How to Cheat a Dragon's Curse
Author: Cressida Cowell
Date: 2006-11-02 07:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy; Dragons; Fiction; Childrens; Middle Grade; Audiobook; Adventure; Young Adult; Humor; Juvenile
Description: In his 4th sidesplitting adventure, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III must rescue his best friend, Fishlegs, from the deadly disease Vorpentitis. The only cure is rare and almost impossible to find...a potato. But where will Hiccup find such a thing? He'll have to dodge the terrible Sharkworms, battle Doomfangs, and outwit crazy Hooligans if he's going to be a Hero...again.A fast paced plot, slapstick humor, witty dialogue and imaginative black and white illustrations enhance this exciting tale.
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Rights: 2013

You don’t have to read the Hiccup books in order.
But if you want to, this is the right order:

ABOUT HICCUP

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third was
an awesome swordfighter, a dragon-whisperer,
and the greatest Viking Hero that ever lived.
But Hiccup’s memoirs look back to when
he was a very ordinary boy, and finding
it hard to be a Hero.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons,
living or dead, is coincidental.

Text and illustrations copyright © 2006 by Cressida Cowell
Cover design by Kristina Iulo
Cover © 2010 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading,
and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful
piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the
book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the
publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
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Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

First ebook edition: June 2014

ISBN 978-0-316-33567-6

E3

~ CONTENTS ~

1. The Hunting-with-Bows-and-Arrows-on-Skis
Expedition ........................................................15
2. Sabre-Tooth Driver Dragons...............................29
3. The Hunters Become the Hunted........................48
4. Is There Something Wrong with Fishlegs?...........67
5. Smashsticks-on-Ice............................................79
6. What Old Wrinkly Said.......................................89
7. The Quest for the Frozen Potato........................100
8. The Wrath of Thor..............................................110
9. Back on Berk.....................................................118
10. Freya’sday Eve on Hysteria.............................120
11. In the Soup......................................................131
12. Will Toothless Save the Day? ..........................151
13. The Great Potato Burglary...............................158
14. The Potato-Burglars’ Run.................................176
15. They Might Just Make it, Now..........................182
16. The Doomfang..................................................186
17. The Quest is Over.............................................196
18. Fishlegs...........................................................207
19. The Final Chapter.............................................214
Epilogue.................................................................233

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

15

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.

16

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.

17

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

18

of the Visithugs Territories far too impossibly fast for it
to stop in time…
‘Don’t open your eyes, Fishlegs,’ advised Hiccup.
Gobber the Belch reared up and with a mighty
roar of ‘WOOOOOOAH!!!’ leant back so far pulling
on the reins that he was nearly horizontal. The Sabre-
Tooths came to a plunging halt so sharply that the
sleigh wheeled round in a mad arc… they were going
to slam into that cliff at such a speed they would all be
smashed to splinters…
‘AAAAARGH!’ yelled Hiccup, shutting his
eyes too.

The sleigh screeched to a quivering halt. Hiccup
opened his eyes again. Astonishingly, they were still
alive. But the smooth black wall of the cliff was only
centimetres away from Hiccup’s cheek. Hiccup held on
to the rock for a second to help himself stop shaking.
‘RIGHT!’ bellowed Gobber, clambering out of
the sleigh entirely unconcerned. ‘WHAT ARE YOU
ALL DOING SKULKING IN THERE? GET OUT
AND STAND TO ATTENTION YOU PATHETIC
DRIBBLES OF EARWIG DROPPINGS!’
Yawning and chattering, all twelve boys
unpacked skis from the back of the sleigh, and
attached them to the bottom of their furry boots.
For six months of the year the Vikings lived
under SNOW… so a Viking Warrior had to be just as
good at SKIING as he was at SAILING.
This was a Hunting-with-Bows-and-Arrows-
on-Skis Expedition. The boys had to ski down Mount
Villainy, the largest mountain in the Inner Isles,
shooting with their arrows as many Semi-Spotted
Snowpeckers as they could.
‘I’m going to get at least FIFTY,’ boasted
Snotface Snotlout, a tall thug of a boy with huge
nostrils and a moustache like a little furry caterpillar
squirming on his upper lip.

20

‘SILENCE!’ screamed Gobber, cracking his
whip.
There was absolute silence immediately. It’s
a curious fact, but a heavily armed, mad, six-and-a-
half-foot teacher holding a whip tends to get his class’s
attention.
‘I will be staying here to guard the sleigh,’ yelled
Gobber. ‘Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third will
be in charge of the Hunting Party when you get to the
mountain.’
Ten of the boys groaned and turned round to
look furiously at Hiccup.
ALL of them reckoned they would make better
leaders than Hiccup.
Snotlout had won the Senseless Violence Cup
three years in a row. Wartihog could smash chairs to
pieces with his bare fists. Dogsbreath the Duhbrain
burped so loud he shattered glass.
Small, skinny and unimportant, only Hiccup
looked like he had no leadership skills whatsoever. He
stood on one leg apologetically and this made his skis
cross and he fell over.
‘Why does HICCUP get to be in charge
AGAIN?’ demanded Snotface Snotlout through
gritted teeth.

22

‘Because Hiccup is the son of the CHIEF and
one day he will be in charge PERMANENTLY, Thor
help us all…’ explained Gobber, helping Hiccup to his
feet and dusting the snow off him with one hairy hand.
‘Any questions?’ boomed Gobber.
Fishlegs put up his hand. ‘Just a small point, sir,’
he said. ‘How are we going to climb up the mountain in
the first place?’
‘The Sabre-Tooth Dragons will DRAG you to
the top ON your skis,’ replied Gobber. ‘It shouldn’t take
more than half an hour.’
Fishlegs and Hiccup looked dubiously at the
great white creatures crouching dangerously on the
ice, tongues spilling out over teeth as sharp as swords,
cat-like eyes gazing at their small human Masters with
the purest hatred.

23

‘So that’s that, then,’ said Gobber. ‘I shall wait
for you here and see you all in three hours’ time… I
really need a NAP… way too early for me…’
Gobber settled himself on the furs of the sleigh
and gave an enormous yawn. ‘Oh, and one more thing…
as you know, nobody lives on the island of Villainy, but
the island of Hysteria is just next door and I should
warn you that at this time of year there may be Hysterics
about…’

24

‘HYSTERICS???’ squeaked Fishlegs, somewhat,
well, hysterically. ‘But the Hysterics are trapped safely in
Hysteria, aren’t they?’
HYSTERICS, I should explain, were a
particularly bloodthirsty and lunatic Tribe of Vikings.
Even tough Tribes like the Visithugs were scared of the
Hysterics. Hiccup had never actually met a Hysteric, but
he knew they were renowned for killing you first, and
asking questions later.

Normally they didn’t trouble the other Tribes,
however, because three-quarters of the island ended in
dizzyingly high cliffs plunging straight into deep seas,
and on the north coast was the Wrath of Thor, where
an impossibly huge and monstrous Sea Dragon called
the DOOMFANG lived.
The good news about this was that nobody
could get into Hysteria, and even more importantly, the
Hysterics could not get out.
Except at this time of year…
‘Because at this time of year,’ boomed Gobber
happily, ‘the Wrath of Thor is all frozen over, and the
Doomfang is trapped under two metres solid of ice. So
if you do happen to come across a Hysteric – and I’m
SURE you won’t, it’s far too early in the morning – I
suggest you ski like fury in the opposite direction.’
And just like that, Gobber fell asleep.

26

Sabre-Tooth Driver Dragons
Sabre-Tooths are enormous lion-like dragons that
do not hibernate, and are therefore very useful
to the Vikings for pulling their sleighs, and
dragging them up mountains during the winter.
They have been known to eat their owners.

~STATISTICS~

COLOURS: Always white
ARMED WITH: Sabre-Teeth and spikes on head.
FEAR FACTOR:.................6
ATTACK:...........................7
SPEED:.............................7
SIZE:................................7
DISOBEDIENCE................6

2. SABRE-TOOTH DRIVER
DRAGONS

Gobber’s enormous snores rang out like a walrus calling
out to another walrus some fifty icebergs away.
As if they were all a part of the same creature, the
pack of Sabre-Tooth Driver Dragons settled themselves
down on the ice and refused to move. By Woden’s Armpit,
but those Drivers were BIG.
The boys looked at them.
‘Well come on, then, Hiccup,’ grunted Wartihog
impatiently. ‘Take charge!’
Hiccup cleared his throat and used his most
reasonable voice. ‘OK, guys,’ he said in Dragonese.* ‘I
don’t want any trouble…’
‘Oh look, it talkssss…’ hissed a particularly large
and savage-looking Sabre-Tooth. He was missing an eye,
and from the specially royal way he held himself, seemed
to be the Leader of the Pack. ‘The little Human
Tadpole is speaking the noble Dragon tongue…’
The other Drivers laughed jeeringly.
‘We all know what we’re supposed to be doing
here...’ Hiccup continued.

30

‘We know what WE’RE going to be doing,’
sneered the Driver, closing his one eye and settling
himself comfortably. ‘WE’RE going to have a nice
long sleep right here while you sweat it up the
largest mountain in the Inner Isles…’
‘Oh for Thor’s sake!’ exploded Snotface Snotlout.
‘That girly “speaking Dragonese” stuff isn’t going to
work with these brutes!’
Snotlout grabbed the black whip from Gobber’s
relaxed hand, and cracked it.
Snnnnnnaaaap!
The Driver Dragons blinked open their eyes.
Snotlout cracked the whip again, this time
letting the end of it lash the face of the Sabre-Tooth
with the one eye. The Driver sprang to his feet with
a yowl of pain and the rest of the pack followed him,
furious but respectful. The boys cheered.
‘That’s the way to do it!’ grinned Snotlout,
whipping another of the dragons for the pure pleasure
of it. The animal howled and Snotlout laughed. ‘Disobey
ME, would you, you SNIVELLING CRAWLING
PIECES OF FORKED-TONGUE RUBBISH! This’ll
learn you!’
‘Don’t do that, Snotlout,’ said Hiccup quietly.
Hiccup didn’t normally stand up to Snotlout, but he

31

couldn’t bear to see an animal as proud and dignified
as a Sabre-Tooth Driver made to dance about like a
monkey.
Snotlout stopped what he was doing to turn on
Hiccup.
‘What’s this?’ sneered Snotlout. ‘Is Hiccup the
Useless trying to tell Snotlout the HERO what to do?
Face it, Hiccup, the snow will turn as blue as Gobber
the Belch’s nose before YOU become the Chief of the
Hooligan Tribe.’
Snotlout snapped the whip, and it curled cruelly
forward at Hiccup, hitting him on the chest.
It would have been a very painful lash, if it hadn’t
been for the fact that sleeping down Hiccup’s waistcoat
was Hiccup’s small, disobedient hunting dragon,
Toothless.
The cutting edge of the whip hit Toothless on
the hard, horny skin of his behind, and woke him out of
his hibernation sleep.
Toothless climbed up out of Hiccup’s collar, sat
on his shoulder and puffed out his neck in fury.
‘S-something hit T-t-toothless on the b-b-
bottom! H-h-how can T-t-toothless s-s-sleep
with things hitting him on the b-b-bottom!’
‘Why isn’t your ridiculous pinprick of a hunting

32

dragon hibernating like all the others?’ blustered
Snotlout.
‘I was worried he was getting too cold,’ replied
Hiccup, soothing Toothless by scratching him softly
in between the horns. ‘He didn’t dig himself a deep
enough Hibernation Hole, and if a dragon gets too cold
he can stay asleep for centuries. So I dug him up and
I’ve been carrying him around with me to keep him
warm.’
‘And now T-t-toothless woken up too
EARLY!’ raged Toothless. ‘Issa f-f-freezing!’
‘What,’ scoffed Snotlout, ‘what is your pathetic
pinprick of a dragon,’ (for Toothless was the smallest
hunting dragon anybody has ever seen, before or since)
‘what is your ridiculous frogspawn of a reptile wearing?’
Toothless was wearing a fur coat.
Hiccup had made it in a desperate attempt to
keep the little dragon warm.
‘Oh this is too good – hold me up, Dogsbreath!’
snorted Snotlout. ‘Hiccup has made his ickle teeny
dwagon an ickle teeny furry DRESS!’
‘Issa c-c-coat!’ hissed Toothless. ‘Issa C-C-
COAT!’
‘A dragon in a dress!’ squealed Snotlout.
‘HA HA HA HA!’ roared the boys. ‘A dragon in
a dress!’

33

Even the Sabre-Tooth Driver Dragons joined in.
‘Oh my Claws and Jaws,’ drawled
One Eye. ‘I do believe that is the
smallest hunting dragon I have EVER
seen dressed up in HUMAN
WRAPPINGS! Has it no
shame?’
Poor Toothless
stood up very straight and
stiff on Hiccup’s shoulder.
Beginning with his horns and
spreading slowly downwards, he turned
a delicate shade of pink. He closed his
jaws tightly and smoke rings blew out of
his ears.
‘Issa v-v-very stylish winter COAT,’ he
said gruffly. ‘Yer all j-j-jealous.’
Snotlout started barking out orders. OK,‘ we’ve
wasted enough time here… everybody get themselves
into pairs and grab on to the harness of one of these
Sabre-Tooth Brutes… you two LOSERS,’ he pointed at
Hiccup and Fishlegs, ‘can have the half-blind one.’
‘You don’t like us humans much, do you,
One Eye?’ said Hiccup, as he and Fishlegs shuffled
themselves into position behind the enormous
Sabre-Tooth.

34

One Eye spat a great
burst of fire into the snow.
‘Don’t like you?’ he hissed. ‘I
LOATHE you with every drop of
my pure green blood…You
Humans are treacherous,
ignorant, greedy and
violent. I have been
Leader of my Pack for
forty years through good
times and hard. What
does Snotlout know about
TRUE Leadership?

He’s just a pig with a whip in his hand. My fangs
ACHE with my hatred… my claws ITCH to scratch
out every single Two-Legged, Mud-Bound, Jaw-
Flapping Human on this entire planet…’
‘Oh great,’ said Fishlegs nervously. ‘We have
a Driver Dragon who
HATES us. This morning
just gets better and better…’
By the time they got
going, with One Eye dragging
them VERY SLOWLY up
the gorge, and through
a thick pine forest,
there was no sign of the
other boys.

The forest ended as suddenly as it had begun,
and on the final sheer climb to the top of Mount Villainy
they did not pass a single tree. One Eye halted at the
peak of Mount Villainy. A lone boulder marked the
Highest Point. Hanging on firmly to this rock to prevent
the wind, or the sheer dizzying pull of the abyss, from
carrying him over the edge, Hiccup peered down
the other side of the mountain into the Wrath
of Thor.

Normally, the sea and the Doomfang roared
and raged through that spiteful slit, whirlpooling and
spiralling and crashing into each other. Now the crack
was still and frozen as Death itself, and the only sign of
the Doomfang was a dreadful moaning that drummed
in the ears like a headache, and a dark shadow moving
slowly under the ice, like a gigantic cloud building up
before a thunderstorm.
‘Let’s get out of here as quickly as we can,’
shivered Fishlegs. ‘There are a lot of grim, creepy places
in the Barbaric Archipelago, but THIS has got to be the
GRIMMEST and the CREEPIEST.’
I don’t know whether YOU have ever tried
Hunting-with-Bows-and-Arrows-on-Skis, but it is
really quite a complicated skill. Skiing downhill itself
is difficult enough, and then you have to concentrate
on actually HITTING the pesky little Semi-Spotted
Snowpeckers, not too easy because they flit about like
humming-birds.
On top of the basic difficulties of the sport,
Fishlegs was the most appalling skier and a terrible shot.
His bow whirled around like a windmill as he tried to
keep his balance, and even if his hands had been as
steady as a rock, a dreadful squint meant that his eyes
were as crossed as his skis, and frankly, any chance of
him hitting ANYTHING AT ALL would be a matter of

38

pure fluke. He wobbled forwards, knees bent as if sitting
on the lavatory, skis pointing inward in the snowplough
position, and at the first hint of a little bump in the snow
he fell over and his skis fell off.
Hiccup wasn’t as bad as Fishlegs, but any sport
is not just about skill, it is also about HEART. And
Hiccup’s heart wasn’t really in this. He was
secretly on the side of the Semi-Spotted
Snowpeckers, charming little birds that
Hiccup often watched from his window.
They built themselves interesting little
nests like tiny igloos.
So after an hour and a half, despite the fact
that Semi-Spotted Snowpeckers were jumping all around
them like fleas on a cow’s back, Hiccup and Fishlegs had
shot not a single bird.
‘Bother, bother, bother!’ exclaimed Hiccup, as he
missed yet another one.
One Eye seemed hugely amused by the whole
thing.
‘You ARE interesting Humans,’ he drawled.
‘I’ve never met Vikings like this before… You’re
tiny and not very tough. You can’t ski. You can’t
hunt. You can’t yell for toffee.’
‘Oh, shut up,’ snapped Hiccup crossly.

39

40

Fishlegs had fallen over
exactly fifty-four times. He was now
covered with snow and wet through
and his aim was not improved by a
violent shivering. On top of all this, he
seemed to be catching a nasty cold.
‘Oh this is HOPELESS!’ he exclaimed.
‘Absolutely HOPELESS! A-A-ACHOOO! Snotlout
and Dogsbreath will have probably murdered half the
bird population in the Archipelago by now and we can’t
even get ourselves one measly Snowpecker corpse!
Why won’t the wretched little birds stay still for just a
MILLISECOND?’
As Hiccup helped Fishlegs to his feet for the
fifty-fifth time, he thought he heard something almost
like deep human laughter. It seemed to be coming from
some distance below them, from behind a snowdrift.
Leaving Fishlegs leaning on one of his poles,
warning Toothless to be quiet, Hiccup peered cautiously
over the top of the snowdrift.
And there, a hundred metres down the side of
yet another slope, was a sight that sent a nasty trickle of
fear down Hiccup’s spine.

41

HYSTERICS.

Behind Hiccup’s left shoulder, One Eye the
Sabre-Tooth growled grimly. The spines on his muscly
back all stood up, his eyes narrowed. His tail with the
spiky point swayed dangerously from side to side. ‘Now
THOSE Humans,’ he hissed, ‘THOSE Humans
really ARE Badder than most…’
‘What’s going on?’ asked Fishlegs, wiping his
runny nose on his sleeve, and rubbing his bottom, sore
from falling over so often.
‘Hysterics…’ whispered Hiccup. ‘Get down…’
There were six Hysterics dressed in black sitting
on the slopes below them. Five enormous stags lay dead
on the ground beside them, their blood very red against
the white snow. The Hysterics had clearly stopped for
breakfast before the long ski back to the Hysterical
Village on the other side of the Wrath of Thor. They
had built a small fire, and were eating bits of deer
in their fingers.

Their skis and their bows and arrows were jammed in
the snow behind them.
‘Thank Thor they haven’t seen us,’ breathed
Hiccup to Fishlegs. ‘Come on, we’ll just ski quietly back
the way we came.’
This would have been an excellent plan.
But something weird was happening to Fishlegs.
He was already looking terrible, his eyes
streaming and his nose running with snot. He was
shaking a little with fever, and now as he watched the
Hysterics, his face turned first pink, and then a brilliant
red. He snorted furiously. ‘The Big Brainless Muscle-
Bound Idiots!’ he muttered.
‘Yes, yes,’ whispered Hiccup, ‘but come on…’
‘The murderers… they’ve only gone and killed
those poor deer in broad daylight… the great Stinking
Gormless Brutes…’
‘This is all true,’ said Hiccup, ‘but we need to get
out of here before they kill us…’
But before Hiccup could stop him, Fishlegs had
staggered to his feet and drawn his sword, crying out
‘COWARDS!!!!’ at the top of his lungs.
The Hysterics stopped eating. They looked up in
astonishment.
They couldn’t have been more flabbergasted than

44

Hiccup, as Fishlegs set off down the hill straight at the
band of fearsome Warriors, in his lunatic uncontrolled
slowplough. His ski-poles flailed around frantically, his
arrows flew out of their quiver like a hedgehog shedding
needles, he was gaining speed every second, and
shouting at the top of his voice:
‘YOU MISERABLE MOLLUSCS! YOU
WHINGEING WIMPERING WINKLES! I COULD
TAKE YOU FRITTERING FAIRY FOLK WITH
ONE HAND BEHIND MY BACK! STAND
AND FIGHT LIKE MEN, YOU COWARDLY
COWERING CUTTLEFISH!’

46

47

3. THE HUNTERS BECOME
THE HUNTED

Open-mouthed, almost in a trance, Hiccup watched
the furious frantic progress of his friend down the
mountainside.
‘YOU HORRIBLE HALITOSIS HADDOCK!’
shrieked Fishlegs in a frenzy. ‘YOU PATHETIC
PIECES OF PLANKTON! I CAN SEE YOU –
YOU’RE BLUBBING LIKE BABIES AT THE
THOUGHT OF FIGHTING A REAL VIKING!’
One Eye, the Sabre-Tooth Driver Dragon, was
watching Fishlegs with something approaching awe.
‘You know, I underestimated your friend,’ he
grunted respectfully. ‘I thought he was a complete
weed, but I have to admit, that is BRAVE…
Suicidal, of course, but definitely brave…’
The Hysterics were so completely amazed to
find themselves being attacked out of the blue by a
single, undersized, under-age member of another Tribe
that for a moment they just froze, jaws hanging open,
hands filled with deer halfway to their mouths.
Fishlegs skied straight at the Hysterics, swinging
his sword furiously when he got amongst them,

48

but missing of course, and skiing straight over their
campfire and on down the hill. For a moment his furs
caught on fire, but the wind blew them out again.
The Hysterics paused for one second in their
astonishment as they watched the small shrieking
figure careering down the mountainside. They then
looked at one another, and you didn’t need to see
their faces to know that it was a grim, Let’s-Murder-
Him-Now sort of look. They fastened on their skis in a
businesslike, unhurried fashion, hoisted their bows on
to their enormous hairy shoulders, and set off after him.
‘Oh, by the Bouncing Buttocks of Beaming
Baldur,’ panicked Hiccup, setting off down the slope
after Fishlegs, ‘they’re going to kill him, aren’t they?
What am I going to do?’
‘Do?’ asked One Eye, bounding beside Hiccup
in long easy strides. ‘There’s nothing you can do…
your friend is as good as dead… he’s what we in the
Sabre-Tooth Pack would call a Walking Corpse… or
a SKIING Corpse in his case. There’s nothing you
can do, and if you ski in this direction YOU may end
up dead too…’
It looked like the dragon was right. Hiccup was
working hard to keep up with the Hysterics. Hysterics
are enormous and very strong skiers indeed.

