The Grumpy Troll

Jackfroot was carrying the entire picnic.

All of it. The basket, the blanket, the jar of honey, the flat stone Cheri liked to sit on and would not sit anywhere else, and one end of a long loaf of bread with Tang holding the other end and not really helping.

He could have made three trips. Three trips would have been sensible. But Jackfroot had worked out that he could do it in one, and once Jackfroot has worked out that he can do a thing, the matter is settled.

They had come the long way, over the top, because the short way was one of Jackfroot's tunnels and nobody else will use those. There are tunnels all over Wan Hundred Woods. Jackfroot dug most of them and remembers about half.

They were halfway across the Old Bridge when a voice came up through the stones.

"TOO. LOUD."

Everybody stopped.

"Did the bridge say that?" whispered Kiwi.

They leaned over the side. There was nothing under there but water, shadow, and a great gnarled tree root going down into the bank.

"It's a troll," said Tang, with enormous satisfaction.

Wan Hundred Woods had never had a troll before. This was excellent news.

Cheri pointed out that trolls were not real. Tang pointed out that the bridge had just spoken. Cheri, who liked evidence more than she liked being right, went quiet.

And Jackfroot went to work.

Because Jackfroot's answer to a problem is more. More running, more helping, more trying, faster.

He put down the picnic and leaned over the rail. "HELLO! Are you hungry? I can bring you food!" He was gone and back before anyone had answered, holding a berry over the side. "BERRIES!"

"No."

"Blanket? It's a bit damp down there!"

"No."

"A song? Tang knows a song. TANG, DO THE SONG—"

"No."

He tried a joke. He tried the honey. He ran to his burrow and back with a cushion, and then ran to the far bank and back to check whether the troll could be seen better from that side, and then ran across the bridge again just to see if the voice moved.

Every trip, the voice got shorter.

By the sixth trip it was one word.

By the eighth, Jackfroot sat down on the bridge with his ears flat and his legs shaking, out of ideas and out of run, which are two things Jackfroot almost never runs out of at once.

"I've done everything," he said.

Blueberri, who had not moved for a while, walked to the end of the bridge, sat down on the bank near the gnarled root, and did nothing at all.

That was it. She did not call. She did not offer anything. She sat with her arms round her knees and looked at the water going past.

Nobody had tried that all afternoon.

It took a long time.

Then a small mustard-coloured nose came out from under the root, followed by a small mustard-coloured hedgehog, who looked at Blueberri, and then at the picnic, and then at the eight small dents Jackfroot had worn in the path.

"You are all extremely loud," said Durian.

"You live here," said Blueberri.

"I live here."

Jackfroot came down the bank so fast he arrived sitting. "How long have you lived here?"

"Longer than the bridge."

And then Durian said the thing, gruffly, at the water rather than at them, in the way that people say the true thing when they have decided to only say it once.

"Everybody goes over. All day. Every day. Feet, feet, feet." He shrugged his prickles. "Nobody has ever once come down."

There was a small silence on the bank.

Then Jackfroot's ears came up.

Because here is the thing about Jackfroot: he does not know the woods the way everyone else knows the woods. Everyone else knows the top of it. Jackfroot has spent his whole life underneath, and he has dug more tunnels than he can remember — which is the problem, and also, today, the answer.

"There's a way down," he said. "From the far bank. Behind the ferns—" He stopped. His ears went up further. "I dug it. I dug it ages ago and I forgot about it and it comes out—" he was already running "—RIGHT HERE!"

It did, too, eventually, after some digging, most of which Tang did with tremendous enthusiasm and no plan.

They moved the whole picnic down under the Old Bridge: the basket, the blanket, the honey, and Cheri's flat stone, a better stone down there anyway. It was cool under the arch. The water talked. The light came off the stream and moved around on the stones over their heads, which is a thing Wan Hundred Woods had been doing under that bridge, for nobody, for years.

Above them, all afternoon, the feet went over. Tok, tok, tok.

Durian sat at the edge of it with a cup of something warm and did not join in, exactly, but did not leave either.

When they packed up he cleared his throat.

"You may come again," he said.

Everyone beamed.

"Not all at once."