cats

F rom the moment you take your first pawstep out of the nursery, you long to go to Fourtrees. You long to meet cats from other clans, to gaze up at the Great Rock beneath StarClan. But you have to wait. Six moons, to be exact, until you're an apprentice.   My first gathering was only two days after I received my apprentice name, Bluepaw. In my first training session, I caught a squirrel that was as big as me. My mentor, Stonepelt, was so impressed, he invited me to the gathering, ahead of the older apprentices.   The moon was as round and yellow as my mother Moonflower's eyes. She ran beside me, her tail lifted proudly. We stoped at the top of a wooded slope. I gaze down onto a wide clearing-four massive oaks that looked as old as the highstones beyond.   The clearing was full of cats, meowing and murmuring. In the moonlight, their fur looked silver, and it rippeled like the surface of the river. Their eyes flashed like leaping fish. In the center of the clearing stood the G