49

And Fishlegs was travelling at a very fast speed himself,
on account of not doing anything fancy like TURNING,
admittedly totally out of control, and it was amazing he
hadn’t fallen over already. Hiccup could see him twisting
his head every now and again to shout more insults over
his shoulder.
The Hysterics were gaining, and one Big
Brute carrying a gigantic, double-headed,
black and gold axe, fastened an arrow to his
bow.
Hiccup screeched to a stop, sending out a fan of
snow. He fixed an arrow to his own bow.
‘Oh my horns and whiskers!’ squealed
Toothless. ‘He’s going to d-d-do something! Don’t d-d-
do it, Hiccup! Don’t do it!’
Hiccup took careful aim, and let go of the arrow,
which sailed through the air, and hit the Big Brute with
the Axe who was about to shoot Fishlegs, right bang
splat in the bottom.

51

It was the first successful
hit Hiccup had had all
morning.
‘Good shot!’
roared One Eye, enjoying
himself hugely.
The Big Brute with the Axe let out a roar, and
his arms flailed around wildly. He let fly his own arrow,
which, in a streak of glorious luck, soared in a perfect
arc… straight into the bottom of the Hysteric skiing in
front of him.
‘Oh, this is too good…’ breathed One Eye.
‘Pinch me… it must be my birthday…’
That Hysteric then screamed in pain, and pitched
forward into a complete somersault, taking out the
Hysteric in front of him, who slid on his back into the
legs of the last three Hysterics, upturning them like
skittles, and all SIX Hysterics ended up in a groaning,
tangled, furious, snowy heap.
‘Good, good,’ muttered Hiccup. ‘Now, please
make all six of them follow me, not Fishlegs.’
‘I think they will!’ cried One Eye, crying with
laughter, ‘Oh, I think they will…’
‘OVER HERE!’ yelled Hiccup, making quite sure
they saw who had caused their downfall, and then for

52

good measure, ‘IF YOU’RE NOT AFRAID OF
BEING SHOT, YOU… WRIGGLING RUFFIAN
RUBBISH!’
‘Look what you’ve d-d-done!’ moaned
Toothless. ‘Those Hysterics are going to be so m-m-
mad!’
Mad those Hysterics certainly were, as mad as
fire, and Hiccup set off down the mountain like a little
bolt of lightning.
‘We’ve got a head start,’ panted Hiccup, skiing
faster than he ever had done in his entire life.
‘But it’s not going to be enough,’ gloated One
Eye with relish. ‘You’ve got half the mountain to ski
down, and they’re going to catch up.’
Sure enough, a horribly short time afterwards,
Hiccup could hear the Hysterics beginning their pursuit
behind him.
Five of the Hysterics were howling the Hysterical
Howl like a pack of insane high-pitched wolves, and the
sixth, the one with the Axe, was screaming more
personal insults.
‘How DARE you assault MY Royal Buttocks,
you midget Hooligan Assassin! We Hysterics are the best
Hunters in the entire world, and when I get hold of you
I shall chop you with my Chopper and feed you to the

53

Doomfang, I shall
shoot you full of
arrows and use you
as a colander!’ yelled the
Hysteric with the Axe.
‘Charming!’ grinned One Eye.
‘Fond of visitors, are they, the Hysterics?’
Hiccup headed straight for the
woods, thinking they would find it harder
to shoot him in there.

Now, skiing through a thickly forested area is
dangerous hard work, and the first rule you should
follow in normal circumstances is to go SLOWLY.
These were not normal circumstances, and
Hiccup screamed through that forest, madly twisting
and turning, far too fast for safety.
‘B-b-be careful!’ warned Toothless helpfully.
‘M-m-mind the trees!’
‘Oh thank you, Toothless,’ panted Hiccup
sarcastically, as he swerved violently this way and that,
‘I never thought of that…’
Dragons have quicker reflexes than humans,
so One Eye and Toothless followed with ease. But the
Hysterics weren’t doing too badly either. Hiccup did
hear one crash, as one of the Hysterics didn’t turn in
time and smashed into a tree.
But that left five Hysterics still chasing after him,
and from the sound of their spine-creeping Hysterical
Howls, getting closer by the second…
‘You cannot get away!’ screamed the Big Brute
with the Axe. ‘When I get hold of you, I shall tear you
limb from limb and use your wishbone as a toothpick!’
Meanwhile, down at the bottom of the gorge,
Gobber had woken from his nap, and ten of his young
pupils had returned from their hunting trip.

56

Gobber had harnessed five Sabre-Tooth Drivers
to the sleigh, and was waiting for the return of Hiccup
and Fishlegs.
‘I shot ninety Snowpeckers,’ boasted Speedifist
to an impressed Wartihog.
‘That’s NOTHING,’ crowed Snotlout. ‘I got two
hundred and four… easy-peasy lemon squeezy, it was
like shooting fish in a barrel. Even Hiccup the Useless
and his ridiculous Fishlegged friend must have got a few
today, they can’t be THAT pathetic.’
‘WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THOSE
NUMBSKULLS?’ roared Gobber, beginning to feel a
little uneasy. For Hiccup was the son of the Chief, Stoick
the Vast, O Hear His Name and Tremble, Ugh, Ugh, and
Stoick had a nasty temper and wouldn’t be too pleased
if anything had happened to his only son.
‘Maybe they got ambushed by Snowpeckers?’
sneered Snotlout.
There was a shouting from the gorge, and down
it like an erratic snowploughing rocket came Fishlegs,
arms whirring like windmills. Fishlegs was going so fast
he couldn’t possibly stop. He went on past the sleigh,
past the open-mouthed Gobber and the boys, and on
and on for fifty metres until he eventually came to a
stop, and collapsed on the ice.

57

Gobber ran after him, with a very nasty feeling
now in the bottom of his stomach, and picked
Fishlegs up.
Fishlegs looked terrible, purple and sweaty and
trembling.
‘HICCUP?’ shouted Gobber. ‘WHERE is
HICCUP?’
‘Hysterics…’ gasped Fishlegs. ‘A…a…a…cchoo!
Hysterics…’
Gobber turned as white as a Semi-Spotted
Snowpecker.
Up above, Hiccup shot out of the cover of the
trees like an arrow from a bow.
Directly below him was the gorge… he could
see the little speck of Gobber’s sleigh, and little dots
moving around it. The other boys must have made it
back, then…
Hiccup knew that if he skied down the gorge,
he would never make it. The Hysterics were so close
behind him now they would shoot him or catch him
before he reached the bottom.
He had to make a split-second decision.
Instead of heading towards the gorge, he set his
teeth grimly and pointed his skis to the right, down the
slope that led directly to the clifftop.

58

‘What are you d-d-doing?’ shrieked Toothless.
‘This w-w-way issa two hundred metre cliff! You
going to d-d-die!’
Behind him, the Hysterics burst out of the
woods. When they saw where Hiccup was going, they
didn’t even bother to start shooting. They just swooped
after him, shouting out jeeringly:
‘Where do you think you’re going, Hooligan
SCUM?’
‘Say hello to Valhalla for me, because that’s
where you’ll end up!’

59

They could see the edge of the cliff now, where
the snow ended, and it was just an endless drop into
nothingness.
‘Stop!’ shrieked Toothless. ‘S-S-STOP!!’
‘Why?’ asked Hiccup. ‘I haven’t got any choice.
You think those Hysterics are going to give me a big
warm hug and let me go?’
‘N-n-no!’ screamed Toothless. ‘But you can’t ski
off a c-c-cliff! Issa long way D-D-DOWN!’
‘That’s why I need your help, One Eye,’ said
Hiccup to the great Sabre-Tooth Dragon, who was
bounding alongside.

‘And what makes you
think,’ sneered One Eye, ‘that I
WANT to help you? I hate Humans.
One less of you little pink slave-drivers isn’t
going to trouble ME.’
‘That’s true,’ said Hiccup, ‘but if I die, the
next Chief of the Hairy Hooligan Tribe will be…’
Hiccup had run out of slope. He launched
himself off the cliff, throwing his weight forward, skis
wide apart. One Eye followed, unfolding his great wings.
‘Will be who?’ said One Eye urgently. ‘Will be who?’
For one moment Hiccup soared up into that glorious
infinity of blue sky like a bird.
And then he plunged DOWN.

61

yelled Hiccup
as he fell.
Hiccup screamed
towards the ice at a hundred
and fifty miles per hour.
Gobber the Belch, watching from
below as the precious son of his Boss was about
to fall to his death, screamed as well.
In three seconds Hiccup would smash into the
ground and that would be the end of him.
After one second Hiccup was pretty sure One
Eye would save him.
After two seconds he wasn’t so sure.
And in fact the great Sabre-Tooth Driver Dragon
was only just in time. For vital milliseconds his hatred of
humans held him back…
But then he folded back his wings and dived
after Hiccup.

62

A Sabre-Tooth can dive more swiftly and
beautifully than a peregrine falcon. One Eye caught
Hiccup around the waist with his great talons in the nick
of time, and then swept upwards, wings stretched out
like a great white kite. Hiccup gave a whoop of joy.
Down below, the watching boys cheered, and
started the Hooligan Hurrah. Gobber practically fainted,
such was his relief.
‘Snotface Snotlout,’ said One Eye, as he spread
his wings wide. ‘Is he the tall red-headed boy with a
face like a pig?’
‘That’s the one,’ crowed Hiccup happily.
‘Then you’re right,’ replied One Eye, soaring
even higher. ‘Perhaps you are one Human worth
saving…’
Up on the clifftops, the Big Brute of
a Hysteric with the Axe was so angry he
snapped his ski-poles like twigs. His
furious voice floated up to them:
‘YOU’RE NOT SAFE
YET! YOU’RE NOT SAFE
EVER!’ screamed
the Big Brute,
completely
beside himself.

‘WHEREVER YOU GO I SHALL FIND YOU! I
SHALL FOLLOW YOU TO THE ENDS OF THE
EARTH, TO THE BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN,
IN THE GOD-LIKE HEIGHTS OF THE SKY!
I PROMISE YOU, YOU HOOLIGAN COCKROACH,
THAT YOU WILL REGRET THE DAY YOU SHOT
AN ARROW IN THE BOTTOM OF NORBERT THE
NUTJOB!!’ and then the sound became too faint for
them to hear any more.
‘Remind me,’ Hiccup said to Toothless as they
flew along, ‘not to come back to Hysteria any time
in the next twenty years…’
‘E-e-ever,’ replied Toothless passionately. ‘Not
come back EVER.’
Sabre-Tooth Drivers are so bulky and muscular,
they can only fly short distances, so One Eye dropped
right down and placed Hiccup in the sleigh of a very
relieved Gobber the Belch. Gobber took one look at the
Hysterics on the clifftops, shaking their fists and howling
the Hysterical Howl, and judged it might not be a good
idea to stick around. He loaded Fishlegs and the other
boys back on to the sleigh and, cheering and singing, they
followed the flying Sabre-Tooth all the way back to the
little Isle of Berk.

64

4. IS THERE SOMETHING
WRONG WITH FISHLEGS?

Hiccup did not sleep well that night. Every time he
dropped off, Norbert the Nutjob found him in his
dreams, screaming, ‘I will GRIND YOU INTO SAND!
I WILL CHOP YOU WITH MY CHOPPER!’ and
Hiccup would wake up again, burningly hot and sweaty.
The following day, Toothless woke up in a furious
temper because he still wasn’t back in Hibernation Sleep.
He’d done everything he should have done the night
before. He’d taken lots of exercise, drunk a milky drink
at bedtime; all for nothing. On the dot of five o’clock the
next morning, his greengage eyes opened up, SNAP, like
a scallop opening its shell, and that was it for the day, no
more sleeping.
And that was it for Hiccup too.
Toothless crawled up from his place at Hiccup’s
feet, like a small, enraged hot-water bottle. He stormed
up Hiccup’s body, digging his sharp little claws into
Hiccup’s tummy as he went, up to Hiccup’s forehead,
where he sat and hissed furiously.
‘Toothless a-a-awake AGAIN… ’Snot fair…
’Snot fair… WHY Toothless awake? Everyone else
a-a-asleep…’

67

It is not much
fun being woken up
at five o’clock in the
morning by a dragon
sitting on your head
and hissing angry
smoke rings straight
up your nostrils.
‘Well I’M awake now too,’ grumbled Hiccup,
coughing sleepily. ‘Could you blow those smoke rings
somewhere else, I’ve already got a sore throat…’
‘Oh you,’ fumed Toothless, blowing out great
clouds of furious smoke. ‘You’re j-j-just a H-h-human,
you don’t count… us d-d-dragons s-s-sensitive… we
n-n-need our sleep.’
‘Thank you, Toothless,’ said Hiccup through
a huge bout of coughing, ‘but we don’t have to get up
now, you know, we can just doze for a bit…’
Hiccup turned over on to his other side and
snuggled the furs more cosily around his shoulders, so he
could snooze for a bit longer.
But once Toothless was awake he was AWAKE.
The little dragon made a half-hearted pretence of
snuggling down next to his Master, and then he bounced
up again.

68

‘Toothless get UP now…’ he said, flapping
around Hiccup’s head, tweaking his hair and blowing
raspberries in his ears. ‘Issa l-l-lovely morning…
come on… come on… Toothless h-h-hungry…
Hiccup make Toothless b-b-breakfast…’
And when that didn’t work, Toothless stood on
Hiccup’s shoulder, held his ear lobe tenderly with one
claw, and shrieked right down his ear hole, ‘MAYDAY
MAYDAY! Toothless need to make p-p-pee-pee
RIGHT NOW!’
Hiccup sat bolt upright like he’d been shot
with an arrow. ‘Oh jumping jellyfish, not right now,
Toothless, not on the bed again… hang on there,
Toothless, just hang on…’
Hiccup jumped out of the bed in one hop, on to
the freezing cold stone floor, and threw on four layers of
furs, with Toothless flapping round his head squawking,
‘RIGHT NOW, RIGHT NOW, Toothless need pee-
pee RIGHT NOW.’
‘Just hang on!’ begged Hiccup. He had to take
his mittens off to undo the big bolts on the front door,
Toothless shrieking, ‘Right now! Right now! Right
now!’
Hiccup dragged open the door, and the day
outside was still as dark as night-time and very, very cold,

69

so cold that the air was like an icy bucket of water being
thrown in your face.
Toothless flew out, still shrieking, ‘Right now!
Right now!’ and squatted down on the snow a metre
out of the front door.
‘Well done for hanging on, Toothless,’
said Hiccup, banging his hands together to warm
them up. Toothless squatted down, a look of pretend
concentration furrowing his horns, but nothing seemed
to be happening.
After a while Toothless got up. ‘Toothless NOT
need p-p-pee-pee after all…’ he said decidedly.
Hiccup clapped his mittened hand to his forehead
in frustration.
Sometimes being the owner of a dragon was
VERY HARD WORK.
There was no point going back to bed now that
he’d got up so Hiccup fixed himself breakfast, and while
he did this he had plenty of time to think.
Hiccup was worried about Fishlegs. Why had
Fishlegs attacked those Hysterics? It was very out of
character. Normally Fishlegs would only have to get a sniff
of something like a Hysteric and he would snowplough as
quickly as possible in the opposite direction. OK, maybe
all that falling over had set off his Berserk tendencies, but
still, it was a bit peculiar…

70

And Fishlegs hadn’t been looking too well, lately,
either. Lots of sneezing and shivering, and that couldn’t
be caused by being a Berserk. It was almost like there
was something WRONG WITH HIM…
An hour or so later, the door was flung open so
wildly it nearly fell off its hinges, and Hiccup’s father,
Stoick the Vast, stomped into the room looking for his
breakfast, like a six-and-a-half-foot earthquake, yawning
so wide you could see his tonsils. Stoick the Vast was
exactly what you might expect a Viking to be – loads of
beard and not a lot of neck, masses of muscles but not a
lot going on in the BRAIN department.
‘Made some porridge, have you, son?’ he roared.
‘Excellent, excellent.’ Stoick didn’t bother putting the
porridge into a bowl. He simply removed the cauldron
from the fire, sat down at the table, and drank the
porridge straight from the pot.
‘Father?’ said Hiccup.
‘Mmm?’ said Stoick absent-mindedly, as he
tipped his great head back and drank the last dregs of
porridge, a lot of it running down his beard in a sticky,
lumpy river.
‘I wonder if you can help me… I’ve been
worrying about Fishlegs…’ said Hiccup.
Stoick finished the porridge with a great

71

smacking of the lips and threw the cauldron into the
fireplace with cheery violence.
‘Is Fisheggs your odd little friend with the face
like a depressed haddock?’ boomed Stoick, grabbing a
mackerel off the table and swallowing it, tail and head and
eyes and all, in one gulp like a sword-swallower swallowing
swords.
‘That’s right,’ said Hiccup, ‘and his name isn’t
Fisheggs, it’s Fishlegs…’
‘Well, there’s a coinci-thingummy,’ bellowed
Stoick.
‘Do you mean coincidence?’ asked Hiccup politely.
‘Whatever!’ roared Stoick. ‘I’VE been worrying
about Fisheggs too.’
‘You have?’ asked Hiccup, in surprise. It wasn’t
like Stoick to worry about anything.
‘I have,’ said Stoick solemnly. ‘And I need to talk
to you about something VERY SERIOUSLY. Come
here, Hiccup.’
Hiccup went and stood in front of his father. Chief
Stoick put his hands on his son’s shoulders and looked
into his eyes very seriously. Hiccup tried to look serious
too, but it is quite hard to take your father totally seriously
when he seems to have a beard made entirely out of
porridge.

73

‘Son,’ said Stoick the Vast, ‘you are the son of
a Chief, and the Heir to the Hooligan Tribe. A man is
judged by the company he keeps, and I am sorry to have
to tell you, but Fisheggs is the weirdest little weirdo I
have ever seen. You must give him up, Hiccup, give
him up…’
‘But, Father,’ protested Hiccup. ‘Fishlegs is
my friend.’
‘SILENCE!’ roared Stoick. And then more
gently, ‘I know it is hard, son, but a Chief is a public
figure. We Hooligans need to be FEARED by the other
Tribes, so they don’t start thinking they can sneak along
and invade us… Fisheggs is a… well, let’s face it, son,
he’s a bit ODD. You stand too near Fisheggs, son, and
the Meatheads, and the Visithugs, and the Bog-Burglars
and the Hysterics will start thinking YOU’RE a bit odd
too… a bit soft, a bit WEAK, and then you’re putting
the whole Tribe in peril.’
‘Yes, Father,’ said Hiccup miserably.
‘You need to start working on being
TERRIFYING, Hiccup.’ Stoick patted his son on the
shoulder, peering sympathetically at his sad face. This
was hard, but it was for Hiccup’s own good. ‘And
Fisheggs isn’t helping. Give him up, son. Your cousin,
Snotlout, now, there’s a suitable friend for you. Got an air

74

of terrible danger about him. You stand shoulder to
shoulder with Snotlout and you’ll be feared throughout
the Archipelago. Does that answer your question?’
‘Yes, Father,’ said Hiccup, very sadly.
Stoick the Vast clapped his son heartily on
the back. ‘Good boy,’ roared Stoick. ‘I knew you’d
see sense. And now, we’d better get ready for the
Freya’sday Fete… we don’t want to be late now, do we?
Old Wrinkly has given me a tip for the Young Heroes
Smashsticks-on-Ice Competition… he’s done some
soothsaying,* and he tells me us Hooligans are going
to win ten to two so I’ve put a bit of a bet on. Run and
fetch your stick and skates, quick, boy.’
Slowly, Hiccup went and fetched his Smash stick.
Sadly, he picked up his ice-skates.
‘Old Wrinkly isn’t very good at looking into the
future,’ he warned his father, but Stoick wasn’t listening.
Stoick rarely listened.

75

LEARNING TO SPEAK DRAGONESE
TOILET TRAINING

You: Toothless, ta COGLET me wantee ta
cack-cack in di greenclaw crapspot…
Toothless, you KNOW I want you to poo in the
dragon toilets…

Dragon: O yessee yessee, me coglet…
Yes, yes, I know…

You: (pointing at large poo in the middle of
Stoick’s bed) Erg… questa SA?
So what, then, is THIS? PAUSE

Dragon (hopefully): Ummm… un chocklush
snik-snak?
Er… a chocolate biscuit?

You: Snotta chocklush snik-snak, issa
CACK-CACK, issa cack-cack di Toothless
NA in di greenclaw crapspot, may oopla
bang splosh in di middling di sleepy-slab
di pappa.
This isn’t a chocolate biscuit, it’s
a POO, it’s one of YOUR poos,
Toothless, and it ISN’T in
the dragon toilets, it’s
right bang splat in the
middle of my father’s
bed.

77

5. SMASHSTICKS-ON-ICE

The Freya’sday Fete took place every year on Freya’sday
Eve, which was the Viking holiday celebrating the end of
winter and the coming of spring.
This year the Fete was being held out in the
middle of the frozen sea in Hooligan Harbour. It was
strange to think that only six months before the Harbour
had been filled with a grey, surly ocean. Now there were
red and white stripy tents pitched higgledy-piggledy all
over the ice. Roaring fires burned high, grilling Semi-
Spotted Snowpeckers for the Vikings to munch on as
they wandered round stalls selling octopus lollipops, or
listened to story-tellers telling tall stories, or watched
open-mouthed as the giants on skates balanced dwarves
on their heads.
There was a big pitch marked out for the
Smashsticks-on-Ice Competitions. Smashsticks-on-Ice
was a very rough and complicated game played with
bats, balls and ice-skates. Nobody was quite
sure of the rules, which meant that
people tended to make them up as
they went along, and then anybody
who complained would start a fight.
The Young Heroes were

79

supposed to go first, followed later on by the Adult
Warriors. They would be playing against another Tribe,
the Bog-Burglars, who had been invited over to join in
the Celebrations for the day.
The Bog-Burglars were a Tribe of fearsome
female Warriors who lived on an island some way to the
west. Their Chief, Big-Boobied Bertha, stood nearby,

80

gulping down mugs of beer
and scratching her chin
stubble.
Her daughter,
Camicazi, a very small girl
with a swagger and the
tangliest hair in the Inner
Isles, was practising swinging her
Smashstick.
Camicazi was a friend of
Hiccup’s, and he wandered over to
ask her if she had seen Fishlegs that morning.
‘Nope,’ said Camicazi cheerily. ‘But I hope you
Hooligan boys are feeling lucky. Us Bog-Burglars are
going to MURDER you weedy little BOYS in the
Smashsticks. I bet you Hooligans are hopeless at it –
apart from you, of course, Hiccup,’ she added. Camicazi
had a great admiration for Hiccup, ever since he had
rescued her from being eaten by Sharkworms in Fort
Sinister.*

81

Snotlout happened to be skating past at that
moment and he nearly fell over, he laughed so much
at this. ‘Hiccup???’ jeered Snotlout. ‘Hiccup will get
as many goals as he shot Semi-Spotted Snowpeckers
yesterday. I shot more than two hundred. How many did
you shoot, again, Hiccup? What was it – none??’

