A/N: Short chapters, much, much love.

Chapter 4 - The Strange Wood

Dawn was still spreading her dusky hues and the horizon still held the blush of her wakening when a young hobbit came tumbling out of the barren hazel-thicket beside the river with neither coat nor bag. He looked about himself desperately as if for some place where he might hide himself; but whether upon reflection or in a sudden fit of heedlessness, he breathed deeply, held his nose, and jumped feet-first into the cold flowing water. As he sank he felt (besides an awful shock from the cold) the river close in over his head and carry away his hat.

For a moment all was quiet but the steadily coursing water. Then out from the thicket appeared a second hobbit. Down to the bank she came on after the lad with her cheeks aflame and her brown hair bandied about. The Honeybourn flowed merrily on at her feet, cradled between grassy banks on its path to the Water, and nothing disturbed its course. The hobbit lass, finding no one, gave a cry and turning fled back up the slope.

Suddenly a few yards downstream from where she had stood a sorry brown mop broke above the water, and a sorrier face followed it. Their owner swam back to the bank and climbed with some difficulty out of the reedbed. He threw himself down at last upon the dew-soaked grass, chilled and more than miserable.

When he had caught his breath again he got up and searched for his cast off things under the yellow canopy of catkins and among the white wakening snowdrops in the hazel-brake. Then he wrung out all his clothes as best he could, dressed himself in his smallclothes, and hung the rest upon the branches of a young oak to dry if they might.

Then he laid out his velvet coat - the only dry garment remaining to him - and sat upon it with his head in his hands. 'Well, this is a fine business, and no mistake,' he said to the ground, which seemed to be shaking as he shivered. 'I don't suppose I could have done any worse if I had tried.' Then suddenly Frodo laughed, for the traitorous little flower from the Hill was there before him on the coat, faithfully wound through the second buttonhole.

There was no one to hear him out here but a pair of curious robins nesting in the oak nearby - but those two heard each laugh and every word, and remembered them for quite some time.

'So much for indifference!' said Frodo. 'But poor Daisy! I don't know what to tell her. What could I say that would not hurt her? But I suppose that is why I ran.'

Frodo pulled a little loaf and a piece of soft white cheese he had packed that morning from his bag, and there on the west bank of the Honeybourn the swiftly rising sun grew warm and dried the river from his skin as he breakfasted a second time.

When Frodo had eaten and at last felt dry enough to walk comfortably, or perhaps rather too uncomfortable to stay in one place, he reconsidered his plan. Before he had run into Daisy he had meant to cross Hobbiton Bridge and turn west into unfarmed meadowland. Now he was much too far east; and at any rate he had no desire to tramp back up the Hill with his hat gone and half his clothes dripping water.

He smiled to think of his neighbors' faces as he would pass them by. Frodo did not particularly care what names were come up with in Hobbiton to describe him, but he cared for Bilbo very much, and would not have it said of him that he made a poor guardian; and so when possible he refrained from what most hobbitfolk would call odd behaviour, and what his cousin would call kicking a sleeping dragon.

But where could he go? The energy of travel had not left him despite his cold bath. He gazed hopefully up the Honeybourn, which came down from the North Moors and beyond the Bindbole Wood. He could go that way, for miles, even, without meeting a soul, perhaps all the way to Piney-wood House, and make it back to Bag End in time for supper. If he was very lucky, no one (by which he meant none of the Gamgees, whom he fancied as he had fled would all strongly dislike him within the hour) would note him returning in the dark of evening.

Northward it would be. Frodo stood beside the rushing water, and the warmth of the sun and the plink of stream upon stream, ever mingling and tumbling on, lifted his spirits greatly. He tied his waistcoat and trousers still damp onto his pack - there was not much else he could do about them - took up his walking stick again, and started upriver.

The noon sun had begun to beat hot upon him now, and his brow was sheen with the work of forging a path through wild hills. Frodo had rather begun to regret his plan of following the river, for none of the Shire roads bent near it so far south, and no path was evident along the banks as he had hoped. He had put all his confidence in that, and now it seemed impossible that he should reach any familiar place at all today unless he turned back upon his own path.

It was nonetheless fortunate for Frodo that he had kept to the stream, for he had spent most of the morning lost in his thoughts as he wound among the towering oaks and twisting willows and storm-felled beeches; and had he not kept the silver flicker of water always on his right (though it did not occur to him) he would have been quickly lost among the numberless stalking trees.

As it was, however, the shortening of the shadows and the growling of his stomach declared lunch. Frodo walked on for a time until at last he stopped at the base of an ancient oak and surveyed its barren branches.

The lowest limbs reached down to the very earth, falling like the arms of an old man wishing constantly for rest - and they turned back upward again, in search of a consoling sun. Far above the uppermost branches broke through the canopy in a commanding spread. It was into this tree that Frodo climbed with his bag, up and up into fresher air among the heights, until he found a comfortable hollow in which he might be safely cradled as he ate.

And there he lay, heedlessly devouring his second apple and thinking pleasantly of nothing in particular, when suddenly a great buck was felled at the foot of his oak.

"Oh!" he cried with the rumble beneath him, and accidentally dropped his apple.

The wood had become strangely silent, and all that Frodo could hear was the labouring breath of the buck on the forest floor some thirty feet below him. Frodo peeking down from his perch could see the animal with its sadly heaving breast, but now he felt a peculiar dread growing in him; someone had felled a buck...where now was the hunter? He hid in the hollow as well as he could, drawing into himself and his pack, and he and the forest made no sigh.