Upon Meeting Anduin
Rain lashed the leaves and a wind hissed through the night. Thunder rumbled in the not-so-far distance. Higgen Took, a fairly respectable member of the Took family, was on his way back from Bree.
"Oh what a night for a storm!" He lamented as lightening flashed overhead. "How I wish I was home in my hobbit hole!" He darted along the road, passing from tree to tree with his cloak pulled up tightly around his face.
"Cold," he grumbled. "And wet! And perfectly miserable! I should have listened to that man at the Inn, but I just had to get home tonight." The little hobbit paused and peered through the rain. The Brandywine River was just ahead, and Higgen hurried forward hopefully.
"Oh why?" He cried when he saw that that Buckleberry ferry was tied on the other side of the river. "However will I get home now?" He sat down in the mud on the riverbank and wiped raindrops from his face.
"I suppose that now I shall have no choice but to somehow get to Brandywine Bridge," he sighed. "But that is nearly twenty miles! Whatever shall I do?"
Now Higgen was, as most hobbits usually are, very hungry. He had eaten lunch at the Inn but he had missed tea and was feeling rather cross about it all. The thought of his warm hobbit hole with a pot of tea starting to whistle and some wheat rolls warm out of the oven was nearly maddening.
So Higgen did what most hobbits do when they are hungry: he neglected to think. In fact, Higgen was so hungry that twenty miles through a stormy night seemed well worth a decent meal. And so he picked himself off of the riverbank and tried to brush off his cloak.
"Ruined no doubt!" He sighed when he saw it coated in thick mud. "But there really is nothing for it." And so he set off along the bank, hoping to reach home in a few hours.
But the path that led along the Eastern bank of the Brandywine was overgrown with bushes and briars. Soon Higgen was forced to repeatedly leave the riverbank and find a way around the tangles and thorns. But one time when he turned back toward the river, he found that the river was not where he had thought it was at all. In fact, the rushing of rain drowned out the sound of the Brandywine, which was after all a very quiet river.
"And where are you now, Higgen Took?" He rebuked himself. "Lost no doubt! But best to keep moving along where you think you left that river. How I wish I was home in my hobbit hole!" And by now he was so crazed with fear and hunger that he went quite the wrong way.
"This can't be right!" Higgen mumbled, finding his way blocked by a tumble of large boulders. And so he made his way along and around them until he came to the other side. Then he set off again, and yet again in quite the wrong direction.
After several hours had passed, and the rain had slowed from a downpour to a drizzle and then had ceased altogether, Higgen sat down in a clump of ferns.
"Now you've really done it, haven't you?" He said. But by now he had walked quite a long way, for a halfling, and he was exhausted. So Higgen settled down in the ferns and moss and slept fitfully.
He woke at last to the morning light and the birdsong. Higgen sat up and rubbed his eyes, only to find that he was in a very strange place. Somehow, in the night, he had wandered from the forest and was now on some sort of plain. The large space frightened the little hobbit, and he got to his feet and fled back into the woods.
Indeed, he was running so wildly, seeking a small place where a small person would not feel so very vulnerable, that he ran right into the path of a rider.
"Whoa, steady there," the man yelled as his horse fidgeted and pawed the ground. Higgen looked up at the stranger in terror and the man looked down on him without any expression.
The rider was tall, very tall for a hobbit, and tall for a Man. His hair was cut shorter than the Men Higgen had seen in Bree, but still flopped into the man's eyes. And those eyes were startlingly blue, staring out of his dirty and stubbled face. The man was clearly a rover of some sort, he and his horse looked hard and weathered.
"A hobbit? In the wild?" the man asked, giving Higgen a crooked smile. "What's your name then?"
"Higgen Took, of Tooktown." Higgen squeaked. He was barely as tall as the horse's legs!
"Well Higgen Took, of Tooktown," the stranger said, "I am Anduin, of no town. How did you get out here in the middle of the wild?"
"I got lost," Higgen blushed.
"Pretty lost," Anduin of no town laughed. "Come on then, and I'll take you home."
He offered the hobbit his hand, and lifted him up onto the horse's back. Settling him in the saddle in front of him, Anduin picked up the reins and said, "Hold onto to his mane. Good and tight. Don't worry, it won't hurt him." Then he clucked to the horse and they moved forward at a sedate walk.
"What's his name?" Higgen asked, for he had a great love of all animals.