82

Hiccup blushed. Camicazi looked very surprised.
‘P-P-ARP! The Young Heroes Smashsticks-on-
Ice Match is about to begin! Please could both teams
make their way to the Pitch…’ shouted Gobber the
Belch from the centre of the ice.
Gobber had changed into his shortest shorts to
be the referee. The Bog-Burglars (apart from Camicazi
of course) were big, rough, mean-looking girls with
wonky plaits, broken noses, and thighs like tree-trunks.
Fishlegs staggered on to the pitch at the last
minute. He looked even more terrible than the last time
Hiccup saw him. He was sneezing and shivering hard,
and he could hardly stand, and was using his Smashstick
to hold himself up. He had put his ice-skates on the
wrong feet.
Hiccup put up his hand to try and get Gobber’s
attention. ‘Sir, I think Fishlegs isn’t well,’ he said.
‘NONSENSE!’ roared Gobber. ‘Vikings don’t
get SICK! Flu is for softies! Colds are for babies!
Plagues are for girlies! I’VE never had a day’s sickness in
all my life, not even a sore throat. I don’t want to hear
ANOTHER WORD.’
Hiccup and Fishlegs skated out on to the pitch,
Hiccup supporting Fishlegs, who could hardly put one
skate in front of another.

83

‘You ought to be at home,’ worried Hiccup. ‘You
look awful.’
Fishlegs laughed sarcastically. ‘Didn’t you hear
Gobber? Vikings don’t get SICK… I’m not ill, I’m just
shivering with EXCITEMENT to be out here on this
frost-bitingly cold day…’
Gobber blew the whistle, threw the puck into
the Smashstick Scrum and all hell broke loose.

Ten boys and girls fell on top of each other in
an untidy hairy mess, clonking each other on the head
with their wooden sticks. Within two minutes Wartihog,
Clueless, Lovethug and Deadly Doris were lying
stretched out on the ice, and Camicazi had somehow
broken free of the scrum and was skating towards
Hiccup and Fishlegs at breakneck speed. Fishlegs moved
in to tackle her, and she pulled his helmet over his eyes
so he couldn’t see anything, before skilfully shooting the
puck between the goalposts.
And as the Bog-Burglars merrily cried out,
an extraordinary change came over Fishlegs.
He tore off his helmet and he snorted like a bull
about to charge.
‘Uh oh,’ said Hiccup. He had seen that look
somewhere before. ‘Now hang on a second, Fishlegs,
don’t do anything rash…’
‘FOUL!’ bellowed Fishlegs.
Fishlegs skated towards the gigantic figure of the
referee, Gobber the Belch, like a crab slipping on soap.

‘GOBBER, YOU BIG, STUPID, BARBARIAN
BABOON, ARE YOU BLIND? SHE FOULED ME!’
Gobber started, as surprised as if a small pink
prawn on a plate had suddenly leapt up and bit him.
‘WHAT did you say, Fishlegs????’ roared
Gobber in astonishment.
‘SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOUR
EARS AS WELL AS YOUR EYES?’
screamed Fishlegs. ‘I’VE MET SHEEP MORE
INTELLIGENT THAN YOU ARE! I’VE MET
JELLYFISH WHO COULD OUTPLAY YOU IN A
GAME OF CHESS!’
Gobber swelled up like a balloon about to
explode.
‘I’LL DEAL WITH THIS, BELCH!’ yelled
Stoick the Vast, skating ponderously over to this
extraordinary scene.
Stoick the Vast looked down at Fishlegs from
the giant height of six-and-a-half-feet. ‘YOUNG MAN,’
he roared, ‘YOUR CHIEFTAIN IS SPEAKING
TO YOU. THIS IS A SPECIAL OCCASION…
THERE ARE BOG-BURGLARS PRESENT.’ Stoick
pointed to the Bog-Burglars, who were killing themselves
laughing.
Fishlegs was silent for a second, looking up at his

86

Chieftain. And then…
‘FATTY!’ shrieked Fishlegs.
Stoick the Vast stared.
‘LARDY-BUM!’ shouted Fishlegs.
‘WHO’S BEEN HAVING TOO
MANY SECOND HELPINGS, CHIEF
GREEDIGUTS OF THE JELLY-BELLIES??’
Stoick the Vast turned as red as a lobster.
‘HOW DARE YOU TALK TO YOUR CHIEF IN
THIS RUDE AND IMPERTINENT MANNER?’
Fishlegs opened his mouth to scream some more
insults, but Hiccup interrupted.
‘He’s not well, Father,’ whispered Hiccup
urgently. ‘I think his Berserk thingy has gone wrong…
please, Father… I’ll take him home, he’s not well…’
‘Take him home, then,’ growled Stoick to
Hiccup. ‘But I’m warning you, son, that boy isn’t fit to
be a Hooligan, let alone a friend to the son of the Chief.’
At first Fishlegs didn’t want to be dragged away,
but while he was struggling, he fell over, and the cold
shock of landing in the snow brought him back to his
senses again.
Hiccup was really worried now, and he decided
to take Fishlegs to Old Wrinkly, to see whether HE
knew what was wrong…

87

6. WHAT OLD WRINKLY SAID

Old Wrinkly was Hiccup’s grandfather on his mother’s
side. He lived in a large untidy house on the beach. He
was delighted to see them, and he fed them all porridge.
Toothless snoozed in front of the blazing fire in his
fireplace, while the snowy clothes of Hiccup and Fishlegs
dripped dry on chairs.
‘What can I do for you, little Hiccup?’ wheezed Old
Wrinkly, lighting a big fat pipe.
‘It’s my friend, Fishlegs,’ explained Hiccup. ‘He’s
not very well.’
Old Wrinkly looked at Fishlegs, who was shaking
like a leaf in a high wind.
‘Oh come on, Hiccup,’ said Fishlegs irritably. ‘I keep
telling you, it’s just a NASTY COLD…’
Old Wrinkly tut-tutted.
Old Wrinkly was the wise man and soothsayer of
the Hooligan Tribe. If you were ill, you would go to Old
Wrinkly and he would examine you, consult the gods,
and then give you some perfectly disgusting medicine like
rabbits’ droppings in limpet goo that might or might not
make you better. (Doctoring and looking into the future are
complicated businesses – to tell the truth, Old Wrinkly did
not always get them right.)

89

Old Wrinkly put his ancient old hand on
Fishlegs’s forehead, and tut-tutted again. ‘Very hot, very
hot,’ he muttered to himself, ‘and sweaty.’ He listened
to Fishlegs’s heart with a strange trumpet-like instrument
and tut-tutted some more.
And then he threw some twigs on to the fire, and
poked the flames with a long metal stick.
‘Oh dearie me!’ gasped Old Wrinkly as he stared
at the red embers.
‘That sounds cheerful,’ shivered Fishlegs.
‘The fire seems to be telling me that your
friend has VORPENTITIS, caused by the sting of a
VENOMOUS VORPENT,’ said Old Wrinkly sadly.
‘Have you met any Venomous Vorpents recently?’
There was a nasty cold feeling in the bottom of
Hiccup’s stomach.
‘We did meet a Venomous Vorpent…’ Hiccup
said slowly. ‘A couple of months ago… a Vorpent fell
on to Fishlegs’s hand when we were escaping from Fort
Sinister…’
‘But it didn’t sting me!’ Fishlegs said eagerly. ‘I
didn’t feel anything sting me!’
Old Wrinkly shook his head. ‘The Vorpent numbs
the skin before it stings. It’s very clever really. You
wouldn’t have felt a thing. And then nothing happens,

90

until a couple of months later, when you fall ill with
Vorpentitis.’
‘What are the symptoms of Vorpentitis?’ asked
Hiccup.
‘Fever… runny nose… episodes of madness…’
replied Old Wrinkly gloomily.
Hiccup’s stomach was now as cold as ice, but he
tried to sound cheerful. ‘And how do we get him better?’
Old Wrinkly sounded gloomier still. ‘Weeeell…’
he croaked, ‘that’s the tricky part… The sting of the
Venomous Vorpent is pretty much always FATAL.’
There was a nasty silence.
‘The good news is,’ continued Old Wrinkly,
‘we have until ten in the morning tomorrow to find the
antidote* before your friend dies.’
‘Oh good,’ said Hiccup, hugely relieved. ‘So there
IS an antidote…’
Fishlegs had been listening with an open mouth.
‘But all I’ve got is a NASTY COLD!’ he protested. ‘A
nasty cold – and you tell me I’ve only got one day to
live!’
Hiccup ignored him. ‘What’s the antidote?’ asked
Hiccup.
‘This is where the tricky part gets trickier…’
wheezed Old Wrinkly. ‘The antidote to the sting of the

Venomous Vorpent is the Vegetable-that-No-one-Dares-
Name.’
‘What, you mean the POTATO?’ gasped Hiccup.
‘Sssssh,’ whispered Old Wrinkly, desperately
flapping his hands. ‘You’re not supposed to name it! It’s
bad luck!’
‘But the POTATO is an imaginary vegetable!’ said
Hiccup, who thought all this talk of bad luck was just
superstition. ‘It doesn’t really exist!’
‘There are those that say the Vegetable-that-No-
one-Dares-Name can be found in a great country to the
west known as America…’ Old Wrinkly pointed out.
‘But most people say,’ said Hiccup slowly, ‘that
there’s no such place as America. Most people say
that it’s an imaginary land that only crackpot weirdos
believe in. Most people think that the earth is as flat as
a pancake, and if you sail too far to the west you will fall
off the end of it.’
‘That is what most people say,’ admitted Old
Wrinkly, shrugging his shoulders and carrying on puffing
his pipe.
‘And even if there WAS such a thing as this
so-called potato in this so-called land called America,’
argued Hiccup, ‘we’re never going to be able to sail to it
and find the antidote in only ONE DAY. In one day

you’d hardly be out of the Sullen Sea… the thing you’re
suggesting is IMPOSSIBLE.’
‘There’s no such thing as im-POSSIBLE,
Hiccup,’ snorted Old Wrinkly, ‘only im-PROBABLE.
The only thing that limits us are the limits to our
imaginations… and I used to think of you as an
imaginative boy. Give up, if you want to… but I used to
think of you as the sort of boy who would NEVER give
up, however bad things looked.’
‘OK, then,’ said Hiccup crossly. ‘Give me one
reason not to give up.’
‘I will give you a reason,’ said Old Wrinkly.
‘There is a chance that Norbert the Nutjob, Chief of the
Hysterics, may have the antidote to Vorpentitis.’
Hiccup jumped. ‘NORBERT THE NUTJOB??’
said Hiccup. ‘Why does HE have a POTATO? Where
did he get it from?’
‘I will explain by telling you the story of Norbert
the Nutjob’s father and the Doomfang,’ said Old
Wrinkly.
‘You do that,’ said Hiccup, already feeling
anxious at the mere mention of Norbert the Nutjob.
Old Wrinkly relit his pipe. ‘I have to warn you,
Hiccup,’ wheezed Old Wrinkly between puffs, ‘that, like
a lot of stories, this may or may not be true…’

93

94

The Story of Norbert the Nutjob’s Father
and the Doomfang

‘Fifteen years ago,’ began Old Wrinkly, ‘the Chief of
the Hysterical Tribe was Norbert the Nutjob’s father,
Bigjob... The Hysterics have never believed that the world
is flat, and that if you sail too far to the west you will fall
off the end of it. The Hysterics think this is poppycock.
Bigjob believed that the earth was as round as the moon,
and he set out to prove it.
‘Bigjob built the greatest Viking ship you have ever
seen, a ship called The American Dream, and he sailed far,
far to the west through storms as black and wild as Woden’s
nightmares. He sailed past icebergs higher than a ship’s great
mast and on and on over the Great Green Sea Desert, and
however far he sailed he never came to the end of the world,
for the world is as round as a circle, and a circle has no end.’

95

Hiccup could contain himself no longer. ‘Is this
true?’ he burst out. ‘Is the world really a circle that has
no end?’
‘I have no idea,’ replied Old Wrinkly calmly. ‘As I
told you, this is a story. Be quiet and I’ll tell you the end.
‘After a journey so long it seemed like for ever,
Bigjob at last found the land that he had dreamed about,
the land called America. This was a glorious country, full
of natural Treasures like the Vegetable-that-No-one-Dares-
Name, and friendly natives that Bigjob called “Feather
People”. Bigjob spent a happy couple of months there before
returning home to the Inner Isles.
‘Norbert’s father decided to take back with him a
FROZEN VEGETABLE-THAT-NO-ONE-DARES-
NAME, so that everybody would believe that he really
had been to America. On the journey back, Bigjob had
an extraordinary feeling the ship was being FOLLOWED.
At first he thought it was a great whale or a shark, but
eventually he realised it was something far, far worse. It was
a tremendous Sea Dragon called a DOOMFANG.’
‘That is strange,’ interrupted Hiccup. Hiccup
knew a great deal about dragons, and this was very odd
behaviour for a Doomfang. Doomfangs are heavily
armed, terrifying creatures, but they normally just ignore
humans.

96

‘Will you stop interrupting?’ said Old Wrinkly.
‘This dreadful animal followed them all the way
from America like a Curse. It was only when they reached
the Wrath of Thor that the animal attacked, and tried to
swallow the boat. Bigjob was very brave. Riding his dragon
the Thunderer, he shot arrow after arrow at the Doomfang.
These specially sharp arrows had been given to Bigjob by
the Feather People, who are very expert at making arrows.
Bigjob was down to his last arrow when the Doomfang
finally killed him. Ever since that day, the Doomfang has
never left the Wrath of Thor. For fifteen years, no one has
been able to get into Hysteria, and no one can come out.
The Chief of the Hysterical Tribe is now Bigjob’s son,
Norbert the Nutjob, and he has never got over the death
of his father. It is said that he keeps the frozen Vegetable-
that-No-one-Dares-Name in a casket, and it is in as good
condition as it was fifteen years ago.

‘So there you are,’ said Old Wrinkly, ‘That is the story
of Norbert the Nutjob’s father and the Doomfang. Of
course, at this time of year, the Wrath of Thor is frozen
over, and the Doomfang is trapped under the ice. And
Hysteria is only a three-hour sleigh ride from here.’
Hiccup jumped to his feet. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We
were there only yesterday. We haven’t got a moment to

97

lose… I must go to Hysteria and bring back the
antidote.’
Fishlegs’s mouth dropped open. ‘I can’t believe
I’m hearing this… you’re thinking of GOING BACK
TO HYSTERIA??? The creepiest, grimmest, scariest
place I have ever been to in all my life, and you’re going
to go there in the DARK?’
‘The Hysterics won’t see me coming in the dark,’
Hiccup pointed out.
‘You shot Norbert the Nutjob in the bottom
with an ARROW!’ howled Fishlegs. ‘You think you can
just ask him politely to give you his precious American
vegetable and he’s just going to HAND IT OVER??’
‘Burglary may be involved,’ admitted Hiccup.
‘And all because of Old Wrinkly’s
SOOTHSAYING? Everybody knows that Old Wrinkly
is nearly as hopeless at soothsaying as you are at
Frightening Foreigners.’
‘Thank you,’ murmured Old Wrinkly.
Fishlegs hadn’t finished yet. ‘I keep on telling
you… I have just got a BAD COLD… A… a… a…
tish-yoo! Actually, I’m not feeling that well… would you
mind if I lay down for a moment?’
‘Be my guest,’ said Old Wrinkly. ‘You can have
my bed… and I’ll make you some hot lemon and honey.

98

Don’t forget, Hiccup, you have until ten in the morning
tomorrow, before Fishlegs dies… TEN in the morning,
mind…’
So Hiccup left Old Wrinkly looking after his
great friend Fishlegs, and ran out of the door. He had
finally realised he might not have much time left…
And although he didn’t know it at the time,
those were the first steps he took towards the scariest,
the most alarming and ghastly adventure of his life so
far. He was indeed setting out on a quest… a quest that
would be a race against time and lead him to a terrifying
monster and icy peril, which would be sung about by
bards ever after as the Quest for the Frozen Potato.

7. THE QUEST FOR THE
FROZEN POTATO

Hiccup marched out of Old Wrinkly’s house back to the
Celebrations in the Harbour, followed by a grumbling
Toothless. For about six hundred metres he was
absolutely certain about what he was going to do.
He would go and explain to his father what had
happened, and ask him to set up a quest for the Frozen
Potato. The Hooligans were always going on quests.
But when he eventually found his father, who was
trying his luck in the Frozen Lucky Dip, he suddenly
didn’t feel quite so sure of himself.
Stoick wasn’t as pleased to see his only son as
he normally was. He had just lost a big bet because
the Bog-Burglar Young Heroes had WHIPPED the
Hooligan Young Heroes in the Smashsticks-on-Ice
Competition, fourteen goals to nil. So Stoick was not in
the best of moods.
‘Bother that Old Wrinkly and his stupid
soothsaying. An EASY WIN for the Hooligans, he said.
Put all your money on it, he said. And what happens?
The Bog-Burglars win fourteen – NIL. I
should have known it,’ Stoick muttered to

100

himself, as he drew a large frozen object from the lucky
dip and tried to work out what it was. Fish? A useful
axe? A small chair?
‘Father,’ said Hiccup determinedly, ‘I want to set
out on a quest.’
Stoick looked at his son with surprise. ‘What sort
of quest?’
‘You remember my friend Fishlegs?’ said Hiccup.
Stoick rubbed his nose crossly and grunted.
‘Old Wrinkly says the reason he attacked you
was because he has been stung by the Venomous
Vorpent and he is in the first stage of Vorpentitis, and
that causes episodes of madness, you know… and the
thing is, Father, unless we can find the antidote in time
Old Wrinkly says Fishlegs may DIE…’
Stoick looked as if he wasn’t sure whether to
be sad or happy… but then he saw his son’s face and
hurriedly looked sad.
‘Um… yes… oh dear…’ said Stoick.
‘So I want to set out on a quest for the antidote,’
announced Hiccup.
‘What is the antidote?’ asked Stoick the Vast.
‘Old Wrinkly says the antidote is the potato,’ said
Hiccup.
‘SSSSSShhhh!’ said Stoick. ‘You’re not supposed

101

to name it! And the Vegetable-that-No-one-Dares-
Name is an imaginary vegetable – surely you know that,
Hiccup?’
‘Old Wrinkly says that the Hysterics went to
America and brought back a frozen potato,’ continued
Hiccup stubbornly. ‘So I want to FIND the potato and
save Fishlegs’s life.’
‘I FORBID YOU TO DO ANY SUCH
THING!’ roared Stoick.
‘If we don’t believe in the potato Fishlegs may
DIE!’ Hiccup yelled right back at his father.
Stoick the Vast lost his temper and waved the
Unidentified Frozen Object (U.F.O.) around his head.
He roared at his son so loudly poor Hiccup’s
ears rang.
‘YOUR FRIEND FISHLEGS IS A LITTLE
WEIRDO WHO JUST CALLED ME A JELLY-
BELLIED LARDY-BOTTOMED GREEDIGUTS!’
Hiccup flinched as if he had been struck, and
then Stoick felt ashamed, and controlled himself. He
reached out and patted his son on the shoulder, and he
tried to speak more reasonably.
‘Look, son, I know this is difficult for you,
because you are fond of your friend, but let’s just say
that for once in a blue moon Old Wrinkly is right. Even

102

then, as the Chief I WILL NOT risk the life of my only
son for the sake of a little weirdo that Fate has got it in
for.’
‘Isn’t it the Chief’s job to do that?’ said Hiccup
steadily. ‘Fishlegs has no one else to look after him.’
‘You WILL NOT do it,’ said Stoick, very
meaningfully indeed. ‘Because I FORBID it, and that
is an order, son. An order from your CHIEF.’ Stoick
put the U.F.O. on his head (he had decided it was a
HELMET) and stalked off.
The unfortunate thing about going on a quest to
save the life of your sick best friend is that you have no
best friend to go with you. Hiccup watched his father
stalking off with what looked very like a frozen chair on
his head, and wondered miserably what his chances were
if he went on the quest for the Frozen Potato alone.
Not im-POSSIBLE, he thought sadly, but, let’s
face it, im-PROBABLE.
Camicazi stuck her head out from underneath
the Lucky Dip table.
‘Did I hear someone mention the word quest?
When do we get started?’
‘Oh, Camicazi... You really shouldn’t listen in on
other peoples’ conversations,’ said Hiccup.
Camicazi wriggled out from underneath the table

103

and started doing handstands. She still had her ice-
skates on.
‘Us Bog-Burglars always listen in on other
peoples’ conversations,’ she said cheerfully. ‘It’s one
of the reasons I’m going to be so helpful to you on the
quest for the Frozen Potato.’
‘YOU are not going on the quest for the Frozen
Potato,’ said Hiccup. ‘It’s far too dangerous.’
‘Dangerous? PAH!’ boasted Camicazi. ‘Why,
I’ve burgled whole flocks of SHEEP off the
Visithugs… I’ve picked the pockets of the Perilous
Pirates… I’ve stolen the helmet right off the head of
Madguts the Murderous, and you want me to steal one
measly little vegetable?? No problemo, Hiccup, watch
and learn, my boy, watch and learn.’
Hiccup raised his eyes to the heavens. If
Camicazi had a fault, it was that she was very, very
pleased with herself. But it had to be admitted, she was
an excellent burglar.
‘There’s this Madman with an Axe…’ Hiccup
pointed out.
‘Better and better,’ said Camicazi. ‘There’s
nothing I enjoy more than teasing Madmen with Axes.
It’s my favourite sport. If you don’t let me join in I’ll tell
your big fat cross father where you’re going.’

