Watch Wolf

direction and then another.
    “The thing is, Faolan,” Twist said as they reachedthe top of Stormfast’s cairn, “I know these winds seem very confusing. But there’s a peculiar order to them, which you’ll see.”
    Faolan didn’t see any order in the least. The air swirled not only with embers but with the grit scooped up from broken lava flows.
    “Do you notice anything?” Twist asked eagerly.
    “Yes, I notice that I’m having trouble standing upright.”
    “Tuck in your dewclaw and dig in with your others. Look. There are four nice femurs on the cairn, placed just so. Wrap your claws around them. We didn’t place them that way just for the fun of it. Good gripping. Especially the bear femur.”
    “Bear?”
    “Yes, there’s a grizzly femur. Can’t beat it forgripping.”
    Faolan’s splayed paw was drawn to itby an invisible force. He knew that the bones in the cairns sometimes shifted, but why had he never seen this one before?
    “Has this bone always been here?”Faolan cried out over the screech of the She-Winds.
    “Oh, yes. It’s what we call a keybone. It locks the whole cairn together. It never shifts.”
    “How come I never noticed it before?”
    “Maybe you never really needed it before. But you’ll see that it puts a spring in your leaps. Draw a bead on that bone. Fix it in your mind and it will keep you steady and your jumps true. Just feel it and picture it in your mind’s eye.”
    And how he did feel that bone! It was as if he were experiencing a completely new way of seeing, as if his mind’s eye were in his splayed paw. His first jump was not the best. He landed fine but didn’t do the double inverted twist that would allow him to scan the entire rim of the crater and the sky above for graymalkins.
    “I’m sorry,” he said upon landing. “I didn’t do that very well.”
    “It’s challenging in these gusts. You see those owls flying in?”
    “Yes, sir.” Faolan had never seen so many owls before. They seemed to be pouring in from all directions.
    “See how they are flying just off the wind? ‘Crabbing,’ they call it.”
    “Crabbing?”
    “Yes, like a crab walking sideways, except they are flying. The wind is pushing them one way, away from their destination. So they angle their flight toward the direction of the wind. They are not really flying sideways, but instead of flying directly toward the slopes, they have slightly turned into the direction of the oncoming wind to compensate for the wind drift. The amount that the owls turn is called the wind correction angle. Now think about doing that when you jump.”
    “You mean I should jump into a gust.”
    “Yes, smack into it. And don’t start your twists, flips, or pikes too soon or you’ll miss the thermal drafts, and that’s the great treat of leaping when the She-Winds blow.” Twist looked up suddenly. “Look, Faolan! Look at that Masked Owl up there. By my marrow, I think it’s your old friend Gwynneth — a lovely flyer if there ever was one.”
    “How does she do it?” Faolan was amazed. His dear friend appeared to be gliding effortlessly in the buffeting winds above, never even waggling a wing.
    “She’s riding the thermals, those billows of warm air. They lift the owls up high. A free ride, you might call it. And you can do it, too. We can’t get as high as owls do,to ‘owl point’ as the term goes, but there’s a place at thevery top of a lifting draft that is known as the wolf’s peak. Jump into a thermal and let it take you. It’s the closest we wolves ever get to flying. Ready to try it?”
    Faolan was so excited that his paws were almost dancing on the bones.
    “All right. Now let’s not rush this,” Twist said. “When I say jump, you jump.”
    Faolan sensed the lead edge of a very hot gust.
    “JUMP!” Twist shouted.
    Suddenly, Faolan was rocketing into the air. It was so fast he barely had a chance to breathe. Embers whizzed by him like shooting stars. He had entered the sky, a peculiar firmament in which the constellations were composed of red swirling stars.
    Faolan wasn’t flying and yet he might have been. He had fur not feathers, legs not wings, and yet he felt a strangely familiar sensation — a stirring just where his shoulders joined his backbone. The billowing drafts of warm air caressed his underbelly and lifted him higher still. He wasn’t as high as the owls, but he was in their world and it felt good. So good that he almost forgot to do any of the moves he had