Chapter 7

“Are you sure you know where we’re going?” Pippin asked for the third time.

“Of course I do,” Merry stated, somewhat worriedly. “Look, I’ve seen that bush before.”

“We just passed that bush two minutes ago,” Pippin pointed out and the cousins fell silent.

After they had chased each other for a good click, Merry finally caught up and tackled Pippin to the ground for a tickle attack. When Pippin admitted defeat, Merry helped his cousin up and the two began to make their way back to camp. That had been nearly an hour before and they were still walking about aimlessly.

Merry frowned and tried to remember how many turns he had taken before finding the rock, though what good that would do him, he wasn’t certain for he had now lost the rock as well. He noted with consternation that Pippin had also lost his handkerchief and was scratching at his cut again. Merry reached out and gently took Pippin’s hand in his own. “Don’t do that,” he chided softly.

“But it itches, and I think it’s getting worse,” Pippin complained.

“Of course it is. You keep scratching at it,” Merry pointed out. “It’s going to get infected. Leave it alone.”

They walked on in silence, until Pippin looked up through the treetops and pointed excitedly. “Look! We can see the sun!”

“What of it?” Merry asked, wondering how that was good news. The sun only added more heat to the already blistering day, and Pippin’s comment reminded Merry sharply of how thirsty he was. He wiped agitatedly at his brow, moping up the sweat with his soaked handkerchief.

“We can watch the sun’s path,” Pippin explained. “It will tell us west to east, and from that we can figure north to south.”

“Yes, but we still have no idea where we are.”

“We know we camped near the path, and we left camp this morning to the west. So, if we can find east and go that way…”

“We’ll find the path,” Merry finished with a grin. He squinted up at the sun and held his thumb up to cover the yellow orb. A few minutes passed, and the sun peaked out on the left side of his thumb. “We’re to the south, and east is that way,” he said and pointed to his right. “Let’s go then.”  

“They don’t seem to have come this way,” Frodo said, his concern growing. All of Sam’s tales finally came to life in his mind and he could only imagine Merry and Pippin being swallowed up by some bog, never to be seen again. What a cruel way to be proven wrong!

“They’re probably already back at camp, sir, and wondering where we are,” Sam reasoned. “We best be getting back as well, and search for some water if we can.”

“Yes, you’re most likely right,” Frodo said and sighed. “If they are there, I’m going to strangle them.”

Sam gave a soft chuckle, and fell into step behind his master. He kept his eyes peeled for any signs of his master’s cousins, a stream or even those one-of-a-kind flowers Mr. Frodo had promised him. He noticed a fair number of geraniums and crocus, elderberry and juniper bushes, as well as bushes that carried poisonous seeds upon them, tempting but deadly. He saw numerous hawthorn shrubs and reckoned that was what Master Pippin had smarted his hand against the day before. Buttercup daisies, lavender, ivy, roses.

He let out a gasp when he saw the roses, in colors and sizes he had never seen before. Nearly twice the size of his hand and in colors that matched the sunset, all on one bud. He left his master’s side and went to inspect the flowers with earnest. He touched the delicate petals, silky soft, and imagined plucking that flower and placing it behind his Rosie’s ear. Oh, but he would never pick such a flower, nor ever be bold enough to make such a move on the lovely Cotton lass, but the image it planted in his mind was real, so real he almost thought it had already happened.

“They’re lovely aren’t they?” Frodo said, coming to stand beside his gardener. “Those would look wonderful in front of the study, don’t you think?”

Sam nodded in a trance. “They would at that and along the walk path besides.” He knelt down and raked his fingers through the topsoil, picking out as many seeds as he could find. He placed the seeds carefully in his left breeches pocket and stood back to stare at the roses some more.

“Come along, lad, maybe we’ll see other blossoms you can feast your eyes with,” Frodo offered and gave a slight tug on Sam’s sleeve. If he let him, Sam would stand here all day and they would never find Merry and Pippin.

Sam followed with reluctance, and cast one final glance back at the dazzling roses. He would have to plant the seeds as soon as the seasons would allow. Beauty like that shouldn’t be hidden away where no one could see it, as far as he was concerned.  

Merry and Pippin’s eastward progress was cut short when they came upon a large wall of impenetrable brush, covered with more of the prickly thorns that had cut Pippin’s hand the day before. The wall extended a great distance in either direction from what they could see of it, and there was no way to crawl underneath or climb over it.

Pippin’s shoulders slumped in discouragement and he sat upon the ground against a tree with his knees tucked in under his chin. He waited for Merry to think of something and he was not disappointed.