105

‘But that’s blackmail!’ protested Hiccup.
‘You see,’ grinned Camicazi, ‘we Bog-Burglars
have no morals at all. It’s very useful to us.’
Hiccup gave up, and said she could come if she
wanted to.
Camicazi rushed off to get her burglary
equipment, and Hiccup prepared a small sleigh to take
them to Hysteria.
He also pulled down his boat, The Hopeful Puffin,
to drag on runners behind the sleigh.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Camicazi, returning
with her arms laden with ropes and oddly-shaped pointy
metal objects.
‘It’s getting so near to springtime, the ice may
start cracking when we’re out there. And if it does we’re
going to need some way of getting back across the
Sullen Sea,’ replied Hiccup, trying not to think about
what would happen if the ice REALLY DID melt. That
might mean they had to face the Doomfang, on top of
all their other problems.
Hiccup went off to look for One Eye, and
explained his problem, and the big Driver laughed
sneerily.
‘Look, revolting little Human boy, I don’t
know why you think I might want to help you. I am

106

not your mummy. I HATE humans. One thing I will
absolutely SWEAR to you. I will NEVER, repeat
NEVER, waste a tear crying over the death of one of
you Human No-Brainers.’
‘Ah,’ said Hiccup cunningly, ‘but the
antidote isn’t just going to save the life of
my friend, Fishlegs, is it? The Vorpent stings
dragons as well as humans. Thousands of
DRAGONS die of Vorpentitis every year. When
I bring back the frozen potato, I shall plant
potatoes all over Berk, and no dragon shall die
of Vorpentitis ever again.’
Well, that got One Eye, of course, because his
hatred of humans was only matched by his love for
his fellow dragons, and five minutes later Hiccup was
hitching the big Sabre-Tooth Dragon up to his sleigh.
Hiccup told Stoick on the way that he was going
to spend the night at Snotlout’s house and Stoick was
delighted.
‘Excellent, my boy,’ roared Stoick, ‘so you’ve
decided to take my advice, and find yourself a better
friend. Well done, Hiccup.’
‘So now,’ said Hiccup, sitting down in the sleigh
next to Camicazi, ‘we can nip to Hysteria, steal the
potato, and get it to Fishlegs without my father even
knowing we’ve gone.’

108

Only Snotlout noticed the small Sleigh-Dragging-
a-Boat sneaking out of Hooligan Harbour, on its way to
Hysteria on the quest for the Frozen Potato.
Snotlout hoped that wherever Hiccup was going,
it was somewhere dangerous, and that he would NEVER
COME BACK.

109

8. THE WRATH OF THOR

One Eye pulled the sleigh across the ice at a crazy speed.
Once or twice Hiccup tugged on the reins to try and
get him to slow down, but the big Driver ignored him,
and so in the end, Hiccup gave up trying. ‘The quicker
we get to Hysteria, the better, anyway,’ he reminded
himself. The burningly cold wind slammed into his face,
tearing at his eyelids as they careered across the ice.
The Hopeful Puffin bounced crazily behind them
like an ugly duckling desperately trying to keep up with
its demented mother. Luckily, although she was not an
attractive-looking boat, she was sturdy and used to the
odd knock or two. Hiccup had brought along snacks for
everybody that were supposed to last the whole journey,
but Toothless finished all of them in the first three
minutes, littering the sleigh with crumbs, chicken bones
and winkle shells.
‘Toothless c-c-cold…’ he wailed. ‘Toothless
h-h-hungry… Toothless BORED. Ow ow ow ow…

110

Camicazi s-s-sitting on my ta-a-ail… Are we nearly
there yet?’
‘We only left five minutes ago!’ exclaimed
Hiccup.
‘Toothless play I-Spy,’ said Toothless firmly.
At first Camicazi was horribly cheerful, chatting
constantly, and singing loudly, her bright blue eyes
prickling with excitement.
But as the long hours wore on, and as they played
their fifty-second game of I-Spy with Hiccup translating
for Toothless, and as the sky turned pink and grey with
the coming of the evening, and as they passed the Mazy
Multitudes to their left and began to hear the first moans
of the Doomfang under the ice, even Camicazi fell silent.
Hiccup made One Eye wait for the evening
to grow darker before they turned the corner into the
Wrath of Thor, so the Hysteric lookouts wouldn’t spot
them coming.
For a tense, stomach-churning half-hour they
waited, until Hiccup judged it was safe, and gave a pull
on One Eye’s reins to get him going again.
The gigantic sea cliffs of Villainy and Hysteria
loomed above them scarily in the darkness. One Eye
bounded into the Wrath of Thor, and the cliffs leapt up
on either side of the little sleigh as it raced along, like

111

dizzyingly high prison walls.
The eyes of dragons shine
in the dark, and so One Eye’s great
eye acted as a searchlight, showing
them the way. The ice in the narrow
gorge was so clear that it was almost
transparent, and in the beam of One Eye’s
eye, you could see right through it, as if it were a two-
metre-thick pane of frosted glass, down into the sea
below. How interesting, thought Hiccup as he looked
over the edge of the sleigh, I can even make out a shoal
of mackerel down there…
The mass of tiny fish went on for ever,
swimming slowly in their millions way down
below them, until suddenly they scarpered,
shooting away like tiny sparks in an explosion,
as a great dark shape, infinitely large, suddenly
appeared under the ice. It was the
gargantuan shadow of a dragon
the size of an underwater
mountain, and it easily kept
up with the speedy little
sleigh, its long tail lazily

powering it along,
its wings nearly
brushing the edges of
the Wrath of Thor as it beat
them slowly to swim underneath.
‘Issa D-d-doomfang!’ whispered
Toothless into Hiccup’s ear. ‘Let’s go
h-h-home…’
Hiccup gazed downwards in fascinated horror
as the great dragon turned its head to one side
and Hiccup found himself staring into an
enormous, bloodshot, green dragon eye, as long
as the sleigh itself.
It was as if all the green in the
world, of peas, of grass, of spinach, of
leaves, of beans and frogs, had been
concentrated in that one eye and
given it the intensity of a pure green
acid. It was like looking straight
into the sun at midday, through a great
green microscope, and Hiccup was so
dazzled he nearly fell off the sleigh,
until he was brought back to his senses by a
terribleTHUD! and the ice below them jumped up like

The DOOMFANG
The Doomfang is a gigantic predator of the
Open Ocean, very rarely seen by humans.
It is armed not only with fearsome fangs and
claws, but also a strange blue fire that ‘freezes’
its victims to death.

~STATISTICS~

COLOURS: Always as black as your darkest
nightmare.
ARMED WITH: Terrible jaws and fangs. Also
have unusual frozen fire breath, with blue
flames that kill by FREEZING you.
FEAR FACTOR:..............9
ATTACK:.......................9
SPEED:.........................9
SIZE:............................9
DISOBEDIENCE:............9

an earthquake. The sleigh jumped too, and One Eye
soared briefly into the air with a complaining yowl.
THUD! went the ice again as the Doomfang
butted his head against the thick transparent wall. With
terrified relief, Hiccup realised the ice was so deep that
it was holding strong, although it was now shot through
with tiny little white cracks.
The sleigh raced towards the entrance to Hysteria
Harbour like a mouse streaking towards a mousehole.
The dragon followed, thudding the ice underneath as
they went, with terrible blows from its battering-ram
head. When One Eye turned into the harbour, he was
going so fast the momentum from the boat behind
almost turned them round in a great screeching circle.
The sleigh balanced wildly on one runner, before
slamming back down and carrying on.
Hiccup looked over his shoulder. The Doomfang
was too large to fit through the narrow harbour entrance.
It pushed its great head through and Hiccup could see,
though not hear, its huge mouth opening in a roar of
rage, its paw with the terrible talons tearing at the water.
It blew out a great gush of underwater blue flame that
shot out underneath the speeding sleigh and streaked
forward in a straight line right up to the shoreline, almost
as if it were a bright blue road telling them where to go.

115

‘He’s not pleased,’ grinned Camicazi, as the sleigh
raced along the bright blue road. ‘That is one Doomfang
in a VERY BAD MOOD.’
‘Let’s hope the ice holds long enough for us to
steal the potato and get out of here,’ shivered Hiccup.
‘That creature would kill us with one snap of its jaws!’
When One Eye finally came to a plunging halt at
the ice’s edge and Hiccup clambered out of the sleigh,
his legs wobbling like jellyfish, the evening had become
night. The bright blue road had turned palest turquoise,
and was gradually fading entirely.
The harbour, thank Thor, was entirely deserted.
Pulled up on to the rocks, half buried in snow, were
hundreds of Hysterical boats. Even in their snow-covered
state, you could tell these were ghost ships, that hadn’t
rocked on salt water for fifteen years. Rags of sails hung
from drooping masts, oars and rudders jutting from the
snow were rotting or snapped in half.
Hiccup sent Toothless off to have a look at
the Hysterical Village, and the little dragon reluctantly
flapped off into the darkness.
‘Why does T-t-toothless always have to do
this?’ complained Toothless.
‘Because you’re the one with wings, Toothless,’
Hiccup explained for the umpteenth time, unhitching

116

One Eye. Camicazi unpacked her burglary equipment,
humming happily, shoving interesting-looking pointy
instruments into her pockets, putting on her special shoes
with spikes on the soles, winding length after length of
stout rope around her middle.
Hiccup’s usual companion on adventures was
Fishlegs, who was always terrified and asking what
on earth they were doing in YET ANOTHER life-
threatening disaster? So it was quite a change to have
Camicazi treating the whole thing as if it were an
enjoyable outing.
They put on their skis and waited for Toothless
to return from his trip to find out the whereabouts of the
Hysterical Village. He gave them a shock when he flapped
out from nowhere, and landed on Hiccup’s shoulder.
‘Iss s-s-scary out there,’ panted Toothless,
his eyes glowing luminously in the darkness. ‘Them
Hysterics is having a b-b-banquet for Freya’sday
Eve… looksa SCRUMMY.’
Hiccup explained what Toothless had said to
Camicazi, and she got up. ‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘Hopefully
they’ll be so distracted they won’t notice us. Let’s get
going.’ The little party set off up the cliff path, One Eye
pulling them, his one eye burning bright in the darkness.

117

9. BACK ON BERK

Back on Berk, Fishlegs was hot as fire, weak as a fly
caught in a spider’s web, and talking nonsense. Old
Wrinkly quietly bathed his head with cool water, and
tried to feed him some watery tea.
‘Stop it… you withered old… dried-up crab
claw,’ fretted Fishlegs feebly, trying to twist away from
the old man’s hand, but hardly strong enough to move.
‘They must get here before ten in the morning,’
muttered Old Wrinkly to himself. ‘He’s dying fast.’
‘Don’t worry,’ whispered Fishlegs, looking
straight into Old Wrinkly’s concerned old eyes. ‘Hiccup
will make it. Hiccup always makes it… Thor only
knows how,’ and then he drifted off into nonsense
again.
Out in the middle of the Sullen Sea, strange
noises could be heard, like the creaking of an old man’s
knee, or the rapping of a gigantic knuckle on a door.
The ice was beginning to crack.

118

119

10. FREYA’SDAY EVE ON
HYSTERIA

When they reached the top of the cliff, the ground
kept on rising up to Mount Hysteria, on which was
perched the shadowy outline of the Hysterical Village, all
in darkness.
One Eye dragged them right up to the bottom
of the village walls, where Camicazi got out her ropes.
She threw up the rope with the metal hook
attached, and on the first attempt it caught hold of the
top of the wooden wall. She squirmed up it like a little
blonde monkey and disappeared over the top. One Eye
spread wide his wings and flew after her.
Hiccup took a deep breath, grabbed hold of
the rope, and climbed up, trying to ignore the skulls
grinning at him from the top of the battlements.
They were the only visitors to the Hysterical
Village in fifteen years.
The village seemed at first to be deserted.
There was no one in the streets, no light in
the windows.
But the Great Hall was blazing with light. Smoke
billowed out of several chimneys, music and chatter and

120

laughing poured out of the windows.
Weirdly, beside the Great Hall, lying on great
tree-trunks, there stood the largest Viking ship Hiccup
had ever seen. It did seem a trifle strange to keep a ship
so far from the sea, but Hiccup supposed the Hysterics
hadn’t been doing any sailing at all for the last fifteen
years, so perhaps the centre of town was as good a place
to keep a boat as any.
And what a ship it was…
It was more the depth and length of a Roman
galleon and it was the only Viking longboat Hiccup had
ever seen with not one but three masts. On its prow the
figurehead dragon was a snarling Monstrous Nightmare,
and Hiccup’s heart beat a little faster with excitement
as he read the name painted on its side in big flowing
letters: The American Dream. Perhaps the story Old
Wrinkly told him really WAS true…
In stark contrast to the ships Hiccup had seen
in the harbour, this boat was in tip-top condition. The
rest of the village was two metres deep in snow, but The
American Dream was spotless, her decks entirely snow-
free. She was freshly painted, the Hysterical flag flew
cheerily from her central mast and her oars were all out,
just as if she were about to set sail for distant shores at a
moment’s notice.

121

‘We’ll climb up on to the roof of the Great Hall,
and see if we can overhear what’s going on,’ whispered
Camicazi. Camicazi didn’t even bother to use a rope
this time. She just shinned up the sheer wall, appearing
to cling to it with invisible suction like a frog. Once she
reached the roof, she let down a rope for Hiccup, and
One Eye hauled him up with it.
The roof was thigh deep in snow, and Hiccup
had to crawl through it, following the path made by
Camicazi. She wriggled through to the central chimney,
which had no smoke coming out of it, and she and
Hiccup peered down into the room below.
A blast of heat so strong Hiccup had to close his
eyes poured out of the chimney. Hiccup’s hands burned
as they began to warm up. Eventually his watering eyes
adjusted to the heat and the light.
Down below, the Hysterics were enjoying a truly
magnificent banquet. The long central table was loaded
high with fish, flesh and fowl cooked in every possible
manner, whole stags, entire pigs, and brimming cups
of beer and wine. A big drunken chap was
dancing a jig on the table at one end,
and the Hysterics were laughing,
and throwing bits of food and
chair legs at him.

Fires blazed in six huge fireplaces. Enormous
white rugs made out of the skin of polar bears were
strewn about the floor. Hanging on the walls were the
heads of dragons of every possible size, colour and
description. And also the heads of a couple of animals
Hiccup had never seen before, one that looked like
an enormous, depressed deer, and another that
resembled a gigantic bull with black curly hair.
A map of the Barbaric World drawn
on deerskin was hanging in a great curtain
against the north wall. On the west of
the map, someone had scribbled out
the great tumbling waterfall which on
most Viking maps was marked ‘End
of the World’, and replaced it with
a crude charcoal drawing of an
island it called AMERICA.
With a sinking of the
heart, Hiccup recognised a big
blond bearded bloke sitting on
a throne as the Chief, Norbert
the Nutjob. It was definitely
the Big Brute who Hiccup
had shot with an arrow in the
bottom the day before.

124

His throne had a couple of plump cushions on it, but he
was shifting from buttock to buttock as if in some pain.
In one hand he held a very unusual, enormous,
double-headed axe. The axe was different in that one
blade was a bright and shiny copper gold, but the other
blade was rusted and blackened, and deeply scarred.
There was no sign of the potato.
Suddenly Hiccup felt a bit foolish. He had
somehow expected it to be displayed somewhere obvious,
preferably with a big sign underneath it labelling it clearly
as THE POTATO.
Because, of course, he did not have any idea what
a potato looked like, whether it was orange, or green, or
large or small. Hiccup had somehow imagined it as RED
with little black spots, and kind of oblong, or triangular,
just because it sounded so exotic. Purple, perhaps? Really,
he hadn’t a clue.
‘OK,’ whispered Camicazi, ‘I’m going to have to
go down there to try and find out WHERE they keep the
potato… it could be absolutely anywhere.’
She unwound one of the ropes from round her
waist, and Hiccup suggested that they should tie it around
One Eye’s leg. ‘That way, if you get into any trouble, you
can yank on it three times, and One Eye can haul you
up sharpish.’

127

One Eye objected strongly to having anything tied
round his leg, and only agreed when Hiccup reminded
him what a HERO he was going to be in the Dragon
World when they returned to Berk with the antidote to
Vorpentitis.
The little girl then lowered herself down through
the hole in the roof.
It was completely dark and very quiet on top of
the Great Hall.
Waiting by the hole, Hiccup felt rather like he
had as a small boy going ice fishing with his father, when
Stoick cut a hole in the ice, and let down the line, and
then all there was to do was wait… and wait… and wait.
Toothless scratched behind his ears. One Eye
picked at his teeth. And Hiccup shivered with anxiety.
‘Hurry up, Camicazi…’
At any moment Hiccup expected a great crack
to appear in that huge flat expanse of frozen sea, and
then they would never get home… and Fishlegs would be
lost.
Or perhaps Camicazi had got into trouble
down there?
Hiccup peered down through the hole. Camicazi
was clinging to her rope like a spider, two metres below
them. Hiccup leant down a little farther to try and see

128

what was happening…
… And then, to his absolute horror, the edge of
the chimney, already buckling under the weight of the
snow, gave way beneath him and with a shriek, Hiccup
FELL into the Hall.

11. IN THE SOUP

Camicazi watched with round, scared eyes as Hiccup fell
past her, arms flailing wildly.
In ordinary circumstances, that would have been
the end of Hiccup, for the Great Hall was fully twenty
metres high, and he SHOULD have broken his neck
falling all the way from the very top.
But, in a series of tremendous strokes of luck,
the traditional Freya’sday Eve dish was Onion Soup, and
on Hysteria it was served in a truly gigantic cauldron,
two metres wide and a metre deep. This pot was sitting
on the table directly below the falling Hiccup, and he
plunged straight into it, bottom first.
If the soup had been any hotter, Hiccup would
have been burned to death, but it had been on the table
for some time, and had cooled to a pleasant swimming
temperature.
If the Hysterics had been any fonder of Onion
Soup, it would not have been deep enough to break
Hiccup’s fall, but the Hysterics only served Onion Soup
because it was the traditional thing to do, and had hardly
touched it.
So Hiccup merely bumped his bottom gently
on the bottom of the cauldron, and rose to the surface,

131

coughing and spluttering, his hair full of onions. There
was a shocked silence. Nothing puts a quicker stop
to a jolly meal than a stranger and a great deal of
snow suddenly falling on to the banqueting table. The
Hysterics sat, amazed, spitting snow out of their beards,
staring at the unexpected visitor gasping in their soup.
Norbert the Nutjob was the first to recover,
shaking the snow off and leaping to his feet.
‘ASSASSINS!’ he screamed. ‘SEIZE HIM!’
Twenty Warriors sprang on to the table. Hiccup
tried to swim out of trouble, but his back-stroke couldn’t
make up for the fact that he was entirely surrounded.
Two large Hysterics dragged
him out of the soup, and
dropped him, dripping and
gloopy, in front of Norbert
the Nutjob.
‘Are there more
of you?’ barked
Norbert the Nutjob,
brandishing the
blackened blade of
his axe in front
of Hiccup’s
face.

132

Hiccup shook his head, spraying soup in all
directions.
Norbert the Nutjob and his Warriors peered
upwards. Camicazi was hanging way up in the darkness
of the ceiling, and her black clothes came in handy, for
they could not see her.
‘SEARCH THE ROOF AND THE VILLAGE!’
screamed Norbert the Nutjob.
He turned to face Hiccup again. Norbert the
Nutjob had a tic in his left eye, and it was jerking around
frantically like a fly doing a jig.
‘I’m sure I recognise you…’ he said, using the
edge of a nearby Warrior’s cloak to wipe the soup off
Hiccup’s face. ‘Great Thumbnails of Thor! It’s the
revolting Hooligan worm who shot an arrow in my Royal
Bottom yesterday!’
This wasn’t a very good start.
‘How do you do?’ gulped Hiccup politely.
‘I DO NOT VERY WELL!’ screamed Norbert
the Nutjob. ‘MY BUTTOCKS ARE BURNING!’
The Warriors came panting back into the
Hall, and said they had searched both the roof
and the village, and there were no more Assassins
to be found. One Eye and Toothless must have
flapped off to hide in the darkness.

Norbert the Nutjob looked rather cross. ‘You’re
a very SMALL Assassin,’ he said huffily, removing
Hiccup’s sword and stuffing it in his own sword-belt.
‘And so, come to think of it, was the one who attacked us
with you yesterday, the one who skied like a grandmother
with knee trouble. I know I’ve been out of the loop for
the last fifteen years, but do the Hooligans really think
they can assassinate me with CHILDREN?’
‘I’m not an Assassin,’ pleaded Hiccup quaveringly.
‘LIAR!’ screeched Norbert the Nutjob, and he
lurched forward as if to kill Hiccup with the axe right
there and then. And then he calmed himself, and smiled
again, and settled himself back on his throne with a
wince.
‘So if you’re not an Assassin,’ smiled Norbert,
‘what are you doing here on Hysteria, shooting me with
arrows, and poisoning my soup?’
‘I’m looking,’ said Hiccup, ‘for THE POTATO.’
There was an astonished silence.
‘Ssssssh!’ said Norbert the Nutjob, looking over
his shoulder as if walls had ears. ‘You’re not supposed to
NAME the Vegetable-that-No-one-Dares-Name…’
‘Of course,’ said Hiccup craftily, ‘now that I’m
here I realise that it was all just fairy stories. There’s no
such thing as a potato, is there? Because there’s no such

135

place as America… the earth is as flat as a pancake, and
if you sail to the west eventually you just fall off the end
of it…’
‘RUBBISH!’ shrieked Norbert the Nutjob.
‘KILL HIM!’ he screamed, his eyes bulging, his mouth
foaming, before, with an enormous effort, he gained
control of himself again. ‘No, educate him, then kill him!’
said Norbert the Nutjob, twiddling his fancy moustaches
to soothe himself.
‘The earth is as round as a circle, and a circle has
no end,’ explained Norbert carefully. ‘There is such a
thing as America, I know because I’ve been there… and
as for the Vegetable-that-No-one-Dares-Name… I don’t
know what you’re talking about…’
‘That’s because there’s no such thing,’ repeated
Hiccup.
‘There IS such a thing,’ insisted Norbert, trying
to keep his temper.
‘Isn’t,’ said Hiccup.
‘Is!’
‘Isn’t.’
‘IS!’
‘Isn’t.’
‘IS, IS, IS, IS, IS!!!!!’ yelled Norbert the
Nutjob, twiddling his fancy moustaches so hard they got

136

all tangled in a knot.
‘Prove there is,’ challenged
Hiccup.
‘I know there’s no such a thing as a
Vegetable-that-No-One-Dares-Name… because the
Vegetable-that-No-One-Dares-Name… is right here in
this room!’ cried Norbert the Nutjob. He ran over to
the wall where the map of America was hanging.
With two grand sweeps of his axe he threw
aside the curtain.
‘VERY SMALL ASSASSIN,’ announced
Norbert the Nutjob proudly, ‘SAY HELLO TO
PAPA…’
‘Oh whoops!’ breathed Hiccup.
Norbert the Nutjob was clearly madder than a
Mad March Hare having a nervous breakdown.
For there, on a stand, larger than life, stood
what looked horribly like the frozen body of Norbert
the Nutjob’s Papa.
He was standing proud and upright, every
whisker frozen solid, mouth open in a soundless
YELL, a scary monumental sight. One hand was on his
hip, and in the other he held a casket with glass sides,
filled with ice.

