Chapter Text
“Dragons ate them” is a common explanation for the absence of a family member. “Dragons ate your mother” is the reason Hiccup is left to his own devices most days. When he was much younger he’d been sent to his cousin’s house, where Snotlout’s mom (who was his dad’s sister, which made her his aunt) sent the two out to play. Hiccup is old enough now that he doesn’t need to go over there anymore. He’s alright with that. He occupies himself by drawing and exploring, and if he gets really very lonely he goes to visit Gobber, who is not his dad but is almost like a dad, in a way, kind of.
This is where he finds himself today; tucked in the corner of the forge, basking in the heat of the flames. He is allowed to be here as long as he’s not in the way, which he is a lot of the time anyway. Gobber is grumbling to himself and walking about the forge in the distinct thumping way he does. Hiccup is on the floor, which needs to be swept, with a leaf of paper and a stick of charcoal. The charcoal is almost down to the nub and he’s going to need to ask for a new one soon. Though he knows Gobber will gladly provide one, he dreads making a nuisance of himself.
“Lovely yak,” Gobber says, and Hiccup realizes that the man is looming over him. He looks up, startled, then glances down at his paper. This is what Gobber was talking about, he realizes, and smiles.
“It’s a Nightmare,” he corrects the man, though now that he looks at it it’s a little yak-like. He’s been working on long-necked dragons recently, and this dragon’s neck isn’t long enough. It’s hard, though, because it doesn’t really seem like a neck should be that long and he has no model to work off of. Hiccup makes a fist and rubs the dragon’s neck and head out to draw a new line, long and heavy.
“There ye go, much better,” Gobber decides, ruffling Hiccup’s hair. That’s something Gobber does. “Do you need more charcoal?”
Hiccup shakes his head. He would have said yes, but a cool breeze blows in the door, making the fires flicker, and he suddenly wants to be outside. “I’m gonna go in the woods,” he decides out loud, folding his paper up and tucking it in his belt for safekeeping. He tosses the charcoal into the forge on his way out, waving to Gobber as he dashes away.
From behind him, he catches the end of Gobber’s instructions not to go too far. He shoots the man a thumbs-up over his shoulder, but the thumbs-up is a fib. Not a full-blown lie, because how far is too far? Hiccup really need only go as far as the troll traps.
Gobber talks about trolls a lot. They steal his tools and socks, and Hiccup thinks it would be nice to get Gobber’s socks back. Like several other people on Berk, Gobber is missing a leg. Unfortunately, it’s the right leg—and trolls, according to Gobber, only steal left socks. Hiccup finds this tragic.
Gobber talks about dragons, too, and Hiccup’s dad talks about dragons more than anything. They’re his favorite topic, even though they make him angry. Hiccup would be setting dragon traps in the woods, too, but he doesn’t have the bait to spare. He had set a dragon trap before, with fish as bait, but his dad had noticed the fish were missing and had yelled at him spectacularly. Dragons already took enough of Berk’s food. Hiccup would really like to trap a dragon, because this would make his father very happy, but he thinks maybe being punished for stealing food isn’t worth it.
Socks, unlike fish, don’t go bad. This is why troll traps are so easy to set.
He’s been borrowing some socks off clotheslines, since he figures most people have plenty to spare. He can’t really tell the difference between left and right socks, so he hopes the trolls don’t actually care. Maybe all socks are left socks in Gobber’s world. It would make sense, Hiccup reasons. This is why he’s stolen mostly Gobber’s socks—this ensures that they are all left socks. Gobber will miss the socks for a while, but Hiccup will return them with the recovered Troll Socks. Then, he figures, Gobber will have twice as many left socks. Also, he would really like to see a troll.
In the meantime, the trolls have been stealing more socks than ever.
It doesn’t take very long to walk by the first of his troll traps, which is right at the edge of the woods. There are currently five traps, set at different intervals throughout the woods. They are fairly close to the village, since Hiccup figures the trolls don’t mind coming there, but they’re far apart because different trolls probably live in different places and take different paths to Gobber’s house. This is his reasoning, anyway.
Today, he hikes through the dense part of the woods, back toward the beach. He has seen footprints on the beach, which he thinks might belong to trolls—ergo, the beach is a clever place to set a trap. He picked up a spare sock on the way out, and as soon as the beach is in sight, he starts looking for a good tree. He is small, so the tree needs to be very skinny, and it always takes him a while to find one he can bend all the way over. Today is a good day, and he finds a small tree quickly.
“I’ll get you this time, sock thief,” Hiccup mutters, grabbing a flexible branch and tearing it away from the sapling, bends it, and sticks both ends into the sand. This is the trickiest part of building a troll trap because the branch needs to be buried well enough that it doesn’t just pop out. Hiccup has found that the best way to ensure this doesn’t happen is to take out his knife, whittle both ends of the branch into points, and stomp the peg down into the dirt, creating an arch.
After that, setting the trap is fairly easy. He pulls the sapling down, ties one end of a leather strap to it (tightly!) and ties the middle of the strap to a short stick which he pulls through the arch. He braces a longer stick parallel to the ground between the short stick and another peg. The long stick is the trigger. He places the sock on top of it and a string loop around it. When a troll reaches for the sock, its hand will push the long stick down, releasing the short stick, which will be pulled through the arch. The sapling will snap up and the string will tighten around the troll’s wrist. Trapped!
Hiccup did not come up with this trap design all on his own. Gobber showed him how the catapults worked and it gave him the idea. He thought it was a clever idea until he forgot where one of the traps was—now he attaches bells to the saplings, so when the trolls try to escape he will hear it ringing and know he has caught one.
The sun is a little lower in the sky by the time he finishes his trap. It’s about midafternoon, he figures, and he might as well check his other traps.
On the way to the nearest trap, he is distracted by a hole in the ground. He wonders if a dragon might live in there and imagines what kind of dragon it might be. The dragons have a fortress off the island, though. This is probably a squirrel hole. It looks like it might be a good place for a squirrel to live.
Hiccup doesn’t hear any ringing from his trap, so he has to hunt around for it a bit. It takes him a long time to find it because the sapling is no longer bent over; the sock and the long stick are gone—somebody has sprung the trap, but they aren’t here any longer.
“Aw, not again!” Hiccup whines, sliding down the slight incline to where the trap rests. This has happened before. He thinks the trolls might be getting wise, in which case he’ll need to rethink his design. He hurriedly begins the search for a new long stick, knowing that he’ll have to come back and reset this trap once he’s found another sock. “Trolls,” he mutters. “Maybe I can try a box trap. No, that looks like a trap. If they know this is a trap, they’ll know a box with a sock inside is a trap. Ugh, I lost another sock. Gobber’s gonna-“
He is interrupted by distant jingling. “Oh. Oh!” He scrambles to his feet, throwing leaves and sticks across the ground. He sprints up the hill and back toward the beach, branches slapping him in the face as his feet thud across the packed-in leaf mold. He almost twists an ankle in the s quirrel hole, but manages to avoid it. The jingling has stopped by the time he reaches his trap, and he figures the troll is resting.
But when he arrives in the clearing, he’s greeted by a familiar sight: a sprung trap, with a distinct lack of trolls. He groans. Once again, the long stick and sock are gone. In their place, however, is a folded piece of paper.
“What the-“ Hiccup edges closer. “What’s that?” He picks up the paper and unfolds it. It’s not folded so much as crumpled, but written across its surface, plain as day, are two almost correctly-spelled words: Try Hardr.