"Men still live who, in their youth, remember...
Trees still live who, in their youth, were shaken by a living wind.
But a decade hence only the oldest oaks will remember, and at long last only the hills will know."
In Which Hiccup Gets Started on This Venture
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III left the village of Berk in May. He had his pocket knife, a bundle of odds and ends, a small axe, and a fire striker, which he had fashioned himself from scraps in Gobber's smithy. He also had his ubiquitous drafting utensils and sketchbook, bound loosely in leather. Just because he was running away didn't mean that he planned to live like a barbarian.
It wasn't his fault, really. From where he'd been standing, it really looked like his drop net had snared the Nightfury. Even when the rest of the village had scoffed, he had been so sure. And when his father had humored him and gone to check?
Well.
Of course he had missed.
He was the laughing stock of the village. Again. Still.
What was worse, when Stoick discovered his intention to run away a few days later? The man laughed. Guffawed and beamed with pride. He told Hiccup of when he had run away as a child and been back before nightfall, and how his father had done the same. It turned out that trying to run away was another manly Viking tradition, and Stoick had been proud to see his son take it up.
Hiccup blushed vividly when his father patted him on the shoulder and implied that he would see him for dinner that night. Yet again, no one took him seriously. Not that he could blame them; he had yet to give them reason to. Even as he smiled and nervously and laughed along with those who dismissed him, his resolve steeled. Only Gobber had the good sense to cast him a concerned glance.
He was packed and gone before his father returned home that night.
May was not a kind month on Berk. The sun climbed higher each day, but snow clung to every shadow and dip in the land. Evergreens were still hunched from their winter load of snow and broad-leaved trees had just begun to bud. Only early spring flowers had managed to push through the leaf litter, and Hiccup made good time hiking through the tamped down remnants of last year's undergrowth.
"Well this was a stupid idea." He mumbled, eyes trained on the ground. "Run away? I live on an island! An island plagued by dragons!"
But, even after he barely escaped without broken toes after aiming a frustrated kick at a dirt clot that was still frozen to the ground, he maintained his heading.
That night he couldn't find enough dry tinder to make a fire and settled instead in a rocky crag, out of the wind, with his winter cloak as a blanket and his pack as a pillow. His axe lay within easy reach, just in case a hungry Nightmare decided to snuffle about in the night. In which case he'd be roasted before he could so much as heft the thing, but perhaps he could beat off an uppity Terror.
Despite his better judgment, in the long hours he lay awake he never seriously entertained the concept of returning to the village. He was a Viking, and had all of the stubbornness issues that entailed. Dragons were an occupational hazard, a cold night wasn't even an uncommon occurrence let alone a deterrent. Even if it had been, he wasn't about to give up without a fight.
Not this time around.
"Just for a couple weeks, months, maybe. I'll prove that I can do it, and be back before winter…" Hiccup cast his axe one last glance, the polished metal of the head just barely visible in the diffuse moonlight, then tugged his cloak up to his nose and slept.
Survival on his own came far easier than even Hiccup expected. True, he hadn't been too nervous about it in the first place- he'd spent his life surrounded by all aspects of fishing, after all, and the woods had been his second home before he'd started helping Gobber at the forge. The climb over the mountains was rough, but after he'd put Berk's rocky spine behind him he'd followed a stream to the sea. From there on out it was child's play.
Hungry fish, newly active after the thaw, snapped up every bait he put out, in ocean or stream. No one ventured to the rugged far side of the island where the ground was too steep and rocky for grazing or farming and the coasts too shallow for ships to moor close to shore, so edible plants still grew unharvested and mussels and limpets were easy to find. Even small game would have been easy enough to catch, had he cared to practice setting snares.
Instead, with nothing but time, Hiccup wandered up the coast. He'd stay for a couple of days if he found a good shelter or a particularly plentiful foraging site, but otherwise kept moving north. Out of habit he'd been keeping a rough map of his travels, but by the third week he was challenging himself with more precise measurements and accurate drawings.
That's when he really began to notice the dragons. The village of Berk was on the south end of the island. As he moved to the north end and spent more time still and silent as he drew, the dragons became more numerous. And, he noted, markedly less vicious. He spent hours with his legs dangling off of a cliff, just barely out of the spray, sketching a Monstrous Nightmare as it basked on a nearby sea stack. It was closer than he'd ever been, yet the beast scarcely spared him a glance before it lethargically stretched its wings to catch the sun and closed its eyes. Near the sketch he noted:
"Surprisingly placid when not threatened. The most troubling aspect was trying to draw its ochre scales and gold highlights with nothing but charcoal."
