As they climbed up the hillside, Bogrel continuously stopped and stared into the river valley below, from which they had traveled the past few days.
"What is it you see down there?" asked Dara, at a point she could speak with him out of earshot of the others.
Bogrel simply made a grim face accompanied with a disinterested grunt.
"Oh come off it, if you won't talk to me, who will you talk to. I'm not better off not knowing what's going on. I have every right to know what's down there, if it's in plain view. Just because I can't see that far doesn't mean I don't know something is down there."
Bogrel fixed her with a stare from under furled eyebrows. "We are still being pursued, by a small group of men," he said. "I saw them last night, but on the wrong side of the river. They are perhaps a day behind us, but surely they are travelling faster. We need to lose them somehow."
Dara took the news without flinching. "Do you have any ideas?" She asked after a thoughtful minute.
"No," he answered simply.
"Then we can still hope to get off this mountain before they catch us," she said.
"Hopefully there is a good way down, and I'm not just getting us cornered. We need to cut westward soon, to get out of these wild lands."
They stopped for a meal in a flat part of the hill they were traversing. The children ate and caused a fuss among themselves, a fuss that was nothing less than expected and dealt with by Dara. The fussing kept them oblivious to the tenseness that Dara obviously exuded, shared by Bogrel. Only Sara knew her sister well enough to notice that she was tremendously worried.
"What's wrong?" Sara asked her older sister, but Dara just shook her head and gave a barely audible response.
"Finish up," Bogrel announced. The mood changed at once, as his word could often do to the group of children. As they took their last bites of food, a crow crowed at them from a small distance away.
"It's that stupid crow again," said Ezrik. "It's always the same stupid bird, I swear."
"They all sound the same," said Ezara.
"No, I can tell with this bird. I hate its voice."
Ezara let the matter drop, doing her own best to ignore the irritating animal making a commotion at the edge of the clearing.
As Ezrik stared angrily at the bird, he saw his cat Boots burst from the bushes. In a flash quicker than a blink of the eye, the crow's neck was in the jaws of the cat. The heckling crowing turned to a panicked death cry, attracting everyone's attention. Wings flapped and feathers flew. The commotion settled down to the clear image of cat shaking the bird in its jaws.
Once all was quiet and still, the boys exclaimed among each other about the kill. A minute later, Boots himself came to them, dragging the limp body of the crow in his bloodied mouth. Damar and Garik cheered as the cat approached them victoriously. Dropping the bird, he remained for some congratulatory affection and then dashed off into the bushes again, leaving the crow.
The boys poked at it, with comments of surprise and excitement coming from them. "Its got a marking on it!" exclaimed Damar.
Ezara came over to look, turning it about, observing a marking on the breast of the bird, where it was bare of feathers. She picked it up and showed it to Bogrel. "Is this a marking you recognize?"
Bogrel took his eyes from looking back and towards the bird. He said nothing, but Ezara had come to know him well enough in a short time to see that he was bothered. "We need to go."