owl to dive for coals, the first collier. The spiral design had also been appearing with greater frequency. Just as he was about to turn back, he felt a slight draft of humid air. Since he was so deep in the cave, it was hard to imagine where it came from. He nosed around a bit and it was not long before he realized that what he thought was a dead end was really a pile of rock chunks that most likely had caved in during the earthquake.
    He began digging fiercely. With every clump of rubble that his splayed paw cleared, he thanked Thunderheart for swatting what he had considered his good paw and thus making him use and strengthen the splayed one. He was in a fever now to find out the secret of this spiral design that had marked him.
    When Faolan finally cleared away the rubble of the collapse, he passed through into a great bay area that revealed the most magnificent of all the paintings. It was a rounded space that seemed fitting for the subject matter, for he was surrounded by depictions of the five Sacred Volcanoes: Dunmore, Morgan, H'rathghar, Kiel, and Stormfast. Each volcano seemed, upon his first glance, more or less the same. But with closer examination, two  had subtle yet distinct differences. Those two, although he could not sense their names at the time, were H'rathghar and Dunmore. Around each one, owls flew, some diving toward rivers of hot embers that spilled down the flanks of the volcano. H'rathghar appeared to be almost translucent, and in its bubbling cauldron Faolan spotted an ember that appeared quite different from those that composed the ember beds of the flanks. This particular ember was orange with a lick of blue tinged with green at its center, the very same green as his own eyes. The ember was cradled in a pocket of bubbling lava. An owl with a white face and tawny feathers appeared to be plunging directly into the cone of the volcano to retrieve the ember. He gasped at the sight. Was this owl intent on killing himself? But then he saw another volcano directly across from this one. It was in a state of violent eruption, and flying out of a curtain of flames was a magnificent owl, this one with many spots, and in his beak he clutched that same enigmatic ember for which the white-faced owl had been diving. Two volcanoes, two owls, both diving through fire for the same ember. What did it signify? Faolan sensed immediately that these two owls were vastly separated in time. But their stories were linked to each other. And to the wolves.
    Slowly, Faolan began to circle the space, trying to fit together the pieces of this painted puzzle. At first, he had