2 Spinach With Your Driftwood

2. SPINACH WITH YOUR DRIFTWOOD? We'll just leave Hiccup hanging off the window-frame, shall we, while we go back and discover exactly how he got himself into this mess in the first place. When Hiccup had woken up at seven o'clock that morning, he had absolutely no idea of what he would be doing only five hours after. He was rather excited, because it was his birthday, and although he was twelve years old, in fact technically speaking it was only his THIRD birthday, for Hiccup had been born on the 29th of February, a Leap Year. His first thought, when he woke up, was to make a wish. And this wish was, 'Please, Thor, could you make this a nice, quiet, PEACEFUL day? No shipwrecks, no storms, no close encounters with homicidal villains with hooks for hands, or with the deadlier type of dragon? Just for my birthday?' From this you may gather that peaceful days in the Archipelago were few and far between, and the life of a would-be Viking Hero was exciting, if exhausting. Hiccup got up, and spent some time persuading

his pet dragon, Toothless, to eat a healthy breakfast. Dragons are supposed to eat plenty of vegetables, and, weirdly, lots of WOOD, small branches, twigs, the bark of trees. This seems to help their fire-breathing, and this is very important because a dragon who can't breathe fire gets very sick indeed, and eventually explodes. Toothless was a rather disobedient Common-or-Garden dragon, unusual only in that he was a lot smaller than all the other boys' dragons. He hadn't eaten his wood for weeks, and now he absolutely refused to eat either his spinach or his driftwood, and just sat in front of his plate blowing grumpy smoke rings. 'OK, then, Toothless,' said Hiccup, 'if you're going to be like this, I'm just going to go to the Burglary Competition without you. But when I come back, you better have eaten up ALL that driftwood or else there will be NO HADDOCK.' 'You is a very m-m-mean Master,'

said Toothless with dignity, 'and your heart is made out of bogeys.'* In a big sulk, he climbed back into the bowl of spinach and sank down into it, like a very small crocodile into a mudbank. Only his nose and tail were showing, so it looked like the bowl of spinach was blowing smoke rings. Toothless swished his tail and spinach sprayed everywhere. Hiccup went off to the Pick-Pocketing Finals of the Burglary Competition. A nearby Tribe called the Bog-Burglars was visiting the Hooligans, and the Burglary Competition had been carrying on for the previous three days. The Bog-Burglars were frighteningly good in the Burglary Department, as their name suggests. They had already won the Sheep-Rustling Competition on the first day, and the Narrowboat-Nicking Competition on the second day. This was the final day of the Competition, the Pick-Pocketing Challenge, and the Hooligans needed to win this to salvage some pride. Unfortunately the Bog-Burglars were just as good

at pick-pocketing as they were at everything else, and yet again the Hooligans were thoroughly beaten in the match. Hiccup had a particularly gloomy time in the Competition. Not only did he completely FAIL in the Burglary department, but his unpleasant cousin, Snotlout, had made some very sneering remarks about his birthday in front of everybody else: 'So the ickle baby Hiccup is three years old today, is he?' he had jeered. 'Trust a WEIRDO like you, Hiccup, to be born on the WEIRDEST day of the year… and bad luck for us that a FAILURE like you was ever born at all. If it wasn't for you, I would be the next Chief of the Hooligan Tribe, and a very brilliant and violent Chief I would be too… Burgle his shirt, Dogsbreath!' And Snotlout's sidekick Dogsbreath the Duhbrain, a brute of a boy with a ring through his nose and very limited communication skills, had removed Hiccup's shirt, and smooshed him into the mud. 'Everybody else may be celebrating your birthday at this Birthday Banquet this evening,' Snotlout had snarled, 'but I am wearing BLACK, because I am mourning the fact that you were ever born at all… Have a Miserable Third Birthday, Hiccup THE USELESS!' It was all very depressing.

A disappointed, dishevelled, and mud-splattered Hiccup got back again three hours later, with his friends Fishlegs and Camicazi. Fishlegs was a Hooligan like Hiccup, but he looked more like a daddy-long-legs with asthma and a squint. Camicazi was a very small, blonde Bog- Burglar, and she had hair as untouched by human hand as parts of the Amazonian rainforest. Despite her size, Camicazi was PARTICULARLY good at pick-pocketing, and she was carrying five Hooligan daggers, three Hooligan helmets of various different sizes, and a pair of Stoick the Vast's hairy underpants. 'I can't THINK how you got them off him without him noticing,' Hiccup was saying, with reluctant admiration. Stoick the Vast was Hiccup's father, a classic Viking of the traditional 'large and terrifying' type. 'He's going to hit the roof when he finds out…' 'Oh it was easy peasy lemon-squeezy,' boasted Camicazi, carelessly twiddling one of the daggers. (If Camicazi had a fault, it was that she did have a tendency to be rather pleased with herself.) 'He can't see a thing through that beard of his. I could have taken the shirt and the trousers off him as well if I'd wanted to.'

'Well, thank Thor you didn't,' said Hiccup with huge relief. 'It would have put him in an even worse bate than he is already. I'm going to have to tiptoe round him for the next couple of days, as it is, so as not to get into trouble.' When the three of them walked into the room, Hiccup gasped in horror.