Survival

Chapter 9. Survival

Both the young Thain and his escort were covered head-to-toe in mud when they reached the bottom of Hoard Hill at last. Making their way down the hillside had been a slow and, to be honest, a painful process – slipping, sliding, overbalancing due to the weight of the packs on their backs, falling down and getting up again, standing just long enough to pick out where their next steps should take them... would hopefully take them... Only to repeat the ordeal until their progress down the hillside became a blur of effort, and Ferdi's entire body took on the same feeling of weightiness as the pack on his back. Foot by foot, as the old saying went. 

The rain that had fallen while they were inside the cavern, blissfully unaware of the storm's sudden onset and rapid worsening, had transformed the climbable hillside into a slippery slope, slick enough where dirt had turned to mud, but downright treacherous in the form of patches of clay where the pounding rain had washed even the mud away. The cousins tried to follow a path of sorts where the footing would be rocky or grassy. Creeping along over the drenched and flattened grassy patches, though slippery in themselves, was nevertheless better than trying to keep one's feet on sloping ground comprised of mud or clay.

In hindsight, rolling or sliding down the hill to the bottom might have been the wisest choice after all. It felt as if the descent had taken hours. Was the surrounding darkness due to the day drawing to its close – had it taken the entire afternoon merely to reach the valley floor? Or was it the intensity of the storm that had dimmed the light of the day until it resembled encroaching twilight? 

Ferdi blinked in an effort to see more clearly, hampered by the rain that was running down his face and into his eyes.

In the midst of the maelstrom, hands tugged at his arm. With an effort, the escort regained his feet and stood swaying. Or was the ground swaying under him?

'All right?' Pippin shouted after helping Ferdi stand up again.

'I should be the one asking!' Ferdi replied at the top of his voice.

To no avail. For Pippin bellowed in return, 'What?!'

Ferdi merely shook his head as he tried to draw the light jacket he wore, inadequate as it might be against this sudden storm, closer about himself. For all the good it would do... he was wet through, all the way to the skin. The relentless rain continued to hammer against him, threatening to pound him into the ground. At least it was also serving to wash away the mud he'd accumulated in falling and sliding and rolling, over and again, in descending to the valley floor. We must take our blessings where we find them, he thought incongruously, even as a violent shiver took him by surprise. He closed his eyes and dug deep down inside himself to find the resolve he needed to go on... to take the next step.

At least the next step will be on level ground, he told himself. And I'm lighter than I was. That'll make the going easier still. But how...? And then Ferdi realised... the pack he'd carried, heavy with the coinage calculated to cover half of Tookland's expenses for the coming quarter (while Pippin's pack held the other half), was no longer on his back. Somehow the loss didn't seem all that important, considering the circumstances.

Suddenly, Pip's voice sounded loud in his ear, and the escort jumped, then belatedly realised that his younger cousin had cupped his hands around Ferdi's ear and was shouting directly into the ear trumpet he'd thus improvised. Temperature's dropping!

Ferdi nodded, not even irritated that his younger cousin was stating the obvious. Why did I complain of the earlier heat? he mused to himself with an odd feeling of detachment. Despite the drizzle that had begun just before they'd entered the cavern, the air had been muggy – and warm enough that the cavern had felt chilly by comparison. Ferdi had actually looked forward to emerging again into the unseasonably warm day, even with the prospect of sweating his way back to the Smials from here.

But any such relief had been denied them. The wind that had assaulted them at the entrance to the cavern had blown unexpectedly cold – no longer unseasonably warm, but colder even than the constant chill of the cavern. And now... Ferdi idly noticed that there seemed to be stinging needles of ice mixing with the rain. He blinked, trying to make sense of the matter, then lifted a leaden hand to try and wipe away the cascading water from his face. The Green Hills were often crowned with frost or even snow in the colder months, while the valleys running between them could and surprisingly often did remain green – damp, perhaps misty, but not freezing, except in the severest of weathers.

Shouldn't it be warmer here in the valley than it had been high up on the side of Hoard Hill?

But Pippin was hauling at Ferdi's arm with annoying insistence, breaking into the older cousin's muddled thoughts. Bemused, Ferdi realised he was sitting on the ground again. What had been a puddle when he'd first stood up had become a rivulet in just a short time, and he was now playing the part of an island of sorts. Hadn't he been standing in a shallow puddle bare moments ago?

