An Unexpected Journey? You Better Believe It!

A Troll Cave, Sign Language, and King Arthur

Thorin glared at Gandalf, trying valiantly to ignore the giggles that Jael was no longer muffling. "Where were you?"

"Looking ahead."

Jael stole the next classic line, unable to help herself, "And what brought you back?" The smile on her face negated the normally annoyed line.

He smiled back at her, slyly, "Looking behind."

Before Thorin and the other dwarves could get into an argument with Gandalf, he reminded them that the trolls should have had a treasure cave somewhere nearby.

That diverted all the dwarves' attention from him, and they began to cast about for where the trolls could have possibly come from. It wasn't long before they found the first footprint that led up the side of the mountain to a cave with a locked door.

No amount of pushing by the dwarves allowed them in, and it wasn't until Bilbo presented a key, that might have been small and secretive for a troll, but was quite big for a hobbit, that they finally managed to get the door open.

Jael had read about the horrible smell in the cave, and she had smelled quite a few decaying animal corpses on her hunting trips so she'd thought she'd been prepared for the smell that would assault her senses. She wasn't.

It felt as if someone had dumped a rotting corpse in a eight-day-old diaper, bathed it in skunk spray, and then smacked her in the face with it.

She and her dogs ran from the cave opening. She had no interest in anything that could be found in a cave that smelt that horrible. She took deep breaths in the fresh mountain air, trying to avoid throwing up. Her dogs could not stop sneezing. Apparently, the horrible smell had been too much for them as well.

How are they managing to walk into that cave without puking?! Is that what happens the longer you're here? Your sense of smell disappears??!!

When Gandalf came out, bringing a dagger with him, Jael almost refused it. But, after he forced it into to her hand, turning away to head back into the cave to find some more things, she took a discreet sniff, and was relieved that the binding on the hilt did not smell like the cave.

Although she did have a knife, she did not want to blunt it using it on any of the...enemies that they'd be likely to meet on this journey. So it was nice that she now had a different weapon to use in case she ran out of arrows.

When the dwarves began to drag out food and ale from the trolls cave, intending on eating because they were hungry, she almost revolted. What is it with men and being willing to eat anything that's been in the cave? I so hoped that they wouldn't do that.

While they cooked that, she headed into the woods, hunting down something to eat that hadn't been in the cave with the trolls. She finally came across a small rabbit, and she shot it. She brought it back, skinning it and cleaning it, giving the offal to her pets while she cooked the rest of it.

Once she'd finished eating, she gave the rest to her dogs and quickly buried the bones. After that, they all slept because they had gotten no sleep the night before. Only when the afternoon was advanced did they begin moving again.

Although they had begun to feel the danger, and there were no more stories or songs, that didn't stop Jael from keeping the sign language for dummies book open, trying desperately to learn sign language so that she could communicate with Bifur, who, because of the axe to his head, could only speak the dwarvish tongue or use the dwarvish sign language that they had invented to combat the loud sounds of mining ore.

Once she was sure that she knew a few signs by heart, she rode over to Bofur and Bifur. "Um, I noticed that you only speak dwarvish, and then I saw you making signs with your hands? I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't be able to learn that since it counts as the dwarvish language?"