A Perilous Pest

Chapter Four

Grimmbros half jogged, half skipped vivaciously through knee-deep grass with Fürgůïn keeping pace warily at his heel, frowning suspiciously up at his friend's monumental back and boulderish head. The lush, spreading landscape, that from the hill above had looked fairly flat, was actually an undulating vale of elder and hawthorn thickets, dog-rose tangles, meadow flowers and endless grass. A few hundred yards out from the woods the pair noticed a lone rabbit standing in their path balanced up on its hind legs.

"Aaah, cute little fellow," Fürgůïn observed without stopping, "Oh, there he goes." The rabbit hopped off to one side, disappearing into a grassy tussock. "Did you notice that it didn't look too pleased?" Grimm asked, with a slight scowl. "It's a rabbit! How can a rabbit look not pleased? They're basically fluff on four legs aren't they?" "No look!" Grimm disagreed, "I can see its angry furry face glaring at us from its burrow. Look what it's doing with its nose!" Fürgůïn followed his friend's pointing finger but saw only grass.

"I can't see anything," he said, "Maybe you need to buck up." The renling wondered exactly what unpleasantness a rabbit might perpetrate with its nose, but he wasn't inclined to stop and Grimmbros soon picked up the pace again so that Fürgůïn was forced to scamper to keep up.

"You didn't notice anything?" Grimm tried again, "It didn't look annoyed to you? Piqued? Miffed? Affronted? Not even a bit?"

"Hopping mad I imagine," Fürgůïn tried, having been thinking up more rabbit jokes as they went. "There's a couple more..." Grimm stopped and narrowed his eyes, examining the creatures ahead that had stopped nibbling some rabbit delicacy and lifted their heads. "There!" Grimm hissed, "See it?" He turned expectantly to Fürgůïn who was beginning to suspect that some arcane cocktail of elbh health food was curdling his companion's mental faculties. Fürgůïn contemplated some comment about rabbiting on, but thought better of it as the urgh-bane suddenly lunged at the poor creatures causing them to flee in rapid skips and bounds for cover.

"What was that?" Fürgůïn squawked in amazement! "What're you doing?"

"They were doing it! They're up to something." Grimm shouted, stamping the grass down where the rabbits had disappeared. "Look, more of 'em!" This time Grimm ran straight for the little bunch of peacefully grazing animals yelling something about cursing their conniving, little leporine faces. Fürgůïn watched aghast as one small furry ball flew into the air in a long, graceful arc.

"You kicked it!" he exclaimed, "You actually kicked one! Is that what Chicken Scratching has reduced you to?" Grimmbros was panting and spinning about looking for more. "I really think you need to..." Fürgůïn began, but the sporting hero was off again. Fürgůïn hesitated a second and then dashed after him, "You can't kick them! It's not right!*

*The rules of chicken scratching were quite vague (despite having much to say) about the kickability of various inanimate objects and living creatures. Cuteness and furriness had little to do with what might be booted about a field by a professional scratcher. Fürgůïn had no idea about such things.

"You have to stop! It's all those Elbh potions! They've got you hyped up on some lethal dose of huskbiscs, yoboga sap and... and... pink ihmp crystals!" He suspected that he had just made up that last one, but it didn't matter, nobody really knew exactly what those nefarious elbhs put into their 'health' concoctions, besides, Grimm wasn't even listening. Come to that, where was he?

Fürgůïn became conscious of the fact that things had gone suddenly a lot less rowdy. Grimm was nowhere to be seen. The wind blew gently across the grass, the warm air tickled his dangling ears and the blue sky seemed huge and still. Where was Grimm? Cautiously, Fürgůïn pushed through the tall, swaying, verdant blades that encircled him, peering about in bewilderment. The grass was longer here, grass tended to be fairly long for a halfling such as himself anyway, but here it came pretty much up to his waist. "Grimm?" he called gingerly. A small bee landed on his nose making him twitch.