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"Oh," Adan grinned. "Like those words that Nako likes to say but Neko tells her not to when I'm around. Gotcha."

He never understood why he wasn't supposed to know those words, after all they were just words.

"Oh, okay," Adan grinned, still hopping around a bit, bored with waiting on the plateau for so long. He turned back to Aragost. "When can we keep going?" he asked eagerly.

Aragost turned and looked down on the boy. "Perhaps the more pertinent question," he replied softly, "is, is Lin ready to continue? Has she rested enough? Or ... should we begin our lesson here?"

After all, this being a plateau, there would be tracks enoug for them to begin to identify, even if they didn't actually start tracking any one particular animal yet.

Aragost nodded. "Then we will begin by going to a water spring a little further up the mountain. It is one of the only water supplies up here, and so there will be many tracks around it for you to identify."

He motioned for Lin to come along.

"Follow Adanedhel," he instructed her. "He knows exactly where it is, and I will follow behind both of you in case you fall ... there will be quite a bit of climbing before you reach it."

Adan grinned and beckoned to Lin. "Come on," he urged her excitedly. "This way!"

And he turned towards the steep slope of the mountainside and began to climb.

Adan skipped along some large boulders, then pointed up at a little ledge.

"We gotta get up there," he grinned at Lin, "but the easiest way is up this tree here. Did you ever climb a tree before?"

And without waiting for her answer, he grabbed the lowest branch and tugged himself upwards.

Aragost watched as the children made their way up the tree. It was one of the easier trees to climb, with many branches easily within reach of each other, so he didn't foresee any troubles with it. Still, he would wait until they had both made it up to climb to the ledge himself, just in case.

Of course, he could always tell Lin about the other way up to the ledge ... there was a path, a longer path, with rocks to climb over ... and she had never climbed a tree before ... but she was the type to do things the hard way, and enjoy it, so he decided that he would leave things as they were.

Adan peered at Lin over his shoulder. "It's a long way up," he warned her, "so don't fall down, okay?"

"Adanedhel," Aragost called from where he was still standing at the bottom of the tree, "you should pay more attention to where you're climbing ... Lin will be fine on her own."

The last thing he needed was for the boy to fall while worrying about Lin's safety.

"I'll be okay, Ara-kun!" Adan grinned. "Don't you worry about me!"

"Almost every day," Adan grinned, "except we don't always come this way. Sometimes we go on different mountains, and sometimes we go on the other side, or sometimes we just go to a different place, and sometimes we don't always go on a mountain, but Ara-kun takes me out somewhere just about every single day. He teaches me a lot, Mama says it's good since she can't teach me and Ada grew up in a town so he doesn't know all the forest things that Mama or Ara-kun knows."