137

On top of the ice sat the round, rather
disappointing shape of a lumpy brownish vegetable.
Surely THAT can’t be the magical, wondrous POTATO,
thought Hiccup. Sticking out of the vegetable was a
single arrow.
Norbert’s Papa was surrounded by a carpet of
unusual dragon-creatures, called SQUEALERS.
These weird animals are often used as primitive
burglar-alarm systems. They have no legs to chase
after their prey, so they lie on their backs waving their
extra-long nails gently in the air. Any animal that comes
into contact with those nails causes the whole pack of
Squealers to scream unbearably loudly. The sound is
so piercingly noisy that it actually kills smaller dragons
(who have much better hearing than humans) stone
dead on the spot. The Squealers then devour their
victim, and rather like piranha fish, they can strip an
animal to the bone in sixty seconds flat.
‘But, Norbert,’ gasped Hiccup. ‘I thought
your father was supposed to be DEAD?’
‘Oh, he’s dead all right,’ smiled
Norbert. ‘He’s as dead as a doornail… but
as I was keeping the potato frozen anyway,
I thought I’d freeze Papa too.’

139

‘You could give your father a proper
Viking funeral,’ shuddered Hiccup. ‘He looks
untidy standing there… and a bit spooky…’
‘MY FATHER HAS HIS
FUNERAL ON THE DAY THE
DOOMFANG DIES!’ shouted Norbert the
Nutjob. ‘That’s why I froze him. Just before
my father breathed his last, he stuck into the
potato the only arrow he had left given to him
by the Feather People, and made me promise
to use this to get rid of the Doomfang.’
‘That’s impossible,’ objected Hiccup.
‘You can’t kill a whopping great creature like
a Doomfang with one tiddly little arrow!’
‘Not im-POSSIBLE, weird little red-
haired boy,’ corrected Norbert the Nutjob.
‘Just im-PROBABLE. And made more
improbable by the fact that we can’t get the
arrow OUT of the Vegetable-that-No-one-
Dares-Name… Take a look at the inscription
on the casket.’
Hiccup looked at the casket Bigjob
was holding. In it, frozen by the ice, was
the disappointingly boring vegetable called
the potato. And stuck in this potato was the

140

gaudy little arrow, decorated with brilliant feathers
taken from birds Hiccup would not have recognised.
American birds that once flew about in undiscovered
American skies.
On the front of the casket was written in flowing
script the following inscription:

Whomsoever removes the Arrow from this Vegetable
Shall Rid Us of the Doomfang and Prove Himself
Right True Hero and Ruler of all the Viking Tribes.

‘We can’t get the arrow OUT of the Precious
Vegetable…’ said Norbert the Nutjob, sadly. ‘We
practise all year round with constant arm-wrestling, and
every year our strongest Champions try and pull it out.
Even I do not seem to be able to do it, although the verse
is obviously referring to ME. The arrow is stuck in the
vegetable, and we are stuck on Hysteria, until the death
of my father is avenged.’
Hiccup looked at the potato.
‘You can’t get the arrow out of the potato because
it is frozen solid. If you DEFROSTED the potato, a child
could pull it out,’ Hiccup suggested.
The tic was back in Norbert the Nutjob’s eye.
‘My dying father gave me this arrow for a reason,’
snapped Norbert the Nutjob. ‘It’s supposed to be a
test to find out who is strong enough to defeat the
Doomfang. What would be the point of the test if just
ANYBODY could do it? Who are you, anyway, you
small boy, and how dare you ask ME all these questions?’
‘Now, I’m very glad you brought that up,
Norbert,’ said Hiccup soothingly. ‘I am Hiccup
Horrendous Haddock the Third, only son of Stoick the
Vast, and my friend Fishlegs, who you also met yesterday,
has had the Bad Luck to have got bitten by a Venomous
Vorpent—’

142

‘That IS Bad Luck,’ said Norbert the Nutjob
with satisfaction. ‘Certain death, I’d say. I can’t say I’m
surprised, you know, he seemed like just the sort of little
weirdo that Fate would have it in for.’
‘Fishlegs is not a little weirdo!’ interrupted
Hiccup. ‘The point is, Norbert, I have been told that this
potato of yours is the only antidote to Vorpent venom,
and I wonder if you could possibly spare it to save my
friend’s life. It would be the kindest thing you’ve ever
done.’
Norbert the Nutjob was flabbergasted.
‘And what,’ whispered Norbert the Nutjob,
‘would you do with my Papa’s Precious Vegetable after I
gave it to you?’
‘Well,’ said Hiccup, ‘I guess my friend would
eat it.’
For a second Norbert the Nutjob stared into
space.
Then he was livid with rage, whirling his double-
headed axe around his head. ‘EAT IT????’ roared
Norbert the Nutjob. ‘YOU SHOOT ME IN THE
BOTTOM AND THEN YOU WANT TO DIVIDE
UP AND EAT MY DEAR DEAD PAPA’S
PRECIOUS AMERICAN VEGETABLE????? KILL
HIM, KILL HIM, KILL HIM!!!!’

143

After a short struggle, he calmed
down again, and turned to Hiccup with great
dignity, holding up
his arms.
‘I could,’ said Norbert the Nutjob, ‘kill you right
now, you Evil Vegetable Murderer… but we Hysterics
are not like that. We Hysterics are CIVILISED. We
never execute before we have given lousy potato-
savaging criminals an absolutely fair trial. And on
Hysteria,’ Norbert the Nutjob gave a nasty mad leer,
‘the Trial you face is Trial by Axe.’
Oh, crumbs, thought Hiccup.
Norbert the Nutjob strode over to the middle of
the room where there was a large tree trunk, lopped off
at the base.

144

‘Fate herself shall decide your Fate,’ said Norbert
the Nutjob. ‘I shall throw my axe high into the air…
and if it lands with the golden side burying itself into the
wood, I shall allow you to live. But if it lands on the dark
side,’ Norbert the Nutjob stroked the dark side lovingly,
‘if it lands on the dark side, I shall kill you with this very
axe, on the spot. I hope you’re feeling lucky…’
Norbert stepped back dramatically. He gazed up
at the heavens…
‘COME, GREAT POWERS OF FATE AND
DESTINY,’ yelled Norbert the Nutjob. ‘I SWEAR
TO DO AS YOU TELL ME. LIFE OR DEATH?’
The axe soared towards the ceiling, spinning
slowly through the air. It began to fall, first the bright

145

side down, then the dark.
Hiccup was not as tough as the other boys, but
his eyesight was very good. He could see the axe was
going to land dark side down, and he leapt in between
the dark and bright blades, and caught the axe with
its wooden handle just before the dark side landed in
the wood.
The Hysterics gasped.
High up on a beam in the ceiling, Camicazi
gasped too.
Hiccup heaved the axe above his head and drove
the bright blade deep into the tree trunk.
‘BRIGHT SIDE WINS, NORBERT THE
NUTJOB,’ shouted Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the
Third, his hands on his hips.
Nobody knew quite what to do.
Norbert the Nutjob’s mouth opened and shut
like a fish out of water.
‘You CHEATED!’ screamed Norbert the Nutjob.
‘Fate must have let me cheat,’ Hiccup pointed
out. ‘Now set me free like you promised.’
Norbert looked as if he was about to explode. He
was used to terrified adults who cowered down before
him and his terrible Axe of Fate.
He WASN’T used to bossy small boys who told

146

him to defrost his Precious Potato, and bury his Papa,
and caught his Axe before it landed.
But what if Hiccup was right, and Fate had really
meant to LET Hiccup cheat?
Norbert did not dare annoy FATE herself.
‘SEIZE HIM!’ screamed Norbert. ‘He can live,
but he can live out his days in prison! That will teach him
to shoot arrows at NORBERT THE NUTJOB!’
Four or five burly Hysterics grabbed Hiccup and
dragged him to a small cage suspended by a single chain
from a beam in the rafters above. They pushed him in
and locked the cage, returning the key to Norbert, who
put it in his pocket.
And then the Hysterics forgot about Hiccup, and
partied long, long into the night, laughing and singing
and eating and drinking too much.
Hiccup sat silently in the small cage, trying to
think of a Cunning Plan to get out of this situation.
It didn’t look too good.
Even if he could escape from the locked cage,
steal the potato and get away without a single Hysteric
noticing, he could hear some ominous creaking noises
coming from the ice outside… Loud crackings and
knockings, like the striking of an enormous sword upon
a stone.

147

The ice was beginning to melt, and once the
Doomfang was free again there would be no way out of
Hysteria…
As the long night wore on, one by one the
Hysterics fell asleep in their chairs or on the floor, or, in
the case of one fat Warrior, on top of the table hugging
the remains of the roasted boar. Norbert the Nutjob
slumbered on his throne, his thumb in his mouth,
cradling his double-headed axe. High up in the ceiling
of the Great Hall Camicazi was sleeping, clinging to her
beam like a little black cat. Time ticked on, and Hiccup
struggled to keep awake, but eventually the gentle
rocking of the cage, and the cloudy heat and fumes of
alcohol in the room overpowered him, and he,
too, nodded off.

149

SQUEALERS

Squealers are strange
blobby, slug-like creatures
who are so lazy they have
developed an interesting
method of stunning their prey with a single
shriek. A pack of Squealers can strip their
victim to the bone quicker than a shoal of
piranha fish.

~STATISTICS~

COLOURS: Slug black.
ARMED WITH: Scream so loud it can
knock a smaller dragon unconscious.
Piranha-like jaws and fangs.
FEAR FACTOR: ......3
ATTACK: ........3
SPEED: .............1
SIZE: ...................2
DISOBEDIENCE: .......5

12. WILL TOOTHLESS SAVE
THE DAY?

Meanwhile, up on the roof, Toothless and One Eye had
flapped off and hidden in The American Dream when
they heard the noise of Hiccup falling into the Onion
Soup, and the Hysteric Warriors charging outside to look
for other Assassins.
When things grew quiet again, they flew back to
the chimney. Both dragons were cold, hungry and tired.
One Eye’s eye gleamed golden-yellow in the darkness.
‘Shall we leave them?’ One Eye mused to
himself. ‘It looks like they haven’t found the cure for
Vorpentitis after all… and I’m not hanging round
here just to save the skin of a couple of stinking
Humans…’
‘S-s-selfish Humans!’ grumbled Toothless.
‘They n-n-never think of poor, cold H-H-H-
HUNGRY Toothless!’
One Eye snorted. ‘Well, I don’t blame them
for that. You’re just a lap-dragon, an overgrown rat.
And YOU shouldn’t be hungry anyway. Who ate
all the snacks in the sleigh on the way here I’d like
to know?

151

‘… I’ll give them till morning,’ One Eye
decided, letting the rope attached to his leg flop down
the chimney and into the Great Hall again, and settling
himself in the snow to sleep on the roof. ‘My aunt
Snaggletooth died of Vorpentitis, and it’s a nasty
way to go.’
‘Toothless not s-s-sleeping here!’ moaned
Toothless, outraged. ‘Iss too cold! Toothless D-D-
DELICATE, sensitive…’ He checked whether the big
dragon was really asleep. One Eye gave a deep rumbling
snore and Toothless carried on, ‘… not like YOU, you
big, white, gormless mountain gorilla…’
One Eye’s one eye snapped open, and his big
Sabre-Tooth jaws lashed out towards Toothless… but
they shut on thin air, for Toothless had the reflexes
of a bluebottle, and he had already tumbled down
through the hole in the roof. Toothless soared into the
Great Hall, over the heads of the sleeping, mumbling
Hysterics, and landed on top of Hiccup’s cage. The cage
swung violently to the right, and Hiccup’s head banged
sharply on one of the bars, waking him up.
‘Ow!’ protested Hiccup, looking straight into the
upside-down greengage eyes of his pet dragon.
‘Toothless!’ he whispered joyfully. ‘Thank Thor
you’re here, you see how right I was to bring you –

152

you can save the day!’
‘HA!’ grunted Toothless crossly.
‘Just flap over to that big frozen Viking over
there, will you, and nick the potato, and then we’ll be
off…’ whispered Hiccup.
Toothless looked where Hiccup was pointing, to
Norbert’s Papa, Bigjob, and the casket, and gave a shriek
of terror.
‘S-s-squealers!’ he gasped, and jumped into the
cage, burying his face in Hiccup’s leg.
‘Oh, goodness, yes, I’d forgotten. Squealers can
kill a dragon as small as you, can’t they?’ remembered
Hiccup, soothing the little dragon by stroking him on the
back. ‘OK, DON’T steal the potato, but the key to
this cage is in Norbert the Nutjob’s pocket, and if you
could just flap off and get it…’
But Toothless had smelt the Onion Soup on
Hiccup’s leg, and he gave it a lick.
‘Onion S-s-soup!’ said Toothless accusingly. ‘You
bin eating Onion S-s-soup!’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Hiccup hurriedly, ‘I fell in the
soup, but about the key—’
But this was the last straw as far as Toothless was
concerned. He was FURIOUS, and he swelled up to
nearly twice the size with anger, and flew out of the cage

153

like an infuriated little balloon.
‘SNOT fair! SNOT fair!’ snorted Toothless.
‘You been stuffing yourself with Onion S-s-soup and
poor T-t-toothless STARVING and now you want
Toothless to f-f-face a whole load of Squealers with
no food in his t-t-tummy? TYPICAL! Well, you can
just WAIT, that’s all… Toothless’ll have his supper
and THEN maybe he’ll help you out…’
‘TOOTHLESS!’ whispered Hiccup, as loud as
he dared, ‘THIS IS IMPORTANT! GET THAT
KEY RIGHT NOW OR I’LL… I’LL… I’LL…’
‘You’ll what?’ jeered Toothless cheekily,
flapping out of Hiccup’s way as he desperately tried to
grab Toothless’s tail through the bars of the cage.
Sticking out his little pink forked tongue,
Toothless hopped down on to the banqueting tables
and tucked into the roast buffalo pie, ignoring Hiccup’s
furious, frustrated whispers from the cage swinging a
couple of metres above.
‘Toothless can’t hear!’ sang Toothless through
a mouthful of pumpkin. ‘Got s-s-something in his ear!
Oooooh, that rhymes… Toothless ca-a-an’t he-ar, got
something in his e-ar! Toothless ca-a-an’t he-ar, got
something in his e-ar!’
And for the next five minutes, Toothless

154

pretended to be quite deaf, and took his time hopping
from plate to plate, gorging himself on deep-fried
mackerel, turkey wings and sweetcorn fritters.
Eventually, he swallowed the last
remains of the pie, took a big swig of the Home-made
Nettle Champagne, burped and rubbed his stomach
contentedly.
‘That’s b-b-better. Toothless can hear now.
Wossat you saying?’
‘WILL YOU GET THAT KEY FROM
NORBERT THE NUTJOB’S POCKET BEFORE
HE MURDERS THE LOT OF US?’ hissed Hiccup
at the top of his whisper.
‘S-s-say pretty please…’ sang Toothless.
‘Pretty please,’ whispered Hiccup through
gritted teeth.
‘OK, OK, keep your hair on,’ said Toothless,
and he took off (rather wobbly, because he had eaten so
much), and crashlanded on Norbert the Nutjob’s chest.
Luckily, Norbert was so dead to the world he merely
grunted, and hugged his axe a little closer.
Giggling, Toothless snipped off both of Norbert
the Nutjob’s fancy moustaches with two bites of his
sharp little gums, and then he staggered into Norbert’s
pocket and pulled out the key.

155

Toothless marched
across the banqueting table with
the key in his mouth, spitting it out every now and then to
make pointed remarks to Hiccup.
‘Is TYPICAL,’ snorted Toothless. ‘T-t-typical.
Poor old starving T-t-toothless, woken up from his H-
h-hibernation Nap just to save the day YET AGAIN.’
Toothless put the key back in his mouth, and this
time, his large, overfull belly prevented him from seeing
exactly where he was putting his feet, and he tripped over

a knife lying in the middle of the table.
Toothless lurched forwards, knocking a candle
off the table and on to the floor, where it promptly set
fire to a polar bear rug. He did a couple of somersaults,
spinning over and over until he landed bottom first in
the wild boar stew and… swallowed the key.
‘G-g-gulp…’ said Toothless.

13. THE GREAT POTATO
BURGLARY

‘AAAARGH!’ raged Hiccup, shaking the bars of his
cage. ‘Typical! Five minutes ago I was just locked in
a cage in a room full of Hysteric Warriors. NOW
you’ve swallowed the key and set fire to the room!
Flap up and wake up Camicazi and then PUT OUT
THAT FIRE!’
‘S-s-say pretty please…’ choked Toothless
defiantly.
‘PRETTY PLEASE!’ howled Hiccup in the
loudest whisper he could whisper.
Toothless flew unsteadily up to the beam where
Camicazi was sleeping, and woke her up by shrieking
softly, ‘No key! No key!’ in her ear, before flying back to
deal with the fire.
Camicazi took charge of the situation from
the moment she opened her eyes. She got up, calmly
balancing on the beam, for all the world as if she was
safely down on the ground rather than almost twenty
metres up in the air.
She unwound another rope from around her
waist, and threw the metal end of it so that it wrapped

158

around the beam from which Hiccup’s cage was
suspended. She pulled to check it was secure, and then
swung out, clinging to the rope, and landed on the top of
Hiccup’s cage.
Camicazi wriggled down the outside of the cage, and
looked hard at the lock on the door. She felt in her pocket
and brought out a long pin-like instrument, and stuck it in
the lock, wiggling it expertly from side to side.
‘That was so brave of you!’ she whispered. ‘For
a boy of course… Leaping down into the soup like that!
We’d NEVER have found out where they kept the potato
if you hadn’t done that…’
Hiccup considered telling her it had all been a total
accident, and then thought better of it. ‘Oh, you know…’
he whispered modestly back. ‘It was nothing. I do that
kind of… leaping all the time. What are you doing?’
‘Picking the lock,’ replied Camicazi airily. ‘Locks
are nothing to us Bog-Burglars… no prisons can hold us.
We’re as wriggly as eels. We’re as jumpy as crickets.’
The lock suddenly clicked loudly, and the door of
Hiccup’s cage swung open.
‘Your exit, my lord,’ grinned Camicazi.
Hiccup scrambled out of the cage, and dropped
down on to the banqueting table below, unable to believe
his luck.

159

‘And now,’ frowned Camicazi, ‘for the Vegetable-
that-No-one-Dares-Name. We haven’t got a lot of time.’
Indeed they hadn’t.
Toothless had tried to snuff out the fire on the
polar bear rug by smothering it with his wings, and
when that didn’t work, he threw Home-made Nettle
Champagne on it.
The flames sprang up a metre high and the fire
spread to a nearby chair.
‘Oh d-d-dear!’ wailed Toothless. ‘Toothless m-m-
messed up… all Toothless’s fault… ohdearohdear…’
‘Toothless,’ Hiccup ordered, ‘stop making that
fire WORSE and come over here. We’re going to need
YOUR help to steal the potato.’
Toothless flapped over, his guilt making him
unexpectedly obedient.
‘I want you to melt the ice in the casket,’ said
Hiccup.
‘B-b-but the Squealers?’ whimpered Toothless.
Hiccup wound his scarf around the little dragon’s
ears, to act as earplugs.
‘Wait until Toothless has finished melting the ice,
just in case you DO set off the Squealers,’ he explained to
Camicazi. ‘The sound could STUN a dragon as titchy as
Toothless if he’s too close.’

