Golden Mane, Book One of The Adventures of Sarah Coppernick by SJB Gilmour

Author:SJB Gilmour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

The next day, they ate a hurried breakfast. Sarah, Benjamin, Roberta and Robert stayed in wolf form, while Mel, Angela and Ronny dressed in their travelling clothes. The mountain was still spewing ash and soot. Ronny fussed about the state of the tents. Overnight so much ash had fallen on them that they were sagging badly from the weight.

‘Hurry up, Mason!’ Benjamin growled impatiently. ‘Klaus hasn’t finished with this yet. We have to get to the troll’s trail before it’s gone completely.’ He sniffed disparagingly. ‘And I took a bath last night for nothing,’ he muttered.

Mel and Angela rushed to help Ronny dismantle the tents. In a few moments, they were all hurriedly stuffed into their satchels. The tents protested loudly that they needed to be stored properly and that leaving them lying about untidily would make them harder to use later.

Then with a loud yip, Benjamin called the rest of the group.

‘Right!’ he declared. ‘Klaus told me he found the troll’s trail near the southernmost part of the mountain. Let’s go!’ He began to lope away through the forest, with Roberta and Robert following suit. As Sarah prepared to follow as well, Nathan emerged. The bookwyrm looked around at the forest nervously.

‘Don’t worry, Nathan,’ Robert said reassuringly. ‘No birds will come anywhere near you while we’re here.’

Nathan sighed in relief. ‘Thank you, Master Robert,’ he said gratefully. He then wriggled around to Sarah. ‘You go ahead, Miss Sarah,’ he told her. ‘I’ll carry the others!’ Just as he had shrunk to the size of pencil to fit into Sarah’s pocket in Neroland, the purple bookwyrm began to grow. At one metre wide, his body was nearly twenty metres long. At three metres wide, Nathan stretched out nearly sixty metres behind them.

‘Hop on!’ he instructed when he had stopped growing. Mel, Angela and Ronny hurried to follow his instructions. They clambered onto Nathan’s back and grabbed hold of tufts of his bandana, which had also grown to match his size and was very nearly as thick as a blanket.

Ash that had been falling from the sky like gentle snowflakes, had became heavy sods of sooty mud and the air was thick with dark, sulphurous smoke. Sarah bounded away after her aunt and uncles. Nathan, she was surprised to see, wriggled along beside her quite comfortably as they tore through the forest at breakneck speed.

At first all Sarah could smell was smoke and ash, then after a few moments she could detect other fragrances of the forest. She could smell the trees and the forest floor and even the scents of many creatures which had now moved south to warmer weather. Those creatures who had not migrated, like the occasional rabbit or wild boar, had gone, however. Nothing was going to hang around while Klaus was throwing a giant-sized temper tantrum. The forest was eerily silent.

Faintly at first, then stronger, her sensitive nose detected a foreign scent under the thick layer of ash on the ground. It smelled like something between

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.