1 The Hunting-with-Bows-and-Arrows-on-Skis Expedition

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1. THE HUNTING-WITH- BOWS-AND-ARROWS-ON-SKIS EXPEDITION Winters were always cold in the Viking Lands. But this winter was the coldest in a hundred years. It was so cold that the Sullen Sea had frozen over, and all the islands in the Inner Isles were now joined together by a great flat desert of solid ice, two metres thick in places. On this particularly cold morning several hours before breakfast, it was as if the whole

world was holding its breath, frozen in time. The air was as sharp as broken glass, no sound disturbed the pure snowy silence. No sound, that is, apart from an appalling, mad screaming coming from somewhere out in the middle of the ice. For a small party of young boys and their teacher from the Hooligan Tribe had set out from the little Isle of Berk where they lived to the Island of Villainy to the south. Not in a boat, of course, for you cannot sail across a frozen sea.

They were speeding far too fast across the ice in an enormous wooden Viking SLEIGH, pulled by six pure white Sabre-Tooth Driver Dragons larger than lions and faster than cheetahs. The dreadful mad yelling was coming from the man driving the sleigh, Gobber the Belch. Gobber was the teacher in charge of the Pirate Training Programme on Berk, and he was an enormous monster of a man wrapped up in furs who could easily have been mistaken for a grizzly bear with a dirty red beard and an attitude problem. 'GEDDONWITHIT YOU MISERABLE WHITE WORMS!' roared Gobber at the Sabre-Tooth Dragons, cracking his whip above their heads. 'I'VE HAD SNAILS THAT HAVE MOVED QUICKER THAN YOU LOT! MY GRANNY COULD SKIP FASTER THAN THIS AND SHE'S A HUNDRED AND FOUR! YEEEEEEHAAH!!' One gigantic furry arm lashed out with a whip that curled through the air like a great black serpent, the other shook the reins in a lunatic frenzy that sent the Driver Dragons bounding forwards in terrible uncontrolled leaps. Behind Gobber on the sleigh sat twelve of his pupils.

Ten of these boys were ugly young thugs yelling as loudly in crazy excitement as their teacher. 'YEEEEEEEHAAAAH!' they whooped, as the sleigh hit a snowbank and sailed ten metres through the air and then slammed back down on the ice with stomach-churning violence. 'YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEHAAAAAAH!!' The last two boys were smaller than the rest and a lot less excited. 'I'm glad,' gasped Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, as the sleigh tipped over wildly on one runner with an awful screech and spray of ice, 'I'm glad I didn't have breakfast because I think it would have come up again…' Hiccup is, in fact, the Hero of this story, although you would never have guessed it to look at him. He was small, and red-haired, and very, very ordinary. Hiccup's best friend Fishlegs, a skinny runner- bean of a boy with asthma and a squint, wasn't really listening. He was praying to Thor with his eyes squeezed tight shut. 'Please, Thor,' begged Fishlegs, 'please make it stop…' Fishlegs's prayer was about to be answered. The sleigh was approaching the great black cliffs