Lusa immediately bounded off, checking back and forth across the hillside as she sniffed at likely-looking clumps of vegetation. Kallik followed her to a shallow dip in the ground with a small pool of water at the bottom. The ground around the water was covered by a luxuriant growth of plants.

“This looks promising,” Lusa murmured, half to herself.

She led the way down toward the water, smelling the plants and occasionally tasting a leaf as she went. But before she reached the pool, she halted and looked back toward Kallik, frustration and worry in her eyes.

“I feel so stupid!” she blurted out. “I can’t remember all the things Ujurak taught me. I should have paid more attention, but I thought he would always be with us.”

“I know. We all thought that.” Kallik tried to be reassuring, in spite of her own anxiety. “It’s not your fault.”

“But it is, if I can’t find something to heal Yakone!”

Kallik tried to push away the dreadful thought that nothing was going to heal Yakone. “There must be something here,” she said. “We’ve hardly started to look yet. Come on, let’s get a drink from the pool and then see what we can find down there.”

Still looking dispirited, Lusa agreed. Padding down to the poolside, Kallik drank her fill. As she raised her head from the water, she spotted a moss-covered stone jutting out over the pool. “We can take some of this moss,” she suggested to Lusa. “It’s clean and will be good to pack Yakone’s wound, so it doesn’t start bleeding again.”

“Good idea,” Lusa responded, sounding slightly encouraged.

While Kallik peeled moss off the stone, Lusa searched around the edges of the water, thrusting her snout deep into the clumps of plants. Eventually she straightened up with a bundle of leaves in her jaws.

“I think I recognize these. They should ease the pain,” she told Kallik hopefully. “And now we’d better get back before Toklo loses his fur.”

She bounded back to the top of the dip, and Kallik followed more slowly, carrying the moss. Though she was pleased that Lusa seemed to have recovered her optimism, Kallik couldn’t share it. However hard she tried, she couldn’t banish her deepest fear.

Yakone is so ill! What difference can a few scraps of greenery make?

When they returned to the place where they had left their friends, they found Yakone still asleep, while Toklo was pacing fretfully up and down.

“I thought you’d gotten lost!” he exclaimed, coming to meet them. “Or that the wolves got you.”

“If we’d met any wolves, you would have heard us,” Kallik retorted, padding up to Yakone and beginning to lick his wound clean before packing it with the moss. He twitched his ears at her touch but didn’t wake.