160

‘T-t-titchy?’ huffed Toothless. ‘Toothless not
like the word TITCHY.’
‘You’re looking at the burglary EXPERT,’ said
Camicazi. ‘There’s no way I’m going to set off those
Squealers.’
By some miracle, all the Hysterics were so dead
to the world that not even all this noise and commotion,
and a large fire blazing in the middle of their Great Hall,
had woken them up. They snored on, oblivious.
Trembling with terror (and flying rather erratically
because he was weighed down by his fur coat, his large
meal, and the scarf around his head that was slipping

161

over his eyes) Toothless flew over the waving nails of the
Squealers. This was very brave of him, for if he looked
down he could see their horrible black bobby bodies with
the piranha teeth, and to a dragon as small as Toothless,
it was like wandering casually in front of a pack of lions
with open jaws.
Hovering above the casket, he was so scared that
for a moment his fireholes seized up, and he couldn’t
breathe out a single flame, only clouds and clouds of
bluey-grey smoke.
‘Relax…’ whispered Hiccup from the table.
‘Breathe deeply… no pressure… you’ve all the time
in the world…’ Hiccup was trying to sound as calm as
he could even though half the room was on fire.
‘All the time in the world…’ sang Hiccup
nervously. ‘Just relax… go to your happy place…’
The nails of the Squealers began to twitch as
they sensed the smoke.
‘HA!’ puffed Toothless furiously, practically
disappearing he was making so much steam.
‘Toothless’s h-h-happy place! Happy place N-N-
NOT here!’ and to Hiccup’s intense relief, Toothless’s
final indignant snort ended in a big breath of fire that
engulfed the entire casket.
‘Don’t set fire to the potato!’ Hiccup

162

reminded him.
‘S-s-set fire to this! DON’T set fire to that!’
complained Toothless. ‘Mister Hiccup just stop being
such a B-BOSSY-BOOTS and give a dragon a
chance!’
But he made his flame smaller, and directed it
steadily at the ice around the potato, and slowly, surely,
the ice began to melt.
Meanwhile, Camicazi climbed back up to the
ceiling again, and wriggled along the beams until she was
directly above Norbert’s Papa.
She let herself down on another rope, so that she
was hanging, like a little spider, about a metre above the
casket, and then she wound the rope around her ankle
and flipped upside down.
She waited until Toothless had finished melting
the ice, and had flapped off back to the safe distance of
Hiccup’s shoulder.
Right in front of Norbert’s Papa’s frozen staring
eyes, Camicazi reached into the casket and carefully,
delicately, removed the potato with the arrow stuck in it
from the bed of ice.
Hiccup held his breath. If the casket was booby-
trapped, this would be the moment that something might
happen…

163

But there did not seem to be any booby-traps.
Camicazi swung there, potato in one hand.
Norbert’s Papa wobbled for a second on his stand, but
he was still grinning ferociously, his eyes staring straight
ahead at nothing. (He was DEAD, after all.) The snores
of the sleeping Hysterics rumbled peacefully through the
quiet Hall.
Camicazi put the potato in her pocket.
‘She’s done it, she’s done it, she’s done it…’
whispered Hiccup to himself.
Camicazi was about to turn herself the right
way up again and climb the rope, but then she spotted
something else in the casket.
‘Uh oh…’ whispered Hiccup.
Camicazi couldn’t resist. She reached in and
picked the something else out of the casket…
For one second it seemed like it still might be all
right again.
But it turned out that the frozen body of
Norbert’s Papa was very carefully balanced, and when
this second weight was removed from the casket, it
began to tip s-l-o-w-l-y backwards, and then gathering
speed, until the entire body crashed like a great tree
trunk into the waving forest of Squealers down below.

165

166

screeched the Squealers.
The noise they made was simply ear-splitting.
The glass of the frozen casket shattered into
pieces, and the ice inside fell to the floor.
All over the room, the Hysterics sat bolt upright
as if electrified, blearily opening their eyes and saying,
‘Wossat? Wassgoing on?’ to each other. Even with
the scarf and Hiccup’s hands over his ears, poor old
Toothless nearly fainted from the loudness of the noise.
‘Watch out, Camicazi!’ yelled Hiccup. Norbert
the Nutjob woke up, and threw his double-headed axe
straight at Camicazi, dangling from her rope. Camicazi
saw the axe coming, and let herself drop.

167

The axe missed, and Camicazi landed on the
floor, or, more precisely, on the gigantic wobbly stomach
of a Hysteric who was so dead to the world he didn’t
even wake up.
Norbert the Nutjob ran to drag his frozen father
out of the mass of shrieking Squealers. Stiff and ice-cold
as he was, they still tried to eat him, blunting their teeth
on his hard frozen legs, slashing their horrible long nails
on his solid-frozen moustaches. Once he had pulled
his Papa to safety, the Squealers stopped screaming as
abruptly as they had begun. Norbert the Nutjob drew his
sword and strode towards Camicazi, with a murderous
expression on his face…
‘GET OUT OF HERE!’ screamed Camicazi.
‘I’ll be all right, don’t worry about me!’
Hiccup was standing right in the middle
of the table. About twenty large Warriors were
already advancing towards him, swords,
axes and daggers drawn. The odds
were not on Hiccup’s side…
and Hiccup was completely and
entirely unarmed.
He had no bow and arrow,
no dagger. He did not even have
his sword, for Norbert the Nutjob

168

had taken it from him earlier, if you remember. (Which
was a shame, because Hiccup was good at sword-
fighting.)
So, in absence of his sword, Hiccup picked up
two large, sloppy, creamy pumpkin pies, and crashed
them like cymbals on either side of another Warrior’s
face. The Hysteric fell backwards, a sticky, dripping,

pumpkin mess, and promptly sat down on the smaller
Warrior behind him.
Meanwhile, dodging Hysteric sword-thrusts,
Hiccup grabbed the nearest thing to hand, which
happened to be a gigantic half-eaten TURKEY
carcass, and shoved it over the head of the closest
Warrior. The Hysteric’s arms were pinned by his sides,
muffled shouting noises came from within the turkey,
and he staggered off, like a grotesquely large dead
chicken with human legs.
Hiccup was getting into the swing of things.
He tipped an entire bowl of maple syrup on the floor,
sending the Hysterics slipping and sliding all over the
place. He winded another Warrior with a watermelon.
He pelted them all with onions. Now the
Squealers had stopped squealing, Toothless flew down
from the roof to join in the battle. He found a bowl
of chestnuts, sucked up a whole mouthful so that his
cheeks were bulging like a hamster, and zoomed over
the heads of the Warriors, spitting out fire and red-hot
roasted chestnuts like a barrage of flaming bullets.
Chaos reigned in the Great Hall. Vegetables
flew in all directions. Hysterics who had been woken by
a fat overripe tomato splattered in their faces assumed
that this was all just a merry midnight food-fight, and

170

enthusiastically attacked their fellow Hysterics.
‘Hurry up, Camicazi!’ screamed Hiccup, slapping
another opponent around the cheek with a large flat
flounder, and running up the other end of the table.
Camicazi had problems of her own. She was
defending herself against Norbert the Nutjob, who was
livid with rage and lashing out at her with his sword.
Norbert the Nutjob had had a trying couple of
days. His bottom was still throbbing from the arrow-
wound, Hiccup had made a fool out of him in the
Ordeal-by-Axe, somebody appeared to have bitten off
his beloved moustaches, and the Hooligans were even
now stealing his Papa’s American Vegetable.
And they hadn’t even had the decency to send
some proper adult Assassins! This third Assassin was
even smaller than the first two. To add insult to injury,
he, Norbert the Nutjob, noble Chief of the Hysteric
Tribe, and Master Swordsman, was finding it difficult
to defeat this tiny little blonde Assassin in one-to-one
combat. She just wouldn’t stay still.
She met every lunge he made, carelessly singing
the Bog-Burglar national anthem as she did so. She
performed cartwheels between moves. She even picked
up a piece of wild boar sandwich off the floor and
started to eat it, while still fighting.

171

She talked CONSTANTLY.
‘I hope you don’t mind me
eating on the job,’ she said chattily,
easily deflecting his Grimbeard’s
Grapple sword-thrust, and
throwing in a Piercing Point
of her own. ‘I know it’s
rather rude to fight with
my mouth full, but I’m
absolutely STARVING,
haven’t eaten a thing
all evening…’

172

Norbert the Nutjob gave a grim smile and sprang
forward with a particularly violent sword-thrust.
She dodged it, leapt up, swung on his beard while
she wiped her sticky fingers on his shirt-front, and sprang
back down again.
‘I’m going to KILL you…’ panted Norbert the
Nutjob, his eyes watering with the pain of having his
beard pulled. ‘First with my sword, and then with my
axe, and then I’m going to feed you to the Squealers.’
‘You clever, clever boy!’ sang Camicazi,
delightedly spotting her rope dangling just behind his
head. ‘But you’ll have to CATCH me first, you know…’

And with that, she somersaulted right between
his legs, came up the other side, and squirmed up her
rope with astonishing speed, pulling the end of it up
behind her.
Norbert the Nutjob looked down at his legs for
a dazed moment, and then through them, and then
he swung round to find that Camicazi had apparently
vanished into thin air.
He whirled around again. She wasn’t there either.
How completely extraordinary…
Camicazi, swinging centimetres above Norbert
the Nutjob’s head, removed his helmet so gently, so
softly, with her pick-pocketing, burglaring fingers, that he
never felt a thing.
She then bashed him on the head as hard as
she could with the frozen potato. Norbert staggered a
bit, swayed this way and that, and then fell to the floor,
unconscious. As he lay prone, Camicazi dropped back
down to the ground again, and patted him reassuringly
on the shoulders.
‘Practice, Norbert, that’s what you need,’ she said
condescendingly. ‘You’re never too old to learn.’
‘CAMICAZI!!!!!’ shrieked Hiccup from the
banqueting table, knocking out a Hysteric with a leg of
roasted buffalo, shoving a carrot up the nose of another,

174

and spraying three more with Home-made Nettle
Champagne. ‘GET OVER HERE!’ Camicazi swung
across, and landed on the table beside him.
Most of the table was now in flames, and the fire
had spread to ALL the polar bear rugs.
Most ominous of all, the Squealers were actually
MOVING to get out of the Hall. Squealers are so lazy
that they only move when they are in mortal danger.
They wriggled towards the door like disgusting fat,
bloated slugs, their nails waving frantically, leaving a trail
of snotty slime.
The rope that snaked up to the chimney in the
ceiling, the other end of which was attached to One
Eye’s great leg, dangled between Camicazi and Hiccup.
They both grabbed hold of it, coughing from the smoke,
and tugged three times.
Just the second before One Eye dragged them up
and out of danger, Hiccup leant down and picked up a
metal food tray from the table.
And then they were up and away, the Hysteric
swords just brushing their heels as they rose swiftly to the
ceiling and out through the hole in the roof.

14. THE POTATO-
BURGLARS’ RUN

They appeared, blinking like moles, into the daylight,
for night had turned into morning while they were in
the Hysterical Great Hall; the sky was no longer black
but the bluey grey of a seagull’s back, and the sun was
coming up fast from behind the Mazy Multitudes.
Down below they could hear the roar of the
Hysterics, the loudest of all being Norbert the Nutjob
shouting, ‘MY VEGETABLE! THEY’VE GOT MY
VEGETABLE!’ The Hysterics were already

176

stampeding towards the door, in pursuit.
Hiccup knew they hadn’t a hope of getting
away on foot, and they didn’t have time to find their
skis again.
In such situations, being tough is not
necessarily the way to stay alive, because
however tough you are, if there are five
hundred Hysterics on skis and only
FOUR of you, you are not going to
win the battle.
What you need in THIS
kind of situation is a Clever Idea,
and luckily Hiccup was good at
Clever Ideas.
Hiccup put the food tray
down on the roof and sat on it.

‘Come on, Camicazi, you sit behind me,’ ordered
Hiccup.
‘Oh, good-ee,’ said Camicazi, her eyes
lighting up.
The roof of the Great Hall hung slightly over the
village walls. From there a steep slope ran all the way
down to the harbour.
So when the Hysterics poured out of the doors
of the Great Hall in a shouting, angry river they had an
excellent view of Camicazi and Hiccup tobogganing
down the roof and sailing over the walls of the village on
board one of their silver food trays.
‘AAAAIEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!!!’ screamed Hiccup
and Camicazi as they soared through the air.
By some miracle they landed the right way up on
the slope below.
And then the lightning descent began.
Take it from me, there is nothing on earth that
moves faster than two children going down a practically
vertical slope on a highly polished silver food tray.
Hiccup had sledged before, but never on a hill
so steep that it was practically a cliff. And in fact the
exact descent that they made has now become an annual
competition on Hysteria. It is known as ‘the Potato-
Burglars’ Run’, and it follows the same route that Hiccup

178

and Camicazi took, starting, as they did, on top of
the roof of the Great Hall, and ending, less than two
minutes later, in Hysteria Harbour.
‘The Potato-Burglars’ Run’ is the most dangerous
toboggan run in the Inner Isles, and for those brave
enough to try it, accidents are common.
Hiccup and Camicazi were lucky not to break
their necks. They screamed down that hillside, wildly out
of control, yelling at the tops of their voices.
One Eye and Toothless couldn’t possibly keep
up with them, for it was like trying to catch a speeding
arrow.
When they hit the ice of the harbour two bottom-
bruising, hair-raising, eye-popping minutes later, they
were going so fast that they wildly overshot the sleigh
they had left there, and The Hopeful Puffin patiently
waiting for their return.
They scrambled off the food tray and raced
towards the sleigh. One Eye came soaring down, and
they hurriedly hitched him up and set him going at a
brisk trot towards the Harbour Exit.
‘Oh my goodness,’ panted Camicazi, looking
back up at the Hysterical Village, where the Great Hall
was now a gigantic bonfire. ‘Those Hysterics are going to
be SO CROSS.’

179

‘My congratulations,’ growled One Eye to
Hiccup, as he pulled them rapidly forwards. ‘You are
the first Human I have ever met who uses his brain
and not just his muscles.’
‘If he really use his b-b-brain,’ complained
Toothless, catching up and collapsing, exhausted, on the
seat of the sleigh, ‘we not here in the first p-p-place.’
In that very same instant, over the brow of the
hill came the Hysterics.
They had put their helmets on and they were on
skis, howling the Hysterical Howl like a pack of speeding
wolves. They were already shooting arrows in their
direction, trying to hit the sleigh. But they were too late.
Once their skis hit the ice they travelled for a while, and
then came to a halt. Hiccup and Camicazi were nearly
at the Harbour Exit by now, and the arrows shot by the
Hysterics fell harmlessly on the ice.
Looking over her shoulder at the furious
Hysterics, Camicazi let out a whoop of joy as One Eye
galloped out of Hysteria Harbour.
‘We made it!’ she yelled.
‘We haven’t made it yet,’ said Hiccup nervously.
That sharp noise of cracking, like axes on a tree trunk,
was even louder now that they were on the ice. And
Hiccup was looking out for the Doomfang.

180

‘Here’s the Vegetable,’ said Camicazi, handing
Hiccup the Frozen Potato with the arrow stuck in it.
‘And this other thing I found in the casket – I’m sorry, I
shouldn’t have taken it as well, but once you start burgling,
it’s difficult to stop.’
Hiccup took the Potato and the Other Thing, and
stuffed them in his breast pocket, not really concentrating,
for the great shadow of the Doomfang had appeared under
the boat, and was following them under the ice.
‘If we can just get to the Open Sea before the ice
cracks we’ll be all right,’ muttered Hiccup to himself. ‘The
Doomfang won’t leave the Wrath of Thor. The Doomfang
hasn’t left the Wrath of Thor in fifteen years…’
The walls of the cliffs raced past them on either
side. The Doomfang, dark and terrible, stretching out for
ever, swam slowly beneath them. And they reached the
edge of the Open Sea without the ice cracking.
‘You see!’ grinned Camicazi. ‘We did it!’

181

15. THEY MIGHT JUST
MAKE IT, NOW

It seemed like they had INDEED done it, as they burst
into the Open Sea, One Eye pulling into that Great
White Wilderness at terrific speed, the Wrath of Thor left
behind them, the potato safely in Hiccup’s breast pocket,
and Berk only a three-hour sleigh ride away.
And then everything went wrong.
‘What’s th-th-that???’ stammered Toothless,
pointing with one wing to a shape on the ice behind them,
coming closer by the second.
That was an enormous, leaping Driver Dragon,
far bigger and faster than One Eye, pulling a gigantic
sleigh with one man in it. A very cross man, with an arrow-
wound in his bottom, a lump on his head, chewed-off
moustaches and a double-headed axe in one hand.
In fact it was Norbert the Nutjob.
Before Hiccup had time to think, Norbert was
upon them.
His sleigh drew alongside the galloping One Eye.
And then he reached over, and with one blow of his axe,
he cut the reins and tackle attaching One Eye to the
sleigh.

182

One Eye bounded on, but the sleigh, and The
Hopeful Puffin behind it, came to a shuddering halt.
‘Oh, suffering scallops,’ moaned Hiccup.
There they were, as still as a stone, in the middle
of a Great White Desert that stretched for miles and
miles and miles. In front of them, Norbert the Nutjob
was pulling on his Sabre-Tooth’s reins to wheel his sleigh
round for the attack.
Below them was the Doomfang.
For the first time in fifteen years, the Doomfang
had left the Wrath of Thor.
It, too, had stopped when the sleigh stopped. In
fact the sleigh had come to rest right in the centre of its
terrible green eye, as if it were a target.

And a target it was, for Norbert the Nutjob.
Norbert leapt into their sleigh, tall and terrible
and COMPLETELY CRAZY.
‘AHA!’ roared Norbert the Nutjob, his
tic dancing for pure horrible murderous joy. ‘I’VE
CAUGHT YOU, YOU REVOLTING LITTLE
BLONDE ASSASSIN! AND NOW I SHALL
TEACH YOU NOT TO HIT PEOPLE ON THE
HEAD WITH THEIR OWN POTATO!’
Norbert the Nutjob raised his axe over Camicazi,
and he was about to bring it down, when Hiccup said
loudly, ‘I wouldn’t do that, Norbert.’
Hiccup felt in his breast pocket, and drew out
the potato with the arrow still stuck in it. It was warmer
this morning, and the potato, snuggled down the front of
Hiccup’s furry waistcoat, was no longer frozen.
Norbert glanced at Hiccup, and then gasped in
astonishment, as right in front of Norbert’s eyes…
… HICCUP PULLED THE ARROW OUT OF
THE POTATO.
For as Hiccup had suggested earlier to Norbert,
the arrow slid out perfectly easily now the potato had
defrosted.
Hiccup pushed it in and out of the potato several
times just to drive the point home.

184

Norbert the Nutjob dropped his axe.
‘My father’s Prophecy!’ screamed Norbert the
Nutjob, his head in his hands. ‘I don’t believe it…
It can’t be true! You… you revolting little Hooligan
Vegetable-Burglar… you… are the Chosen One? … You
will lift the Curse and rid us of the Doomfang…?’
Hiccup nodded solemnly, thinking, nutty as a
fruitcake.
At that very moment, the sun came over the
horizon…
Rays of sunlight bounced off the snow and ice all
around them, and off the Doomfang’s Great Green Eye
and dazzled Hiccup, so that he had to fling up an elbow
to shield himself from the glare.
A sound like a million whips rang out, or a trillion
axe blows, or a thousand of Thor’s thunderbolts rolled
into one.
The ice cracked from side to side.

185

16. THE DOOMFANG

A great jagged split appeared in the white frozen sea,
a split that ran all the way from the Outcast Lands to
the north, down to the Bog-Burglar islands in
the south.
The world broke open like a
big white egg.
‘Aaaaaargh!’ screamed
Hiccup. ‘Quick! Get into The
Hopeful Puffin!’

Norbert the Nutjob, Camicazi and
Hiccup bolted out of the sleigh, and leapt into
the little boat, the ice giving way beneath their feet.
‘LET DOWN THE SAIL!’ screamed
Hiccup, cutting the rope tying the boat to the sleigh.
The sail flopped down and the wind caught it,
sending it billowing outward like a plump cushion. There
was another enormous CRACK! and the ice in the
Sullen Sea splintered into millions of tiny pieces. The
sleigh slipped gently into the grey-green water and was
seen no more, and The Hopeful Puffin was afloat.

186

Through the jagged jigsaw of ice, between them
and the Isle of Berk on the horizon, up rose the
Doomfang.
It reared out of the sea, showering The Hopeful
Puffin with water and shards of ice, telescoping upwards
to its immense height, which was impossibly,
RIDICULOUSLY high, blotting out the newly risen sun.
The SOUND it made was unutterably awful, a
sadness so extreme it made you want to weep yourself,
a sound that crept up the spine like spiders’ feet,
and scuttled over the scalp, sending each
individual hair on Hiccup’s head prickling
upwards like the spines on a hedgehog. It
was the glossy black of a gigantic, muscly
panther, and when it opened its awful
Cavern jaws to roar, its serrated teeth were
as green as its eyes, and the
yellow frothy scum of its
saliva steamed and
smoked in the cold
morning air.

Indeed, its whole body seemed boiling hot, and
like the flanks of a horse that has galloped for miles,
great clouds of smoke rose up from its tremendous
gleaming bulk and into the sky.
‘It’s come for me…’ moaned Norbert the Nutjob,
in a tremble of fear.
‘No it hasn’t,’ said Hiccup. ‘It’s come for ME.’
And the Doomfang did seem to be looking
directly down at Hiccup.
It was as if Hiccup had always known that
this was going to happen, that somehow he was never
going to get in and out of Hysteria without meeting the
Doomfang face to face.
‘Don’t look into its eyes,’ warned One Eye.
You should never look into a dragon’s eyes. But
in this case it was difficult not to – they were so large
and so close, like a couple of green suns. Hiccup was
hypnotised for a moment, and his head spun so that he
nearly lost his balance and dropped off the boat.
‘What do you WANT?’ Hiccup yelled
desperately in Dragonese.
The Dragon opened its great mouth and tried
to speak. But all that came out was a terrible unearthly
howl of horror and SADNESS, and the foam dripped
from its jaws in a revolting bubbly waterfall. It tried

188

again, and the terrible sound came out again, only
louder.
‘What is it?’ asked Hiccup.
But the creature could not say, and its struggle to
speak made it angry, and it began shooting out with its
blue flames, nearer and nearer to Hiccup. ‘What does it
want me to do?’ asked Hiccup frantically.
‘We’re done for,’ despaired Norbert, wringing his
hands.
Camicazi patted the moaning Norbert soothingly
on the back. ‘We’ll be all right,’ she repeated over and
over again, ‘we always are, Thor only knows how…
Hiccup’ll have a Cunning Plan…’
‘Oh that’s right,’ remembered Norbert. ‘Of
course! My father’s Prophecy! He is the Chosen One,
and he alone can rid us of the Doomfang!’
But for once in his life, Hiccup did NOT have a
Cunning Plan.
‘What do you want?’ asked Hiccup again, more
to himself, this time.
The Doomfang made one last terrible attempt to
communicate, coming out with a truly dreadful, garbled
cacophony of noise, and then opened its jaws wide,
sucking in its breath.
Hiccup did not know what they had done for the

189

creature to have it in for them.
Perhaps it had gone crazy and turned into a Man-
Eater? It had certainly killed Norbert’s Papa, fifteen years
ago, and was it now going to kill them too?
Because now it was aiming directly for them, and
Hiccup braced himself for the Monster to breathe out its
flames and set the boat alight like a little barbecue.
But what shot out of the creature’s mouth was not
a Terrible Burst of Fire, not the frozen flames that would
have sent all three of them, and Toothless too, straight to
Valhalla in a heroic bonfire.
Curling and unfurling, quick and flexible as a
gigantic muscly snake, out of the Doomfang’s mouth came
the Doomfang’s TONGUE.
One hundred metres long, pink and pulsing, the
Doomfang’s TONGUE sped straight to Hiccup’s
left hand, and the wriggling, squirming,
revoltingly WET forked end of it
burrowed its way into his palm
and wrapped itself round
the potato.