"Phaethon," Anduin answered, patting the horses neck.
"He's the most beautiful horse I've ever seen," Higgen said in awe. (It should be noted that Higgen had seen relatively few horses, but he did admire Phaethon very much).
"Don't let him hear you say that," Anduin chuckled. The hobbit could feel the laughter in the man's chest and it was comforting to him. "And he's not technically a horse. I bred him from a wild pony of the North and an Elven steed. He's mischievous as an orc and a lot more intelligent about it, too."
They rode on in silence for a little while. Now, as you may have noticed, Higgen enjoyed talking. Silence was not something he was particularly good at.
"Thank you for taking me home," he said at last.
"It's my job," Anduin answered. Higgen twisted around and looked up at the man.
"Is it really?" He asked. "So you often pick up hobbits in the wild and return them home? I had no idea halflings were so poor at navigation."
"No, I don't normally do this," Anduin smiled that crooked smile. "But I am charged with protecting the borders of the Shire. I'm a ranger."
"A ranger? What is a ranger?"
"We are just Men who owe alliance to no lord but instead have pledged ourselves to roam the wild lands and rout out whatever foul creatures we find there." At this moment, Higgen's stomach, much to his great embarrassment, gurgled.
"I'd forgotten how much you little ones need to eat!" The Man laughed, pulling Phaethon to a stop. "Tell me, Master Took, when was the last time you ate?"
"Yesterday noontide," Higgen sighed. Anduin dismounted and picked the hobbit up off of the horse and place him on the grass.
"That's nearly a day ago! I didn't know hobbits could go so long without food!" He said and he began to unpack a saddle bag. He brought out apples and oat farls.
"How do you know so much about Shire folk, if you don't mind me asking?" Higgen asked, tearing greedily into an oat farl.
"I've been to Bree and the surrounding country. I've seen my share of your kind," Anduin selected one of the apples and bit into it.
"But I've never heard of a ranger! How can you have seen us and us not have seen you?"
"Oh, I can avoid being seen if I don't wish to be."
They traveled a few hours more until they reached Brandywine Bridge.
"I really do seem to have made a muddle of things in the night," Higgen said with embarrassment.
"Shall I leave you here? It is a long way still to Tooktown," Anduin said as they crossed the bridge.
"No, no you must come to see my home," Higgen offered. Other hobbits, tending their fields and gardens looked up suspiciously as the ragged stranger rode by. Higgen felt a blush rise up his ears but he spoke sternly to himself.
"Now Higgen Took, this man saved you in the wild. Goodness knows how long you would have been there before you found your way back. If you found your way back. Just ignore their stares, there's a good hobbit."
Out loud he said, "This next left and then the right after that." Anduin guided Phaethon through Bucktown and then across farmland. At last Tooktown was in sight.
Higgen guided Anduin right up to the door of his hobbit hole. Anduin lowered him down off of Phaethon and the little hobbit ran to open the gate.
"Are you sure you want me to come in?" the ranger asked. "Your neighbors, didn't seem very... hospitable." Now if there is something a hobbit cannot tolerated, it is being considered inhospitable. Even if they are inhospitable, they prefer not to be thought of as such.
"Nonsense! You have to stay for tea!" Higgen declared angrily. He was ashamed that his rescuer had noticed his neighbors' reactions. "Let them look all they like, I'm having a guest for tea, and I don't care who knows," He proclaimed loudly so that Clara Took, who lived next door, cast a sharp glance his way.
And so Anduin tied Phaethon outside in the garden and he stooped down to enter the round hobbit door. Higgen put out a large array of seed cakes and mushroom pasties and even brought out both tea and beer.
"Is someone else joining us?" Anduin smiled, "Or perhaps five someone else's?" The ranger ended up staying late, largely because the hobbit wouldn't let him leave.
"I really must leave now, Master Took," Anduin said at last.
"Higgen, you must call me Higgen."
"Very well," Anduin smiled. Outside it was twilight and Phaethon had eaten the azaleas. "Bad horse," Anduin scolded. As he walked in front of Higgen, the hobbit noticed that he limped. He seemed to put almost all of his weight on his right leg, and then hardly any on his left.
"If you ever need me," Anduin said, smiling down on the hobbit from the saddle. "Send a letter to the Inn of the Prancing Pony. It will find me, eventually." Then the mysterious ranger, Anduin of no town, turned his pony (or was it a horse?) and disappeared into the gathering dusk.