Merry stared intently at the wall, studying it with great scrutiny. This wall was taller than all the others they had seen thus far and actually reminded him of the Hedge that protected the eastern borders of Buckland. He brought up images of Bilbo’s maps in his mind’s eye and went through them one by one. The maps of Bindbole had been frustratingly lacking in detail – not even the energetic, adventurous Bilbo had seen cause to explore the old, forgotten paths of years gone by – but the main trail itself was drawn quite accurately and Merry thought he knew where they were at last.

“I think this is the hedge that runs alongside the path for a spell,” Merry said excitedly. “Which means the path is just on the other side.”

“Well that’s good news,” Pippin replied and stood up again. “Now how do we get over there? Climb a tree and jump over?”

“No, certainly not,” Merry said. “But climbing a tree should help us see if my guess is correct.”

“I’ll do it!” Pippin exclaimed, excited now also. If there was one thing he loved to do, besides all of the other things he loved to do, it was tree-climbing. He found that the tree he had previously been sitting against was perfect for climbing and instantly began pulling himself up into the branches while Merry waited on the ground – in case Pippin fell, he told himself.

“Do you see anything?” Merry called up after a time, when the branches stopped moving.

“Look Merry!” Pippin called down. “There’s a nest of squirrels in this tree! Oh, and there’s little baby squirrels! Do you see?”

“Of course I don’t,” Merry called back up. “Now turn yourself around and tell me if you see the path.”

The branches quivered back and forth slightly and a light shower of leaves fell upon Merry’s head. There was a short pause, followed by more quivering branches and a frantic shower of leaves.

“Pippin, be careful!” Merry warned, fearing his cousin must be jumping up and down.

Pippin wasn’t exactly jumping. He would say he was bouncing, but it was quite correct that he was not being as careful as he should be. At Merry’s warning, he calmed himself down and scrambled out of the tree to deliver the good news he had seen.

“The path is indeed on the other side,” Pippin declared once his feet were firmly upon the ground. “More than that, this hedge ends just around that bend and if I’m not quite mistaken, I believe I spied smoke from our campfire not much farther off from that. We’ve a mile to go is my guess, and about time I say. I’m starving! I can’t wait to eat.”

“Unless of course Sam tells you not to eat,” Merry ventured, instantly ceasing upon the chance to get to the bottom of this mystery.

Pippin only shrugged and trotted off, following the hedge as it dipped south. “Sam would never be that mean,” he stated and smiled sweetly at Merry.

“Come now, Pippin,” Merry said, near to pleading now. “Why won’t you just tell me? I won’t tell anyone else, you know I won’t.”

“I would tell you if there were anything to tell, but there is nothing to tell, which I keep trying to tell you, but you won’t listen, so why should I tell?”

“Will you at least attempt to make sense?” Merry asked grudgingly.

Pippin smirked. “Sorry. Was I flaunting my intelligence again?”

Merry laughed despite himself. No matter how much Pippin might irritate him at times, he could always get Merry to laugh. “You scamp! Keep your secrets then, but I will find out what it is, one way or another,” he declared.

Pippin made no comment, but he delivered one more beaming smile before skipping ahead, humming under his breath. He could taste the food already and he only hoped Sam was as insistent on saving food for him and Merry as he was when it came to Frodo.  

“They’re still not back,” Frodo said when he and Sam returned to camp and found it exactly as they had left it. “What could be taking them so long? Are you certain they were just gathering firewood?”

Sam shrugged and fiddled nervously with his shirt buttons. He hated seeing his master so distressed and assuming the worst, and no doubt blaming Mr. Merry and Master Pippin for running off so recklessly. If anyone was to blame for the current situation, it was Sam alone. Mr. Merry had extended the hand of friendship and Sam had hastily batted it away.

Sam sat down by the cooling timbers and poked them to start a fresh blaze, more to give him something to do than for need of a fire. The noon sun was directly above them, battering its unforgiving rays down through the trees and into their camp. Frodo sat down next to him and mindlessly fanned himself, watching the small tongues of flame dancing about.

“I brought my cousins into Bindbole and now they’ve been eaten by hobbit-devouring bogs,” he said woefully. “What are their parents going to say?”

“I think it’s more likely they just went off to talk, sir,” Sam said at last.

“What could they talk about that would keep them away from food for this long?” Frodo asked, and not without reason. There was nothing so important to any hobbit that it couldn’t wait for discussion until after a proper meal.

“I think, sir,” Sam started quietly, “that Mr. Merry may have wanted to talk to Master Pippin about me.”

This statement caught Frodo completely off guard. He looked at Sam, baffled to say the least, and simply waited for further explanation.