Pip's hands were there again, surrounding Ferdi's ear, and the escort had a confused impression of the young Thain bending over him. And then he heard the hobbit shout: Get up, Ferdi! We've got to find shelter!

I'm all for that, he mumbled agreeably, nodding like a drunken hobbit. He fumbled to lift his near hand to Pippin's obliging shoulder, then nodded again. But as Pippin hauled him to his feet once more, another shiver hit hard, causing his knees to give way. Ferdi sat down with a splosh, then reached a flat palm to splash atop the surface of the water running over and around him. Why am I sitting in a stream? Hadn't he been standing in a puddle? Had he walked away from the puddle, only to blunder into a river?

This is what cold-sickness feels like, some detached part of Ferdi's brain informed him. You're in imminent danger of catching your death... taking a deathly chill... He might have shrugged, but the shivering had seized him again, locking up his muscles and preventing such movement.

Without warning, the world turned suddenly downside-up, briefly interrupting the escort's disjointed thoughts. Then Ferdi seemed to perceive the sensation of movement – rough, not smooth, rather jolting in fact, he thought.

He opened his eyes – though he didn't remember having closed them in the first place – to see the ground passing beneath him; he was suspended in mid-air, hanging upside-down, rather like a sleeping bat, he mused, though curiosity or cohesive thought was beyond his capabilities at the moment besides the passing notion that sleeping bats stayed anchored in one place. Unlike Ferdi.

He couldn't have said how long the sensation lasted or even how it ended. But when he opened his eyes once more, he was lying on a hard floor. He strained to see his surroundings in the shadowy darkness, wondering where he was and how he'd got there. Eventually he realised that Pippin was huddled beside him, eyeing him closely.

'Pip?' he whispered, suddenly thankful that there seemed no need to shout in this place, where ever they had ended up.

'Ferdi,' the young Thain breathed, leaning forward. 'You had me w-worried, I have to admit...'

'Are we...?' Ferdi began, but his eyes were closing of themselves, and his voice trailed off. He drew a steadying breath and forced his eyelids open again. 'Did you...?'

Had his younger cousin somehow carried him up the hillside again, seeking the shelter of the store-hole? The floor under him was smooth and rock-hard – and cold. He drew another deep breath of air that conveyed the familiar chill of an underground enclosure.

While he'd been pondering, his eyes had closed again. Seems such a waste, the escort murmured to himself.

'Not at all,' Pippin said, having evidently overheard. 'I couldn't exactly leave you to drown in that growing stream, not when the runoff pouring down the hillside s-seemed to be increasing, the longer we hesitated...'

'I wasn't hesitating,' Ferdi countered.

'I'd like to know what it was you were doing, then,' Pippin said. 'Practising your swimming technique?'

Ferdi opened a heavy eyelid. 'Don't be ridiculous,' he slurred. 'Only a Brandybuck would be foolish enough to swim.'

'And only a Took would be foolish enough to sit in a brimming ditch, I suppose,' Pippin said.

'Ditch? What ditch? It takes a road or at least a path to make a ditch,' Ferdi argued. 'That was no ditch...'

'A ditch can also run along the edge of a field,' Pippin said contemplatively, then added, 'but that's neither here nor there.'

'Where is here?' Ferdi asked, closing his eye again and taking stock. Wet through, he thought. Wet to the skin, you are, and from what I can see in this dimness, Pip's no better off. A sudden shiver set in, rattling his teeth, and for the moment rendering speech too difficult for the exhausted hobbit to manage.

But the young Thain did not answer his escort's question; not right away, anyhow. Instead, he pressed Ferdi's arm and said, inexplicably, 'You're shivering. That's better.'

When Ferdi was able to unclench his teeth again, he hissed, 'Better?'

'As I was carrying you to shelter, the rain turned to sleet. I can't remember feeling so c-cold in my life... well, I s-suppose I can...'

For, of course, Pippin's greatest betrayal of Ferdi had begun when the younger cousin, not long after he'd come of age, tricked his escort with a play on words and rode off alone into a storm that had started as rain and turned into falling ice. Caught out, he'd nearly died of the cold, and later, of the lung fever that set in afterwards. Thain Paladin had blamed Ferdi, who'd been Pip's escort then as now, for neglecting his duty. Although Pip had tried hard to make amends since returning to the Tookland to follow his father as Thain, how could he expect to restore the years the locusts had eaten?