Hiccup nearly dropped the potato there and
then. But then he realised what the creature wanted.
He dropped the arrow, and grabbed hold of the
potato with both hands. The juices of the Doomfang’s
tongue foamed disgustingly over his hands.
Hiccup p-u-l-l-e-d.
The Doomfang p-u-l-l-e-d.
There was only one potato, and both of them
wanted it. Both of them NEEDED it. Desperately,
Hiccup tried to get a better grip on the potato, slimy and
greasy with the yucky bubbly saliva. He wasn’t going to
lose the quest, and Fishlegs’s life, NOW, not when they
were so close to home, not when the shadow of Berk
was so tantalisingly near.

He leant
right back, pulling with
a might he never knew he had. But the Doomfang
pulled too, and the chances of Hiccup, not more
than four stone, winning a tug of war against a Dragon
numberless stones heavier were very tiny indeed.
Not im-POSSIBLE, but, let’s face it,
im-PROBABLE.

192

Hiccup did not let go. He would never have let
go. He would have stood there all day and all night, if he
could have.
But one fork of the Doomfang’s tongue unpeeled
Hiccup’s desperate fingers, one by one, and the other
fork gave a horrible squirm, and with a final terrible
wrench, the Doomfang’s tongue wrested the potato out
of Hiccup’s hands.

As Hiccup fell backwards into the bottom of the
boat, he saw with more despair than he had ever felt
before in his short adventurous life, the revolting tongue
retreat with a flick as quick as a toad catching flies, back
into the Doomfang’s mouth. The jaws shut over it with
awful finality.
The Doomfang swallowed the Potato.

The quest was over.

17. THE QUEST IS OVER

Tears pouring down his face, Hiccup watched as the
Doomfang threw back its head and screamed as loudly as
if it had been shot with a gigantic spear.
It sent a great sheet of freezing blue flame like an
uphill waterfall shooting up into the sky. These flames
shot so high they hit a small cloud up above, instantly
freezing it, and turning it bright blue. And then, just
like that, the Doomfang sank slowly beneath the waves,
leaving nothing behind but a whirlpool of gigantic ripples,
spreading wider and wider.
They spread towards The Hopeful Puffin, rocking
it violently up and down. They spread wider still, and
lapped the shores of Hysteria itself, and carried on down
the Wrath of Thor.
Hiccup sat in the bottom of the boat, unable
to believe that the Doomfang wouldn’t rear up again,
and maybe spit out the potato, or give it back in some
way. But eventually the ripples got smaller and vanished
entirely, and so too did Hiccup’s last hope.
This really was the end.
The nearest potato was now thousands and
thousands of miles away, in the great country to the west,

196

known as America to those who believe in such a place.
‘Issa g-g-g-gone!’ whispered Toothless in
amazement.
Up on the clifftops, the long line of watching,
silent Hysterics began to shout: ‘THE DOOMFANG IS
GONE! THE DOOMFANG IS GONE! HURRAH
FOR THE WEIRD LITTLE RED-HAIRED BOY,
THE DOOMFANG IS GONE!’
And softly, and silently, snow as blue as Gobber
the Belch’s nose rained down from the frozen cloud
above Hiccup’s head.
The blue snow rained down like confetti at a
coronation, settling in Hiccup’s hair, and on One Eye’s
white back, and in between Toothless’s horns.
‘YOU are the Chosen One,’ said Norbert the
Nutjob, still unable to believe it. ‘YOU have rid us of
the Doomfang. YOU have lifted the Curse of Hysteria?’
Hiccup was suddenly furiously angry.
Not with Norbert, but with the gods.
For six long months he had been longing for
spring to come, praying to Thor for the ice to melt, and
now, just when he and Camicazi had been through
so much, and nearly achieved the impossible, just at
precisely the wrong moment, Thor had made the ice
crack and freed the Doomfang.

197

And this ridiculous blue snow was just the icing on
the cake. What was it Snotlout had said?
The snow will turn as blue as Gobber the Belch’s nose
before YOU become the Chief of the Hairy Hooligan Tribe.
The gods were laughing at him now, playing with
him for their sport.
Hiccup shook his fist at the Heavens.
‘I don’t WANT to be the Chosen One!’ he
howled at the blue sky above. ‘I don’t WANT to be the
Chief of the Hairy Hooligan Tribe! I didn’t WANT to lift
Norbert’s stupid Curse! I wanted to cheat the Curse on
Fishlegs! All I want is my FRIEND…’
The silly blue snow took no notice, and rained
down steadily from above.
Hiccup began to cry.
‘All I want is my friend…’ he sobbed. ‘Fishlegs
trusted me. He thought I would make everything all
right…’ He turned to Norbert in sudden hope.
‘Have you got ANOTHER potato?’ asked Hiccup.
Norbert the Nutjob shook his head. ‘My father
only brought back ONE of those Vegetables,’ he said
between gritted teeth. ‘This is what made it so precious…’
Norbert the Nutjob shifted his axe uncertainly
from hand to hand. The tic in his eye danced a wild
fandango.

198

‘I don’t know what to do!’ shrieked Norbert the
Nutjob. ‘You have shot me in the bottom, stolen my
American Vegetable, chewed off my moustaches, fed
Papa to the Squealers and burned down my Great Hall!’
His shaking hands reached out, almost of their
own accord, towards Hiccup’s neck… and then he
stopped himself just in time.
‘But on the other hand, it seems incredible, but
you HAVE lifted the Curse on Hysteria, and I cannot

199

ignore my father’s Prophecy. So THIS TIME, I shall let
you go free. But if you ever, EVER cross my path again,
I warn you I will kill you on the spot.’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Hiccup sadly. ‘I’m not that
keen on seeing YOU again, either. I’m sorry about the
Hall, and the moustaches, and the bottom, and… I’m
sorry about EVERYTHING, really… I was just trying to
save the life of my friend.’

Norbert the Nutjob pulled Hiccup’s sword out of
his belt, and threw it down with a curse on the floor of The
Hopeful Puffin. He then climbed back on board his sleigh,
and sped back to Hysteria, a land which ships could now
sail in and out of as freely as they liked for the first time in
fifteen long years, all on
account of Hiccup lifting
the Curse, which wasn’t the
quest he set out to do in the
first place, but, there we are, these
things happen to a Hero-in-Training.

200

And hearts sorrowing and despairing, Hiccup
and Camicazi set out in The Hopeful Puffin towards the
distant little Isle of Berk.
Camicazi took the helm because Hiccup was too
depressed.
There was a brisk wind and The Hopeful Puffin
fairly flew over the waves. They had to dodge the
floating icebergs, and if Hiccup had been happier, he
could have enjoyed the warmness of the breeze now
blowing in their faces, for he had been waiting for this
moment for six months.

201

For six long months they had been trapped in
winter, and to Vikings who are used to being surrounded
by the never-ending rocking of the sea, this frozen white
stillness had been terribly eerie, as if time itself had
forgotten to tick and was caught in a Hibernation Coma.
There was nothing, no smell, no sound, no movement,
just a painted white world that stretched out for ever
and a cold that made Hiccup’s helmet burn against his
forehead as if it were made out of fire.
Hiccup had longed and longed for it to end,
and now spring HAD come and broken the spell. The
sea was alive again and the wind whirling through the
marshy grasses carried with it the catcalls and whoops of
Dragonese and the lovely fresh smell and taste of salt.
And Hiccup had never been so miserable in his life.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Camicazi, after they had
sailed in silence for half an hour. ‘Why did the Doomfang
eat the Vegetable-that-No-one-Dares-Name? Why did
it suddenly leave the Wrath of Thor when it had been
hanging out there for the past fifteen years? What just
happened?’
Hiccup sighed, raising his head from his chest for
a moment. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t KNOW of course,
because, how can we know? But my guess is that the
DOOMFANG ITSELF HAD VORPENTITIS.’

202

Camicazi’s jaw dropped.
‘It had all the symptoms,’ continued Hiccup.
‘Crazy behaviour. Bloodshot eyes. Foaming mouth.
A very high temperature. Doomfangs can live to be
thousands of years old, so fifteen years is only two
minutes in the life of a Doomfang. It would explain how
desperate it was, and how ill it looked. And once it had
eaten the Potato, it was instantly cured, so it didn’t need
to hang around any more. That was it, end of Curse.’
‘Who is to say that your friend’s life is worth
more than a Dragon’s?’ said One Eye, who was taking
up most of the deck.
‘It’s worth more to me,’ said Hiccup. ‘Because I
didn’t know the Doomfang personally.’
The temperature was very pleasant, and for the
first time in six months Hiccup found he was sweating in
his furry overcoat. He took it off, and Toothless landed
on his shoulder, and started trying to tuck his head under
his wing.
‘It’s a bit late to go into Hibernation Sleep
now, Toothless,’ said Hiccup, scratching the little dragon
affectionately behind his horns. ‘It’s just about to be
spring again.’
Toothless grunted grumpily.
Hiccup squinted up at the sun. Now that it was

203

out, he could tell the time fairly accurately from the
sun’s position in the sky. They were at least two hours
away from ten in the morning, he reckoned. Not that it
mattered what time they got back now, of course.
Hiccup’s heart was beating fast in anxiety and
sadness, and he suddenly realised he could actually
HEAR it beating.
Tick tock tick tock tick tock went his heart.
How very peculiar, thought Hiccup.
And then he remembered the funny round metal
thing that Camicazi had found lying in the casket next to
the potato. He reached into his breast pocket and drew
it out.
TICK TOCK TICK TOCK TICK TOCK went
the metal thingummy.
It was a beautifully made, strange little object,
slightly smaller than the potato. The front was
transparent and hard, like ice, and behind it were all
these rune numbers set in different circles, and at least
seven arrows, all different colours. When he stared at
it for some time he realised that some of them were
actually moving, very slowly, but all on their own.
He opened up the back to see if it was a tiny
nanodragon making the ticking noise, and found inside
nothing but lots of little delicate metal wheels that all

204

seemed to be moving. Perhaps they too had been frozen
by the ice, and now that it was warmer again, they had
woken up…
‘WOW,’ breathed Camicazi, looking over his
shoulder. ‘What is it, do you think?’
‘I have no idea,’ said Hiccup, putting it back
in his pocket, where the ticking would be muffled. He
would think about it later. ‘It’s some kind of Hysterical
invention, I suppose. Those Hysterics are mad as
mackerel, but they are good inventors.’

205

Please, Thor, please, thought Hiccup to himself,
please let it be all right somehow after all…
It began to rain, and the rain melted the blue
snow, and it dripped like tears off the horns on Hiccup’s
helmet, down into blue puddles on the deck. The
American arrow lay, half drowning, on the edge of one
of these puddles, and Hiccup picked it up and put it
carefully in his arrow case.
Within five minutes, all the snow had gone, and
Camicazi, Hiccup, Toothless and One Eye all looked as
if they’d had some kind of weird accident with a lot
of blue paint. Their hair, coats, helmets and horns all
coated and streaked with the blue of the bluest of blue
skies.
Tick tock tick tock tick tock said the metal
thingummy in Hiccup’s pocket.
Tick tock tick tock tick tock went Hiccup’s heart,
hopeful in spite of itself.
Back on Hysteria, steaming through the pouring
rain, you could see the bright flame of fire and a
column of smoke coming from the Hysterical Great
Hall.
Norbert’s Papa was finally getting his proper
Viking funeral.

206

18. FISHLEGS

Stoick was waiting for them, in pouring rain, on the
Long Beach.
Stoick was FURIOUS.
He had only just found out that Hiccup had not
spent the night at Snotlout’s house, and Snotlout had
told him that he had seen Hiccup and Camicazi sneaking
away in a sleigh from the Freya’sday Eve Celebrations,
heading out on to the great sea of ice.
When Stoick demanded why Snotlout had not
told him this earlier, Snotlout could not answer.
Snotlout could hardly give the real reason, which
was that he had been rather hoping that Hiccup was
doing something STUPID and DANGEROUS, and
he didn’t want Stoick rushing out to save him at the last
minute.
But Stoick the Vast saw the real reason in
Snotlout’s eyes, and in the delighted way that Snotlout
looked out at the melted ice in the Harbour. Snotlout
was PLEASED that Hiccup could have drowned
somewhere out there in that grey, grim sea.
For the first time, Stoick realised that Snotlout
might not be the best choice of friend for his son
Hiccup.

207

I am afraid that Stoick the Vast gave Snotlout an
old-fashioned spanking.
This WAS the Dark Ages.
Stoick then ran to the Long Beach to see if he
could see what was going on, and, to his MASSIVE
relief, the first thing he clapped eyes on, picking through
the icebergs out to sea, was the tattered, round shape of
his son’s funny little boat, The Hopeful Puffin.
‘WHAT IN THOR’S NAME DO YOU
THINK YOU HAVE BEEN DOING?’ roared Stoick
the Vast, storming up to them as the nose of The Hopeful
Puffin landed on the sand. Hiccup, who appeared to
have turned an extraordinary blue colour, clambered out
of the boat and looked his enraged father straight in
the eyes.
‘I have been to Hysteria, to try and bring back a
Potato to save Fishlegs’s life,’ said Hiccup.
Stoick exploded.
‘I ABSOLUTELY FORBADE YOU TO DO
ANY SUCH THING!’ bellowed Stoick the Vast.
‘HOW DARE YOU DISOBEY, ME, YOUR CHIEF,
AND RISK YOUR LIVES LOOKING FOR A
VEGETABLE THAT NEVER EXISTED, ON A
WILD-GOOSE CHASE FOR NOTHING—’
Tears poured down Hiccup’s face. ‘The potato

208

DOES exist,’ he interrupted his father, ‘it DOES exist,
because we stole it, and Norbert the Nutjob nearly
chopped our heads off, but you are right, it WAS all for
nothing, because the Doomfang ate it and now Fishlegs
is going to DIE.’
Stoick the Vast’s anger could not last in the face
of the utter hopeless misery in his son’s eyes. His fury
melted away, like the snow dissolving into rain all around
them on the beach. He patted his son awkwardly on the
shoulder.
‘Now, now, son,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Of course
Fisheggs isn’t going to die…’
Hiccup pushed his father out of the way, and
stumbled over the sand to Old Wrinkly’s house, followed
by Stoick the Vast, Camicazi, Toothless and One Eye.
He flung open the door without knocking.
Old Wrinkly was standing in the middle of the
room, poking the fire with a metal stick.
For a moment, Hiccup couldn’t see Fishlegs, and
then he realised Fishlegs was on the bed. He was lying
completely still, his glasses off, white as a corpse.

209

Hiccup’s heart stopped.
And then to Hiccup’s unspeakable relief, Fishlegs
sat up and put his glasses on.
He was still alive, then.
Stoick the Vast, Camicazi, Toothless and One Eye
the Sabre-Tooth Driver filed into the room after Hiccup.
‘WELL?’ roared Stoick the Vast. ‘IS FISHEGGS
DYING, OR IS HE NOT?’
Old Wrinkly looked very embarrassed. He shifted
guiltily from foot to foot. ‘Ah, yes, Stoick, I’m so glad
you brought that up… yes, the thing is, I’m not sure that
Fishlegs is dying after all…’
‘WHADDYAMEAN, NOT DYING?’ yelled
Stoick the Vast.
‘I’m afraid my diagnosis wasn’t completely

210

correct.’ Old Wrinkly giggled nervously. ‘Soothsaying
from the fire is very complicated… I won’t go into the
details, but take it from me, it’s tricky… and, what with
one thing or another, it turns out that Fishlegs didn’t
have Vorpentitis after all. It was just a bad cold that set
off his Berserk tendencies. I nursed him back to health
with lots of bed-rest and lemon-in-honey.’
Fishlegs stood up, slightly wobbily, and gave
Stoick the Vast a big smile.
‘I’m fine!’ said Fishlegs happily, throwing wide
his arms.
Hiccup couldn’t believe it.
It was going to be all right after all.
‘HE’S ALIVE!’ cried Hiccup joyously, over
the moon at this uncomplicated happy ending, and he
rushed over to hug his friend.
Toothless gave Fishlegs a lick on the ear, which
was a big compliment from Toothless. One Eye drawled,
‘Well, well, that was all worth it, wasn’t it?’ and
Camicazi did a couple of celebratory cartwheels.
But Stoick wasn’t going to take this lying down.
‘DO YOU MEAN TO TELL ME,’ roared
Stoick the Vast at Old Wrinkly, ‘THAT ALL
BECAUSE OF YOUR LOUSY SOOTHSAYING
MY SON HICCUP HAS GONE ALL THE WAY

211

TO HYSTERIA AND NEARLY GOT HIS HEAD
CHOPPED OFF BY NORBERT THE NUTJOB
AND FACED THE DOOMFANG ALL FOR
NOTHING?????’
‘Well, not for nothing, Stoick,’ explained Old
Wrinkly. ‘If you’ll just listen a moment, I’ll explain.
Soothsaying is a very tricky business and when I looked
in the fire—’
‘Did Fisheggs have Vorpentitis, or did he not?’
interrupted Stoick.
‘No he didn’t,’ admitted Old Wrinkly.
‘THEN THE QUEST WAS COMPLETELY
UNNECESSARY!’ roared Stoick.
‘Don’t give Old Wrinkly a hard time, Father,’
said Hiccup. ‘Why waste time getting angry
when all’s well that ends well…’
Hiccup started to laugh, but
something in the middle of the laugh
went wrong when Hiccup’s left arm
suddenly went dead.
Hiccup looked down at his
arm in surprise.
‘I can’t feel my arm,’ said
Hiccup.
And then the other arm went dead.

212

Hiccup had been feeling rather hot all day, but he
suddenly felt as if he were burning alive. Sweat poured
down his face, and great clouds of steam rose up off his
shoulders and chest.
And Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third’s
entire body went rigid as a statue, his eyes staring and
bloodshot, and he fell down lifeless on the very bed
Fishlegs had been lying on just two minutes before.

213

19. THE FINAL CHAPTER

Sometimes it is not until the Final Chapter that you
realise what a quest has REALLY been about all along.
Stoick’s face turned from red anger to pure
white terror.
‘The Doomfang…’ whispered Stoick the Vast
in agony, rushing to hold his stiff son in his arms. ‘By
Woden and Freya and Hairy Knuckled Thor, he did get
touched by the frozen flames of the Doomfang… and all
for a stupid useless quest for NOTHING…’
Enormous hairy Stoick the Vast burst into tears.
‘Oh for Thor’s sake, Stoick,’ cried Old Wrinkly,
bossily pushing Stoick out of the way. ‘Will you just
SHUT UP and listen to me? I’m really not that bad a
soothsayer. This has nothing to do with the Doomfang.’
He took Hiccup’s pulse, and looked under his eyelids,
and tapped his chest, which had turned as wooden as a
tree trunk. ‘This is VORPENTITIS.’
Stoick reeled back. ‘And what does that mean?’
he whispered through white lips.
‘It means,’ said Old Wrinkly, ‘that one little
weirdo looks very like another when you’re soothsaying
in a fire, and it was HICCUP who was bitten by the
Vorpent, and not Fishlegs. So HICCUP has Vorpentitis.

214

And that means that since it is now…’
(At this point Old Wrinkly reached into Hiccup’s
breast pocket, hoping to draw out the potato, and in fact
drew out the ticking metal thingummy. He looked at the
numbers on it and nodded his head.)
‘… oooh exactly five to ten in the morning on
Freya’sday Friday!’ continued Old Wrinkly, laying the
metal thingummy carefully on the bed beside Hiccup,
‘your son, Hiccup, who has Vorpentitis, has five minutes
to live.’
Old Wrinkly chuckled. This didn’t seem to be
worrying him much.
‘Which wouldn’t give a great deal of time for us
to find an antidote. But luckily,’ said Old Wrinkly, in
the spirit of a conjuror, ‘luckily, on your son’s so-called
stupid useless quest for NOTHING, he has brought
back the antidote with him ALREADY. Camicazi,
where is the potato? It doesn’t seem to be here in
Hiccup’s pocket… Have you got it?’
Camicazi was as white as One Eye’s back. She
shook her head numbly. ‘No… potato,’ she gasped.
Old Wrinkly’s mouth fell open, appalled.
‘NO POTATO?’ shrieked Old Wrinkly. ‘WHAT
DO YOU MEAN, NO POTATO? YOU MUST
HAVE THE POTATO!!!’

215

Camicazi shook her head again. ‘No potato,’ she
whispered.
‘But I was so sure,’ whispered Old Wrinkly. ‘I
was so sure you would bring back the potato… This is
the last time I believe a single word those beastly fires
say… they told me DEFINITELY that you would
get it…’
‘Oh, we got it all right,’ mumbled Camicazi
miserably. ‘It was just that the Doomfang ATE it.’

‘Oh, my goodness,’ gulped Old Wrinkly.
NO POTATO.
Suddenly Old Wrinkly looked every second of his
ninety-three years. His whole body crumpled up like an
old brown leaf.
Little did Hiccup know, when he was crying on
the boat for his friend Fishlegs, that he should have been
crying for himself.
For it was indeed HICCUP who had been stung
all those many months ago, escaping from the Fortress
of Sinister.
And it was Hiccup who was now moments away
from the death he feared for his friend Fishlegs.