The son of the Chief even spent an entire evening watching a group of Deadly Nadders spiral and swoop up and down the coast, tossing and playing keep-away with an unremarkable bit of driftwood. Their forms slipped in and out of silhouette as they spiraled before the setting sun. Hiccup, sprawled on his back, watched them until it was too dark to see.
So he hadn't been particularly upset when he spotted a small group of Terrors watching him from a safe distance as he gutted a couple of trout. They were wary enough, slinking about a nearby boulder, but their oversized heads and bulbous eyes weren't exactly inconspicuous.
"You guys aren't so bad, yeah?" Hiccup chuckled. "Here ya go…"
Three Terrors bounded forward when he tossed his leftovers in their direction. Even though it was only a few feet away from him, the scraps were gone in seconds. After that they showed very little fear, and one that snuffled about Hiccup's feet even allowed him to brush the outside curve of its wing.
And so feeding the small dragons became a habit of his. Though he was always on the move and rarely saw the same group twice, he managed now and then to coax one in close enough to pet. That was the only encouragement he needed.
Five weeks in- he watched the sunset with his sketchbook open on his lap and a particularly friendly group of Terrors piled about his legs in content, food-induced slumber, and decided that he didn't need to go back to Berk quite yet. Even if he had been gone long enough now to make a point…
"I's not like I've got friends who will miss me!" He confided to a sleeping lizard with a series of exaggerated nods, and patted its round little ribcage. "And dad… he might miss me, but he'll be fine. He's always fine. Another few weeks without the fishbone getting in his way won't bother him…"
"I'll at least map to the northern most tip of the island, then." He relaxed again with a crooked smile. "We'll see how long that takes."
Night had fallen. But the clear sky wouldn't bring much dew and Hiccup didn't have the heart to wake the Terrors, so he reclined against a boulder and watched the stars come out. Perhaps it was a sign the Gods approved of his decision that, just then, he heard a faint whistling on the wind.
A couple weeks ago, even that distant sound would have had him leaping to his feet, and probably losing his balance in a spectacular fashion soon thereafter, but now only his eyes snapped open. He lay still. Gronkles had been passing by all afternoon, even if he only saw a few of them their rumble was unmistakable, and this new sound conjured only one thought in his mind-
Nightfury.
He was torn between raw, ingrained fear and a wave of excitement so intense it caught him off guard. When the star-splattered twilight sky remained devoid of movement for a couple more minutes, he couldn't decide if he was relieved or disappointed.
But he wasn't surprised. Even though it was dead calm, the wind silent, and he couldn't think of any other probable source for that faintest of whistles- he tried to convince himself that he was mistaken. Nightfurys were the rarest, most elusive, most dangerous, most prized of all of the known species. To think that he would find one by accident while napping on the beach was absurd.
But that night, warmed by his living blanket of Terrors, he dreamed of darkness and speed and the roar of wind around unseen wings. For the first time, dragons crawled from his nightmares and into his dreams.
I will try to keep my updates bite-sized, as the chapters in My Side of the Mountain are. The matter-of-fact writing style is an attempt to stick to theme as well. If you have not read the book then I do recommend it, but you're not missing out on anything in this story.
There will be baby Nightfurys in the next chapter! So, to keep us grounded, I decided to keep up with the sobering opening quotes. This one is courtesy Aldo Leopold (1947, On a Monument to the Pigeon). Yes indeed, he is referring to the passenger pigeon, once the most numerous bird in the world- they flew in flocks so thick they blocked out the sun, so long they took three days to pass, so large that the beating of their billions of wings could be heard as a distant thunder-like rumble long before they came into sight and built to a roar as they passed overhead. This September the first (2014) will mark the 100th anniversary of their extinction.
"At other times I have seen them move in one unbroken column for hours across the sky, like some great river, ever varying in hue; and as the mighty stream, sweeping on at sixty miles an hour, reached some deep valley, it would pour its living mass headlong down hundreds of feet, sounding as though a whirlwind was abroad in the land. I have stood by the grandest waterfall of America… yet never have my astonishment, wonder, and admiration been so stirred as when I have witnessed these birds drop from their course like meteors from heaven." -Simon Pokagon, from "The Chautauquan," November, 1895
There were pigeons when he was a boy.
Hold tight to your dragons, my friends.