But the younger cousin was still talking, through increasing shivers that were evident in his voice. 'When I g-got you here, you were t-too cold to shiver! Tha—that's a bad sign, Ferdi, as I know all t-too w-well from our t-time climbing Caradhras...'

That was a reference to Pip's time in the Outlands, Ferdi thought. Must be. I've never heard of any hill named Caradhras here in the Shire, not even in the North Farthing. But he'd lost the thread of conversation again.

Ferdi could hear the shivers in his younger cousin's voice worsening as Pippin continued. '...s-so shivering is a g-good thing, as it t-turns out! One of the—the s-signs of life, as it w-w-were...'

The young Thain fell blessedly silent at this point, possibly because the chattering of his own teeth made speech too difficult to attempt. Then the pressure of his hand on Ferdi's arm disappeared. The escort forced one eye open and turned his head slightly. It was surprisingly difficult to focus his vision, but at last he saw that his younger cousin was now hugging himself as he shook with cold.

'...a fire?' the escort fumbled. He'd meant to ask if they could risk making a fire despite the danger posed by the barrels of black powder, but the words had come out so softly as he began the thought, that even he had trouble hearing them.

Pippin shook his head and managed to say, 'N-nothing to burn here.'

'Nothing...?' Ferdi forced out, attempting to sit up. Pip wasn't much help, if any, caught in the throes of ever-more-violent shivering.

The escort squinted and, with an effort, scrutinised the cavern. Dim light entered to one side of them – the opening to the outside world, he thought, but the impossibly heavy door was nowhere to be seen, nor could he see any sign of the overhang just outside the entrance to the store-hole.

Moreover, he could see the ceiling of this cavern, even without a lantern – unlike the enormous store-hole. And though the interior wall opposite the opening was shadowy and difficult to make out, it was not completely hidden in darkness. This underground refuge had to be much smaller than the store-hole.

Memory of that other, smaller cavern delved into the base of Hoard Hill returned to Ferdi's sluggish brain. The – the Dwarf-stables? he hazarded. He found it difficult to believe that they'd enjoyed a leisurely lunch here only a few hours ago, blessing the natural chill of the underground space along as they'd sought a brief respite from the unseasonable warmth and glare of the Sun before climbing the hill to achieve their aim.

Though Ferdi could not hear his own voice in his ears, Pippin had evidently read the words on his lips. Still beyond speech, the young Thain nodded.

The chill that seized the Thain's escort in the next moment took away Ferdi's breath along with his capacity for thought. Like Pippin, he wrapped his arms around himself, desperate for some sensation of warmth, then drew up his knees and hugged them to his chest, for all the good it did.

A fire, that's what was needed. Lacking that, even dry clothing would do some good.

He might as well wish for a hot bath, a steaming drink, and warm bedcovers to curl himself under, along with a bedwarmer for his icy feet, before giving himself up to sleep.

Ferdi opened his eyes wide at the sudden realisation that he was feeling increasingly sleepy.

'Pip!' he managed somehow, in between fits of shivering. 'Pip!' he said louder, to be rewarded by seeing his younger cousin's eyes open and fix themselves upon him. Now that he had Pippin's attention, he said as firmly as he could through chattering teeth, 'M-mustn't sleep!'

The young Thain nodded again, a certain vagueness about the gesture communicating his deteriorating condition to the older cousin all too clearly, shocking Ferdi wider awake. 'Got to stay awake,' Pippin agreed, even as his eyes closed and his chin dipped lower, nearly touching his drawn-up knees.

Wet to the skin. The chilly cavern was better than gale-force wind and pelting ice, perhaps. No doubt about it, actually. That said, Ferdi was entertaining serious doubts that either of them would be able to survive their current predicament.

They'd never make it back to the Great Smials in this ice storm. But their chances of waiting out the storm, chilled to the bone and with no means of warming themselves, were equally grim.

You swore on your life... Ferdi's thoughts flowed sluggishly. I swore on my life... to defend the Thain and his family with my life...

The oath he'd sworn as he'd knelt before old Thain Paladin echoed in his memory – strangely, it seemed to the escort at this moment as if it had been a lifetime ago. 

...and only the Thain or death can release me from my oath...

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Author's note: If you are interested in learning more about the real-life storm that inspired this story, look up the Armistice Day blizzard of 1940, which has been ranked as one of the deadliest winter storms in US history.

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