all of the dwarves. Ignoring the calls of Bruenor and Dagnabbit, Thibbledorf Pwent and his Gutbusters assembled into their own formation, unique to their tactics. They called it a charge, but to Drizzt and Catti-brie it more resembled an avalanche. Pwent and his boys whooped, hollered, and scrambled headlong into the darkness of the forest shadows in pursuit of the orcs, leaping through the first line of brush with gleeful abandon.
"The orcs may have set a trap," Catti-brie warned, "showing us but a small part o' their force to drag us into their webs."
Cries resounded within the boughs, just south of the caravan, and flora and fauna, and orc body parts, began to fly wildly all about the area the Gutbusters had entered.
"Stupid orcs, then," Drizzt replied.
He started down from the higher ground, Catti-brie in tow, to join Bruenor. When they reached the king, they found him standing on his wagon bench, hands on his hips, and with groups of properly arrayed dwarves in tight formations al I around him. One wedge of warriors passed skillfully by the defensive squares two others had assembled.
"Ain't ye going to join the fun?" Bruenor asked.
Drizzt looked back at the forest, at the continuing tumult, a volcano come to life, and shook his head.
"Too dangerous," the drow explained.
"Damn Pwent makes it hard to see the point o' discipline," Bruenor grumbled to his friends.
He winced, and so did Drizzt and Catti-Brie, and Regis who was standing near to Bruenor, when an orc came flying out of the underbrush to land face down on the clearer ground in front of the dwarves. Before any of Bruenor's boys could react, they heard a wild roar from back within the boughs, up high, and stared in blank amazement as Thibbledorf Pwent, high up in a tree, ran out to the end of one branch and leaped out long and far.
The orc was just beginning to rise when Pwent landed on its back, blasting it back down to the ground. Likely it was already dead, but the wild battlerager, with broken branches and leaves stuck all about his ridged armor, went into his devastating body shake, turning the orc into a bloody mess.
Pwent hopped up, then hopped all around.
"Ye can get 'em moving again, me king!" he yelled back to Bruenor. "We'll be done here soon enough."
"And the Lurkwood will never be the same," Drizzt mumbled.
"If I was a squirrel anywhere around here, I'd be thinking of making meself a new home," Catti-brie concurred.
"I'd pay a big bird to fly me far away," Regis added.
"Should we hold the positions?" Dagnabbit called to Bruenor.
"Nah, get the wagons moving," the dwarf king replied with a wave of his hand. "We stay here and we'll all get splattered."
Pwent and his boys, some hurt but hardly caring, rejoined their fellows a short while later, singing songs of victory and battle. Nothing serious emanated from this group. Their songs sounded more like the joyful rhymes of children at play.
"Watching Pwent makes me wonder if I wasted my youth with all that training," Drizzt said to Catti-brie later on, the pair patrolling with Guenhwyvar along the northern foothills again.
"Yeah, ye could've just whiled away the hours banging yer head against a stone wall, like Pwent and his boys did."
"Without a helmet?"
"Aye," the woman confirmed, keeping a straight face. "Though I'm thinking that Bruenor made him armor the poor wall. Protecting the structural integrity of the realm."
"Ah," said Drizzt, nodding, then just shaking his head helplessly.
No more orc bands made any appearances against the caravan throughout the rest of that day, nor over the next few. The going was difficult and slow, but still, not a dwarf complained, even when they had to spend the better part of a rainy day moving the remnants of an old rockslide from the trail.
As the days wore on, though, more and more rumbles began to filter through the line of wagons, for it became obvious to them all that Bruenor wasn't planning a turn to the south anytime soon.
"Ores," Catti-brie remarked, examining the partial footprint in the dirt of a high trail. The woman looked up and all around, as if gauging the wind and the air. "Few days, maybe."
"At least a few," replied Drizzt, who was a short distance away, leaning on a boulder with his arms crossed over his chest, scrutinizing the woman's work as if he knew something that she did not.
"What?" the woman asked, catching the non-verbal cue.
"Perhaps I have a wider picture of it,"