Sam took his time building himself up. He thought he knew already what Mr. Frodo would say once he explained everything and he wanted to make sure he had a response ready.

Frodo allowed his gardener the time he needed, sensing that Sam had something important to say. He mindfully kept his own nervous fidgeting to a minimum. No good would come of rushing Sam, he knew, so he forced himself to stop worrying for a few minutes at least and focus on his friend.

At length, Sam took a deep breath and said, “Mr. Merry and me had some words this morning afore Master Pippin woke up. Seems Mr. Merry want us to be friends again.”

“Oh that’s wonderful,” Frodo exclaimed, delighted with the news, but he quickly became confused about Sam’s somber mood. “You don’t agree?”

Sam hung his head. This was the reaction he had expected. And now came the hard part. “It’s not that I don’t agree, sir, it’s just that we can’t be friends.”

Now came the crinkled brow and the displeased frown. “Why not? You used to enjoy being friends with Merry when you were younger.”

“I did, until… But it was different then.”

“Different how?” Frodo asked.

Sam shook his head, trying to sort out his thoughts, not daring to meet his master’s gaze. Mr. Merry and Master Pippin were wrong to fear Mr. Frodo’s angry glare; his look of disappointment was a hundred times worse. “We were just kids then, for starters, and I imagine any distraction as kept me out of my dad’s hair when he was too busy to learn me about the garden was welcome to him. It put him in a bit of fix though, what with him always telling me not to get above myself or go bothering my betters, and off he sends me up to Bag End to play about. Left me confused most times, but he made it clear in no uncertain terms when I got older that I had to put such privileges behind me and get on with being a simple gardener. And I’ve done that, for the most part.”

“I still don’t see why that means you can’t be friends with Merry now,” Frodo stated.

“A little bit of mischief is to be expected when you're younger, but I'm too old for such things now,” Sam replied. “We can’t be friends, not like he’s wanting to be. That’s just the way of things, sir.”

“Things are the way you make them, Sam,” Frodo said.

Frodo wanted the four of them to be close, for Sam to feel comfortable in their company. That had been another reason for inviting Sam along. Only at the time, he had thought the biggest obstacle would be getting Merry and Pippin to see Sam as more than just a gardener and start appreciating him as an individual. His cousins liked Sam of course, they always had, but as they got older, they slipped more and more into seeing all hobbits who worked with their hands as servants in one form or another. They were hardly what anyone would consider snobs, far from it, but it was a natural development in thinking when one lived in Brandy Hall and Great Smials, or even Whitwell. Even Frodo had to break himself of the habit when he first moved to Hobbiton.

He had assumed that Sam would be reluctant of the notion, but he had not expected his gardener to put the brakes on so completely. Sam was naturally cautious of change, but as he and Merry had been playmates once, Frodo had thought that Sam would warm up to being friends with Merry again rather quickly. Now it seemed that Sam was determined to do just the opposite.

“Sam, just because your father says that’s how things are, doesn’t make them so,” Frodo tried again.

Sam shook his head. “Begging your pardon sir, but this has naught to do with him. Some things just are the way they are, and you can’t go changing them on a whim. It’s why some flowers can bloom for months without a single drop of water and why others wither up if you don’t feed them everyday. It’s why some plants need sun to grow, and why others wilt if they don’t get enough shade. It’s why the sun always rises in the east, and why the moon goes about its cycles. It’s just the nature of things. I’m common folk, he’s gentry; we can’t be friends.”

“But you and I are friends,” Frodo stressed, trying for a different approach.

“You’ve lost your parents, and I’ve lost my ma,” Sam answered sadly. “We’ve got something in common, see? Something that goes beyond everything else. What have Mr. Merry and I got in common?”

Frodo had no answer and so he joined Sam in staring mutely at the fire. He knew Sam was speaking the truth. He knew it was easier for Merry to declare friendship with Sam than it was for Sam to do likewise. There would be talk of Sam getting above himself, and not just from the Gaffer. There was a reason Hamfast stuck so strictly to his boundaries and insisted that his children do likewise. As Sam said, it was just the nature of things, and he remembered sorely what had happened the last time those two natures had clashed on that long ago Harvest night. Frodo knew all this, but he did not agree with it. Yet how could he change it? How could he alone change anything?

Before he could wonder too long on that strand of thought, something came pounding into camp, dropping next to the nearly dead fire across from them. Sam and Frodo looked up, startled out of their reveries, and into the grinning, sweating, panting face of Peregrin Took.

Frodo smiled with relief but instantly asked, “Where’s Merry?”

“Coming along. The poor lad’s getting slow in his old age,” Pippin answered and looked about eagerly. “So, where’s the food?”
 
 
 

To be continued…