Chapter 28. The Trolls Reunite
The night held a cool breeze. It wasn’t cold, but the coolness held within it a taste of the cold that would come with winter. A scythe of a moon hung overhead. It was shortly after midnight, and the town had mostly shut itself down. The streets were quiet. The trolls stalked the maze of town, heading toward the locus of Schmoozeglutton’s foodwhoop. For trolls, 95 percent of the day was for goofing off. The other 5 percent was reserved for work. When it was time to work, there was no funny business. A foodwhoop, an indication that dinner was in the offing, was a signal to get to work. Though trolls appeared to be quite cumbersome beasts, they were able to move through the streets of town with a silent intensity.
Schnottweiper and Schnottblower and Droolmeister were the first to respond, being the closest. When they heard the foodwhoop, they stopped in their tracks, realizing that whoever had made the foodwhoop was behind them, and heading their direction. The three trolls stood, Schnottweiper with a newly harvested stop sign resting on his shoulder. These odd trees made darned fine clubs, in his estimation, and he had uprooted the next one he had found. He’d love to have his old club back, but this was a good substitute.
Ferdy Chicken, as he rode along on the horse, had caught occasional glimpses of his quarry in front of him. They remained in the road, and every now and again would enter and then leave one of the cones of light cast by the streetlights. As the eerie call of the foodwhoop sounded behind him, Ferdy saw the trio of trolls slow, then stop. Two blocks ahead. They were only two blocks ahead. He spurred the horse’s flanks with his hiking boots, urging her ever forward.
When the trolls were only half a block away, Ferdy called “Whoa” to the horse and pulled on the makeshift reins. This was his moment. He didn’t know exactly how he was going to face down these creatures, but face them down he was. He’d had enough of floundering around, unsure of what to do, his quarry always outside of his grasp. Finally, he knew just where they were, and he was going to make them pay. He was going to make his stand, right here and right now. He was going to prove his superhero mettle.
By this point, of course, the three trolls had heard the cloppity-cloppity-clop of the horse’s hooves as it thundered down the middle of the avenue. They turned and looked, and immediately sensed that this was the reason for the foodwhoop. The horse with its rider made for a fearsome shadow running through the night. But where Schmoozeglutton had seen the land troll mount the horse, the rest of the trolls didn’t have the benefit of his experience. They thought that the horse and rider were a single entity: a four-legged, two-armed, two-headed beast. As it approached, ever more strange details made themselves known: The creature had hair on its lower body and strange multi-colored plumage on its upper body. It seemed to be half mammal and half bird. Half mammal, half bird, all strange.
But this strangeness was no news to them: they had seen no end of strange things since they had awoken to this new world.
Ferdy commanded the horse to slow again, in a slightly louder voice. “Whoa,” he said, and yanked threateningly on the knotted tripwire. But the horse was in full panic mode by now, and wasn’t going to stop. Before Ferdy knew it, he had ridden right through the middle of the small knot of trolls in the street.
The trolls were as shocked as Ferdy. As the horse pounded its way between the Schnott brothers and Droolmeister, the trolls gave a collective gasp. The creature’s head—its tallest head— loomed above even their massive forms. Surely it would be a test of their trollish hunting tactics. Schmoozeglutton had obviously spent a fair amount of time identifying the largest and fiercest of the land’s fauna. This creature, whatever it was, would make for a fine dinner, a welcome break to their centuries-long fast that had previously been broken in a less than satisfactory way with the hot dogs. When the trolls recovered from the shock of the creature running right past them, they began following it, first at a jog and then at an all-out run. Soon, Schmoozeglutton came running up behind them, taking his position in the rear as befit the leader of the Rabid Band.
The other trolls began to arrive as well. The foodwhoop had pulled them from all directions. They arrived by ones and twos and threes, seamlessly joining the growing formation of hunters. As more trolls came, the group fanned out. Schmoozeglutton kept his position in the rear; from this anchor, the others spread to the left and to the right. They surrounded the beast in three directions. It ran, and they ran behind it and beside it. There was no way that it was going to escape. Soon, the trolls knew, they would close in on their prey, and the beast would be theirs. Dinner on the hoof. With a snort of fear, the horse ran ever faster.