The flat gray boulder had warmed under the sun for as long as Donatello could remember, and now a bear stood on it. Donatello was a six-legged lizard, no longer than a fox, and he loved that rock more than anything. He climbed onto it every morning to soak the heat into his cold blood. Today the heat was gone. The thief that took it was not an ordinary bear. Its hide cracked like drying mud, and orange light glowed through the seams, as if fire lived under its skin. "Off," Donatello said. "That's mine. Get off." The bear turned one burning eye toward him and yawned. Steam curled from its jaws. It did not move. It settled deeper onto the boulder, and the stone hissed where the bear's belly touched it. Donatello's legs itched to charge. He knew how that would end. He was small. One swat and he would fly into the ferns. So he backed away instead, tail dragging, muttering every insult he knew. He stopped at the base of a giant tree. Its trunk was wider than the boulder, split by a dark hollow, and its roots spread across the ground like frozen rivers. Donatello had napped in those roots a hundred times. Now he studied them. One thick root ran under the boulder. He pressed his snout against it and felt it move, just slightly, when the bear shifted its weight. An idea took shape. He crawled into the hollow and found what he needed. Rainwater had pooled deep inside the old wood, cold and dark. Donatello could not fight the bear. But he could move the ground it lay on. He dug. Six legs tore at the wet earth beside the largest root, scooping mud toward the pool in the hollow. Water began to trickle into his channel. It ran along the root, under the boulder, and soaked the dirt there black. Donatello dug faster. His claws bled. He did not stop. The soil under the boulder turned to soup. The great stone tilted. The bear woke, confused, and scrambled for footing on the sliding rock. Its claws found no grip. With a wet groan the boulder rolled sideways off its bed and thumped into the mud, and the bear tumbled after it into the ferns. The bear rose, shook itself, and roared. The sound flattened the grass. But the boulder now lay in shadow, half-sunk, far from its warm patch of sun. The bear sniffed the cold, ruined rock, snorted, and lumbered away into the trees. Donatello had won. Then he looked at the boulder. It sat in a mud pit, wet and cold, its sunny spot gone. He had saved the rock and buried it at the same time. He flopped onto a root and sighed. "Great," he said. "Now I have to dig it out."