‘WHAT CAN I DO?’ roared Stoick the Vast.
‘There must be other cures? Other medicines?’
Old Wrinkly shook his head. ‘The potato is the
only cure for Vorpentitis.’
‘I’LL BRING BACK THE POTATO!’ cried
Stoick the Vast, drawing his sword, a Man of Action to
the last. ‘JUST TELL ME WHERE TO GO AND
HOW LONG I’VE GOT!’
‘Well,’ said Old Wrinkly sadly, ‘the nearest potato
is now roughly three-and-a-half-thousand miles away
on the distant shores of the country known as America
to those who may believe in it. And you have…’ Old
Wrinkly checked the clock sitting next to Hiccup’s bed,
‘… exactly THREE minutes to find it.’
Even Stoick seemed to feel that perhaps this
might be a problem.
He strode round the room, tearing at his beard.
Old Wrinkly, Camicazi and One Eye sat at
Hiccup’s bedside.
One Eye didn’t seem as happy as he might have
been two days ago at the thought of one less Human in
the world.
A big tear rolled out of his one eye and down his
Sabre-Tooth and plopped on to the ground.
Hiccup was stiff as a board, and his body was

218

now red, and boiling hot. Toothless licked his poor red
face, to try to cool it down.
‘THE DOOMFANG!’ cried Stoick the Vast.
‘I COULD TRACK DOWN THE DOOMFANG
AND WRESTLE THE POTATO FROM HIM!’
‘You’re going to find the Doomfang in the vast
and trackless wastes of an immense and fathomless
Ocean,’ said Old Wrinkly wearily, checking the time
again on the clock, ‘in TWO minutes?’
‘Face it, Stoick,’ whispered Old Wrinkly. ‘What
you’re talking about is not just im-PROBABLE… it’s
im-POSSIBLE…’
Fishlegs had drawn back into the shadows, and
he was watching his friend’s face.
Hiccup was trying to say something, but his
frozen, burning mouth made it difficult for him to say
the words.
In fact he looked very like the Doomfang, when
he was trying to speak to Hiccup out on the Sullen Sea.
‘Ooot me…’ mumbled Hiccup desperately.
‘OOOOOT ME!’ and he tried to point, but his arms were
as stiff as if they were made out of wood.
Old Wrinkly patted his hand, and bathed
his forehead with water. Stoick’s shoulders heaved
with sobs.

219

‘OOOOT ME!’ cried poor Hiccup again.
Fishlegs tried to follow where his friend’s eyes
were looking, and it seemed like they were staring at the
table by the door.
On that table lay Hiccup’s furry coat and his
helmet, bow and arrows that he had thrown there when
he first came in the room.
‘One minute left,’ whispered Old Wrinkly.
‘OOOOOOOOOOT ME!’ repeated Hiccup
desperately.
Sometimes it is only a True Friend who knows
what we mean when we try to speak.
Somebody who has spent a lot of time with us,
and listens carefully to what we are trying to say, and
tries to understand.
Fishlegs understood.
He didn’t know why he was supposed to do what
he was about to do, but he trusted Hiccup, who always
seemed to know the right thing to do.
Fishlegs picked up Hiccup’s bow.
Out of the arrow-case he drew an arrow, a
singularly beautiful arrow, decorated with feathers from
birds Fishlegs had never seen before.
Fishlegs fitted the arrow to the bow, and pointed
the bow towards Hiccup.

220

Stoick looked up from his sobbing, in
amazement. Here was his son, moments away from
dying, and that weird fish-faced friend of his appeared to
be about to SHOOT him. TYPICAL. What a nutcase.

221

cried Stoick. ‘DON’T SHOOT!’
Stoick threw his vast bulk across the room in an
attempt to shield his son from the arrow.

223

Of course, he was trying to protect Hiccup’s heart and
chest. He didn’t realise what an appalling shot Fishlegs
was, so he jumped far too high.
Fishlegs let the arrow
go, and it soared in a wobbly
unsteady arc, finally landing in
Hiccup’s right big toe, piercing
through his wet boots, and into
the skin.
It was a bit of a miracle it hit
Hiccup at all. In fact, it may just be
the only time Fishlegs has EVER
hit something he was actually
aiming at.
The arrow that pierced the
skin of Hiccup’s big toe at ten o’clock
on the morning of Freya’sday Friday was the same arrow
that had been soaking for the last fifteen years in the
magical juices of THE POTATO.
Over the past decade and a half, those juices
had concentrated on the surface of the metal, and the
antidote now made its way into Hiccup’s bloodstream,
taking its cooling, healing work up every little vein, down
every little artery, into every little corner of Hiccup’s
poor, rigid, boiling little body.

224

In front of their eyes, Hiccup’s stiff arms
softened. His chest rose and fell. The breath blew out of
his nostrils, and his eyes opened.
‘Hello, Father,’ said Hiccup.
This was just too much for Stoick. He fainted
dead away, on the spot, all six-foot-seven and three feet
round of him, and it took a great deal more trouble to
revive HIM.
He was out cold, and Old Wrinkly slapped him,
and Hiccup shook him, and Camicazi tickled his feet,
and eventually it was Fishlegs who ran out and filled
an enormous bucket full of snow, and threw it right in
Stoick’s face. That brought him to his senses, and Stoick
sat bolt upright, spluttering and spitting snow out of
his beard.
‘You’re ALIVE!’ he shouted joyfully, and he
hugged his son so hard Hiccup thought his ribs might
crack. ‘By the Bristly Beard and Thunderous Thighs of
Great Goddess Freya, you’re ALIVE!’
‘He is alive,’ said Old Wrinkly pointedly, ‘and I
think some apologies are in order.’
Stoick’s brows lowered. However relieved and
happy he is, a Great Chieftain used to absolute power
does not like to apologise, but after a short struggle,
Stoick swallowed his pride.

225

‘You are right,’ said Stoick. ‘I have been
thoroughly wrong, and I am sorry. Old Wrinkly, you are
not the most pathetic soothsayer in the uncivilised world,
and I am sorry I ever said you were. Hiccup, you were
right to go on the quest for the Frozen Potato to try and
save the life of your odd little friend.’
Stoick turned to Fishlegs.
‘And most of all, FISHEGGS,’ he boomed
solemnly, ‘I have misjudged YOU.’
Fishlegs blushed. ‘No, no,’ he stammered.
‘Yes,’ said Stoick, holding up a hairy hand. ‘I

226

have. A Chief has to be big enough to admit it when he
is wrong. You are a little weirdo, it is true, but you are a
LOYAL little weirdo, and one day when my son is
Chief I have a feeling he will need some loyal people
about him.’
Meanwhile, Toothless, who really couldn’t stand
all this soppy hugging and apologising, flapped away to
find a nice warm spot by the fire.
‘Hiccup,’ Toothless called out sleepily, when he
had found himself a particularly cosy position, ‘issa
anyone else gonna d-d-die inna next f-f-five minutes?’
Hiccup laughed, and he asked Old Wrinkly.
‘No,’ said Old Wrinkly solemnly. ‘I have
examined the fire very carefully, and I can say,
absolutely DEFINITELY, that NOBODY is going to
die in the next five minutes. However, Gobber the
Belch, I’m afraid, will catch Fishlegs’s cold, and it’s a
nasty one.’
‘OK then,’ yawned Toothless. ‘Iffa no one need
T-t-toothless, Toothless go
back to sleep.’
So just when the
Inner Isles were waking up
from the coldest, longest
winter in a hundred years,

227

when the snow was melting, when all the other hunting
dragons were opening their eyes underground preparing
to burrow upward, and spring was eventually deciding it
was time to arrive, just at this moment, Toothless
FINALLY relaxed and went back into Hibernation Sleep.
One Eye settled down next to him, snoring like a
dinosaur with sinus problems.
Old Wrinkly began to explain to Stoick some of
the finer points of soothsaying.
And Hiccup and his good friends Fishlegs and
Camicazi wandered outside to spend the rest of the day
not doing very much at all – my favourite kind of day.
As for Gobber the Belch, why Gobber the Belch
woke up with a throbbing head and sore throat and a nose
that ran like a great green river.
So it appears that Vikings DO catch colds after all…

228

229

232

EPILOGUE BY HICCUP
HORRENDOUS HADDOCK THE
THIRD, THE LAST OF THE
GREAT VIKING HEROES

I guessed, but never knew for sure, what had happened in
that strange frozen moment in my childhood, when the
Doomfang stole my potato.
But many years later, when I was a tall young man
in command of my first ship and we were just returning
home from some wild and dangerous adventure, we
suddenly realised that we were being followed by
something. For days and days it followed us, always
staying at the same distance behind the boat. I spent
hours up the mast watching the black pin-prick on
the horizon and trying to work out what it was, whale
or shark or dragon monster, friend or foe, with some
nagging feeling at the back of my mind that this was
something I recognised from somewhere in my past.
It wasn’t until we entered the Sullen Sea that the
creature came right up close. It was immediately clear
from its glossy dark colour that it was a Doomfang. It
didn’t attack us, as I had been secretly dreading, but
began to play with the boat, swimming alongside, diving

233

underneath and coming up the other side, getting nearer
and nearer with each circle that it made.
This is common enough behaviour in dolphins,
and even in humpback whales, who are fascinated by
boats, and will play like this for hours. But it is hugely
unusual in a Doomfang. Doomfangs normally have the
same attitude towards humans that we have toward
insects: they loftily ignore us.
But this Doomfang was different. Even though
it was clearly a fully grown animal, at least five times
as long and as big as our ship, it played with us like a
child, swimming round and round the boat, until finally
the great creature gave a mighty thrash with its tail and
soared out of the water, spreading wide its wings. It
jumped right over the ship, just clearing the mast.
My Warriors gasped in awe and fear and
amazement and wonder, as the great long body blocked
out the sun, and I gasped too, for I recognised the
animal at last. This was my Doomfang, not slain, not
dead, not gone away, but in the very pink of health, and
it seemed rather pleased with itself, and with me.
For when it entered the water on the other
side, the great Doomfang tucked its legs up neatly and
entered the water at exactly the right angle, so that it
would not cause a single ripple to rock our little boat.

234

And when the creature swam alongside, so close now
that we could reach out and touch its glistening raven
black sides, it rolled on to its back and moved its wing
almost like it was waving, and its terrible mouth seemed
to be grinning at me.
That very same Doomfang has followed my boat
ever after, not like a Doom or a Curse, but more like a
guardian angel.
I have lost count of the times when I have been
out at sea in the most dreadful peril (for we Vikings lead
dangerous and exciting lives) and just at the moment
when all hope is lost, the Doomfang has appeared.
That Doomfang has steered my boat through
the Great Storm that drowned a thousand ships in the
Restless West Sea, it has rescued me from shipwreck on
Cannibal Isle, it has fought great Monsters that had my
ship wrapped around with their squids’ tentacles like a
cat’s-cradle.
It has returned the favour I once did it of saving
its life in a cold, cold world, a hundred times over.
It is following me still, even though I don’t need
rescuing so much now I am old and slow as a great
sea turtle, and my hair is as white as a Semi-Spotted
Snowpecker.
You can Cheat a Dragon’s Curse.

235

You do not have to accept the hand that Fate has
dealt you.
Look at me, the skinniest, most unlikely Viking
ever, now known as this great Hero all around the world.
Again and again, I have the same dream. Norbert the
Nutjob has thrown the axe high, high into the air, it is
turning round and round, and the black side is going to
plunge into the ground first… Bad Luck will follow and
the Tribe will be DOOMED. Again and again I make
the same leap, I dodge the bright and black murderous
blades, I catch the axe before it lands, I make my
own luck.
If none of this had happened, the potato would
still be stuck frozen on Hysteria, of no use to anybody.
Instead of which, I buried the arrow which saved my life
in some muddy ground behind my house, and, miracle
of miracles! A single seed must have been sticking to
the metal!
For some time later, in the springtime, I noticed
a strange green plant in that particular spot, and I dug
the arrow up again. A new potato, larger than the one
I lost, had grown right around the arrow’s point. From
that new potato, I grew more potatoes, and now there
are potatoes growing all over Berk and the whole of the
Barbaric Archipelago, and not a SINGLE PERSON

236

or dragon has died a terrible death from Vorpent stings
EVER SINCE.
(The potatoes are also rather delicious when
they are cooked, either mashed or just plain with a little
dollop of melted butter.)
But more importantly still, if I had never gone
on the quest for the Frozen Potato, I would never have
saved the life of my good friend Fishlegs, who, although
some people thought of him as a little weirdo, was the
best and truest friend a Viking ever—
HANG ON A SECOND.
You see how confusing all of this is.
I didn’t save the life of my good friend Fishlegs,
after all, did I? Because Fishlegs was never ill in the first
place.
I saved myself.

237

What Happens Next?

Will Norbert the Nutjob set out on a quest to go back to
America? And, indeed, does this land they call America
really exist, and is the world really a circle that has no end?

And what has happened to Alvin the Treacherous,
Hiccup’s arch-enemy, who we rather hoped had been killed
when he dropped from a hot-air balloon into a sea boiling
with ravenous Sharkworms? I can’t think how he might
have got out of that tricky situation…

But I have a nasty feeling in the pit of
my stomach that Hiccup hasn’t seen
the last of these two mad, wicked and
dangerous villains, both of whom have
sworn to kill him...

Watch out for the next volume of Hiccup’s memoirs,
How to Twist a Dragon’s Tale

1. THE HERDING-REINDEER-
ON-DRAGONBACK LESSON

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third never forgot
the day he met an Exterminator Dragon for the very first
time.
How could he?
It was one of the most terrifying experiences of
his short, adventurous life.
There he was, sitting in the middle of a circle of
fire which was getting smaller and smaller, with no way
out, and prowling through the flames, getting closer
and closer, were these sinister leopard-like shapes, the
slinking silhouettes of Exterminator Dragons sharpening
their talons and getting ready to leap –
Hang on a second.
I had better start at the beginning.
It all took place during a heatwave in August,
which was surprising, for Augusts in the Viking
territories were normally rather cool, wet affairs. But it
had been growing hotter and hotter over the course of
the summer, and as the temperatures rose, Hiccup’s
grandfather Old Wrinkly had been babbling on about
how the unexpected warmth was a terrible Omen of

Doom, and a new kind of Terror-Dragon had awoken
in the West, and would descend upon them all with Fire
and Destruction…
But unfortunately nobody really took Old
Wrinkly seriously, because he wasn’t very good at
looking into the future.

On this particular day, the sun was beating down
relentlessly on the usually soggy Isle of Berk as if it had
lost its way, and thought it was in Africa.
There was not a cloud (let alone an Exterminator
Dragon) in the sky.
Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the Third, only
son of Chief Stoick the Vast, was on the Hooligan Pirate
Training Programme on the Isle of Berk.
His teacher, Gobber the Belch, had decided
that on this particularly still, stuffy summer’s day,
when all you really wanted to do was to find a nice
tree and lie gasping underneath it, downing lots of
drinking-horns of nice cool water, it would, in fact, be
an EXCELLENT idea to hold a Herding-Reindeer-on-
Dragonback lesson.
Hiccup did not agree with
Gobber the Belch.

But Gobber the Belch had not asked Hiccup’s
opinion on the matter.
And Gobber the Belch was a six-and-a-half-foot
axe-wielding lunatic who was not the kind of teacher
you argued with.
So there they all were, all twelve pupils on the
Programme, standing in a hot, bedraggled, wilting line,
halfway up Huge Hill, swatting off the midges that were
gathering in great clouds in the still and steamy air.
There was Hiccup Horrendous Haddock the
Third, rather surprisingly the Hero of this story, for he
was extremely ordinary-looking, with bright-red hair that
shot straight up in the air whatever you did to it, and no
obvious Heroic qualities.
There was Hiccup’s best friend Fishlegs, the
only boy on the Pirate Training Programme who was
even worse at being a Viking than Hiccup was. He had
asthma, eczema, short-sight, flat-feet, knock-knees,
an allergy to reptiles, heather, and animal fur, and he
couldn’t swim. He bore a strong resemblance to a
runner-bean wearing glasses.
There was Snotface Snotlout. A delightful boy
– if you happen to like unpleasant teenagers with skull

tattoos who bully anything that moves and is smaller
than them.
There was Tuffnut Junior. A pleasure to meet –
if you happen to like meeting pimply young plug-uglies
who pick their noses, and sleep with an axe under their
pillows.
And Dogsbreath the Duhbrain, the largest,
sweatiest, and smelliest of the lot of them, had all the
grace and charm of a pig in a helmet.
There they all were, this horrid collection of
spotty Viking pre-teens, and Gobber was shouting at
them, in his usual cheery fashion.

‘RIGHT!’ yelled Gobber, the sweat pouring down
his lobster-red cheeks and into his beard, turning it as
limp and steamy as a jungle rainforest. ‘I PRESUME
YOU HAVE ALL BROUGHT YOUR HUNTING-
DRAGONS?’
They had all brought their hunting-dragons. All
except for Clueless,who really was so stupid that he
shouldn’t have been allowed out without a minder. He
had brought his hunting FLAGON, which wasn’t the
same thing at all.
But everybody else had brought their hunting-
dragons.
Most of the hunting-dragons were looking as
cross at being called out on this mission as their Masters
were, panting heavily with their forked tongues hanging
out, and swishing their tails to keep off the midges and
the flies.
Snotlout’s dragon, Fireworm, who looked a bit
like a flame-red Rottweiler with a face like a snooty
alligator, was curling dangerously around Snotlout’s legs,
wondering whether she would get in trouble if she gave
Gobber a big fat bite on his big fat hairy bottom.
If it was a big enough chomp, it might just stop
the lesson while Gobber went to the Hospital Hut…

But, reluctantly, she decided that she would get
in trouble.
Fishlegs’s dragon, Horrorcow, the only vegetarian
hunting-dragon anybody has ever heard of, had gone to
sleep in Fishlegs’s arms on the way up, and Fishlegs was
trying to hold her head up in a way that looked like she
was awake, and listening intently, because Gobber had
strong views on how everybody at the lesson really ought
to be conscious.
And all the other dragons were lounging at their
Master’s feet, or hovering limply a little way above their
Master’s heads, wishing they were somewhere else.
Hiccup’s hunting-dragon, Toothless, was by far
the smallest, a bright-green little Common-or-Garden
dragon, about the size of a naughty dachshund, or Jack
Russell terrier.
He was also the only dragon showing the same
amount of enthusiasm for this expedition as Gobber.
He was fidgeting in and out of Hiccup’s
waistcoat in a whirl of impatience, scurrying up his shirt,
his little claws tickling Hiccup’s tummy, and then up
out the collar and on to Hiccup’s head. Then he would
perch on Hiccup’s helmet, spreading his wings and
hooting in short, excitable bursts before scampering

back down Hiccup’s body again.
‘Are we s-s-starting yet? Are we s-s-starting?’
chirped Toothless. ‘When are we going to start? H-h-how
many minutes? C-c-can T-T-Toothless go first? Me! Me!
M-m-me!’
‘Calm down, Toothless,’ said Hiccup, as Toothless
accidentally stuck his claw up Hiccup’s nostril on the way
down. ‘We’ve only just got here.’ *
‘OK, BOYS, LISTEN UP!’ bellowed Gobber.
‘Herding reindeer is a lot like herding sheep, but
reindeer are bigger.’
Clueless put his hand up.
‘Which is bigger?’ asked Clueless.
‘Sheep are the round fluffy ones, and reindeers
are the larger ones with the pointy things on their heads,’
explained Fishlegs kindly.
‘Thank you, Fishlegs,’ said Gobber. ‘You
will use your hunting-dragon to round up any stray
reindeer that try to break away from the group we are
herding. It’s a chance to put into practise all that you
have learnt in your Herding Sheep lessons.’

*Hiccup was the only Hooligan who could understand Dragonese, the
language that dragons spoke to each other.

‘I don’t know how Hiccup the Useless is ever
going to be the chief of this tribe,’ sneered Snotlout,
‘when he can’t even keep control of that minuscule
microbe of a dragon of his. Look what happened last
Herding Sheep lesson.’
Toothless had lost his head on that occasion,
and single-handedly CHARGED the flock, and chased
it into the Dragon Toilets. (He claimed it was an
accident, but Hiccup had his suspicions.)
It had taken three-quarters of an hour to get
the sheep out of the Toilets, and they still stunk to high
heaven four weeks later.
‘But the main business of the herding,’
continued Gobber, ‘will be performed by YOU on your
RIDING-DRAGONS…’
‘C-c-can Toothless EAT the reindeer when he
catch them?’ squeaked Toothless.
‘NOBODY is going to be EATING any reindeer,
Toothless!’ whispered Hiccup. ‘And we’re not going to
chase them, either. This is herding, not chasing. We will
just be gently guiding the reindeer in the right direction.’
‘Oh,’ said Toothless, hugely disappointed.
‘… None of you have ridden dragons before,’
Gobber boomed, ‘and you will find it is more difficult

than you think. And therefore the dragons that
you will be riding on today are NOT YET FULLY
GROWN. This means that they will not have the
strength to carry you up into the air.’
‘Oh, Sir…’ groaned Snotlout, ‘I thought we were
going to be FLYING today.’
‘First you learn to ride,’ said Gobber, ‘and
then later, MUCH LATER, you learn to fly. You fall
off a flying dragon, Snotlout, and you will end up a
SQUASHED Viking. Which would be difficult for me
to explain to your father.’
‘Can T-T-Toothless just eat a very small one?’
asked Toothless, in a very small voice.
‘No,’ whispered Hiccup.
‘So, ON our riding-dragons, we will approach
the reindeer QUIETLY – no farting, Dogsbreath – and
we will carefully surround the herd, and see whether
we can guide it back towards Hooligan Village. Any
questions so far? Yes, Clueless?’
‘Which were the round fluffy ones again?’
asked Clueless.
Gobber sighed.
‘The round fluffy ones are the SHEEP,
Clueless, they’re the SHEEP. Now. You will find the

riding-dragons rather a lively ride. They are just over
here – WHERE ARE THE RIDING-DRAGONS?’
asked Gobber in exasperation. ‘They were supposed to
be following us.’
‘I think they’re over there, sir,’ said Fishlegs,
pointing to a small, twisted tree a little way away.
The riding-dragons were looking far from lively.
They were lying in the shade, resting their heads on their
paws, their forked tongues hanging out.
Gobber strode towards them, clapping his hands
and shouting, ‘COME ON, UP YOU GET THERE,
YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE TERRIFYING, FOR
THOR’S SAKE!’
And as the riding-dragons got to their feet, and
slunk towards their Masters through the browned and
shrivelled heather, like a pack of surly lions, Hiccup
realised something that really WAS terrifying.
Something that gave a small indication that
perhaps the day might take an unexpected turn.
The tree the riding-dragons had been sheltering
under was blasted and twisted and reduced to carbon.
All around the tree were scorch-marks. And when
Hiccup moved a little closer to investigate, he found to
his horror that the entire hillside behind had been burnt

to a cinder and turned to sooty desert.
Where once heather grew and swayed in the
wind, covered with butterflies and grasshoppers and
buzzing nanodragons, now there was only ashy stubble,
scarred across with white, stretching out across the
whole of the slope.
Only one thing could do that to a hillside, and it
wasn’t the sun, however fiercely it might shine.
It was FIRE.

www.cressidacowell.co.uk

This is Cressida, age 9, writing on the island.

Join Hiccup and his dragons on
their original misadventures!

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