How to Be a Dragon Star 1

Chapter Seven - New Tail

This time, as he was walking into the pit, Hiccup wasn't quite as wary. He saw the Night Fury almost immediately, staring at him. At the odor radiating from the huge sack Hiccup had brought with him, he slowly began walking forward.

"Hey, Toothless," Hiccup said, defiantly speaking the name aloud. It stuck with what he had first seemed when Hiccup got a close look at him. It seemed a little odd for a dragon, and a Night Fury at that, but it had started subconsciously and Hiccup kind of liked the abnormality of the word as a name. "I brought breakfast. I hope... hope you're hungry!"

And he tipped the rucksack's contents onto the ground. Out spilled fish. So many fish. He had something else with him, something he had made the night before, but he hoped Toothless wouldn't be wary of it. If it worked....

"All right, we've got some salmon, some nice Icelandic cod, and a whole smoked eel."

To Hiccup's pleasure, Toothless barely glanced at the cylinder-looking shape in Hiccup's hands. His hunger seemed to have gotten the best of him, and he began sifting through the fish. Hiccup watched him, waiting until he began to eat.

But suddenly, Toothless roared in fear and flared his wings out, teeth bared and eyes widened. Hiccup saw the yellow-and-black striped worm-shaped fish in the pile, and if gazes could burn, it would be a pile of ashes.

Hiccup held up the dead electric eel to make sure it was what Toothless disliked. The dragon snarled, glaring daggers at the fish. Hiccup realized that dragons had probably developed a fear of electric eels, and stayed away from them even if they weren't moving, just in case it was sleeping and not dead.

When Hiccup saw Toothless open his mouth and blue begin to glow behind his teeth, the dangerous sign of a plasma blast building, he blinked. "No, no!" he cried hurriedly. "I didn't know.... Yeah, I don't really like eel either." And he tossed the carcass into the lake, instantly scaring a school of fish to the other side. "Just stick to the good stuff."

Toothless shook himself, still unnerved, and searched through the rest of the fish. When he couldn't detect anything else dangerous, the black dragon made a short sound, almost like a purr— a purr!— and began scooping the haddock and cod and salmon into his mouth.

Hiccup began to slowly walk backward, away from Toothless's mouth and towards his one-finned tail, shifting the object in his arms and praying the fish would be enough to keep the Night Fury distracted. "Yeah, that's right... that's right.... Don't mind me, I'll just go back here... minding my own business..." he breathed, keeping a careful eye on the remaining fish. Why was Toothless such a fast eater? The fish weren't buying him a lot of time, but if he was lucky....

He laid the object down flat in the same spot where Toothless's other tail fin would be, and unraveled it in the same way a fan would open up.

It was a makeshift tail fin, made out of thick paper and word-for-word with the diagram of real tail fins. With luck, it would replace what Toothless had lost.

Gobber's words came back to Hiccup as he unstrapped the buckles that would restrap around the tail. "'It's the wings and the tails you really want. If it can't fly, it can't get away. A downed dragon is a dead dragon.'"

Hiccup shuddered as he thought of Toothless, of this magnificent and heavily endangered Night Fury, trapped in this pit for the rest of his life. What could happen if Night Furies went extinct? How could it affect the food chain? Dragons were the top carnivores, but if Toothless was the last Night Fury, and he died without somehow finding a mate and becoming a father, there would still be other dragons to manage the balance. But Hiccup knew that it was never that simple. Especially since dragons were so mysterious, and vikings hardly knew anything about them, or how they impacted the circle of life.