Page 5 of Hansel and Gerhardt (The GriMM Tales #3)

Herr Hare Here

“ W e’ve been walking for fucking hours!” Gerhardt whined, his constant complaining having reached fever pitch.

Hansel was ready to slap him. “You’re the one who wanted to go downstream. I said to go upstream.”

“What do you know about rivers?”

“Like you know so much about it. You and your mystical ‘oceans’.”

“Oceans are real, Hansel!” He accompanied this with a very angry finger wave and a wide flare of his nostrils.

“Sure, they are,” Hansel muttered, which he shouldn’t have done, but he wasn’t immune to hunger, thirst and physical exhaustion any more than Gerhardt was.

Luckily for them both, the moment Gerhardt snapped around to yell at him was the very moment the bushes beyond Hansel’s shoulder moved.

Gerhardt stopped dead, looking like a starving man who’d just been presented with a feast. Which is exactly what he was.

His inarticulate message to keep quiet smashed loud and clear into Hansel, and he stilled just as Gerhardt had.

And there, before Gerhardt’s entranced eyes, a small puff of brown fur sniffed its way out of the leaves.

Nose twitching, little furry feet hesitant on green grass, a hare displayed itself in full in front of two ravenous stomachs.

Neither knew what to do. One false move and the creature might disappear just as magically as it had arrived.

“Is that—” Hansel whispered.

A grunty breath came from the back of Gerhardt’s throat to quiet him. Gerhardt shifted a foot backwards with excruciating care, barely moving, but with fingers digging into Hansel’s shoulder to pull him along.

The creature took a small hop towards the water’s edge, evidently looking for a drink, which doubled Gerhardt’s urgency—a few small sips, and it would be gone.

“We need to trap it,” Gerhardt whispered. “I’ll go into the forest and move around the other side—”

“The forest?” Hansel cut in. “Are you mad?”

“No, I’m hungry!”

“But that gnome thing—”

“Shh!” He hissed so sharply that the hare’s ears popped up. They waited in taut silence until the animal relaxed and moved a little closer to the water. “Then you run between the hare and the bushes. Scare it towards me.”

Hansel raised one eyebrow. “Why would it run towards you?”

“Because you’ll be terrifying, and you won’t fuck it up!” Gerhardt attempted to escape to the forest, but was caught by Hansel.

“Surely you don’t believe a hare that size, in a place like this, can be so easily fooled. Look at it. It’s huge. It’s clearly a survivor.”

With eyes that pierced straight through him, “And we’re not survivors unless you do this exactly right.” Gerhardt wrenched his shoulder away dramatically and crept off into the forest.

Hansel watched him until he’d disappeared behind a tree. He half expected him to cry out as magical vines twisted around his ankles, or when he was bitten by some cousin of that angry gnome thing.

He kept one eye on the woods, and the other on the hare.

He didn’t hear a sound for what felt like centuries, but just as he was about to try his luck in the forbidding darkness of those trees, he finally caught a flash of floppy, dark hair off to his left.

Gerhardt had come out some way from the hare, moving more stealthily than Hansel would have thought him capable of. But then, it was life or death now. Failure to catch and kill this beast could spell the end for both of them.

The animal had stretched its front paws down a small incline, and, with eyes wide open, scanning the area constantly, its fluffy cheeks and whiskers moved in rhythm with the water it sipped.

Hansel gave Gerhardt a small nod, Gerhardt returned it, and Hansel ran.

He dashed in front of the bush, just as Gerhardt had told him to, but the hare was fast. At the first flash of its predator, it was around and dashing for cover.

Hansel leapt, but missed it. It dodged straight past his ankle and half disappeared into the bush.

But Gerhardt was quicker still. He crashed down on the grass, his shoulder hitting the ground with such force it made Hansel wince, yet his fingers grasped the hind leg of the animal, and struggle as it might, he wasn’t about to let go for all the world.

Hansel dropped down on top of the hare and snaffled it up in his arms. The hind legs beat against his empty belly, claws scratching at his arms, but he held tight until he heard the words, loud and clear, straight from the animal’s mouth: “Set me free this instant!”

By instinct, Hansel flung the creature away from himself.

It flopped down on the ground with an angry look at Hansel such as Hansel hadn’t thought any hare capable of conjuring, but both his surprise and the creature’s ire were short-lived.

Gerhardt’s arms snapped an inescapable prison around the animal.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Gerhardt yelled up at Hansel.

Hansel’s trembling finger extended towards his bounty. “It spoke. You heard that, didn’t you? It spoke!”

And if Gerhardt was about to deny the possibility that his lunch was sentient—nae, intelligent—he never got the chance, for the thing cried out loud, “Of course I spoke! I don’t want to be hare-napped. What is it you want with me?”

“Oh, dear lord!” Hansel cried, thrusting two full hands finger-deep into his stormy red locks.

Gerhardt, whose mind was reeling from both the strangeness of the predicament and Hansel’s clearly growing panic, only held tight to the animal.

But, “I just wanted a drink!” the hare wailed. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“I’m sorry,” said Hansel, dropping to his knees to meet the animal eye-to-eye. “Only, do you know where we could find some food?”

“Don’t talk to it, Hansel!” Gerhardt yelled, pulling it away. “It is the bloody food!”

“Food?” the thing wept, and who knew hares could weep? “ Food ? You intend to eat me?”

Gerhardt redoubled his grip as the hare kicked desperately at him.

“What did you tell him that for?” Hansel shouted. “The poor thing. It hardly needed to know.”

“Get a rock and kill it,” Gerhardt replied, avoiding Hansel’s gaze.

“No!” screamed the hare.

“No!” yelled Hansel. “It’s a speaking hare! It speaks, and it thinks. We can’t kill it. That makes us no better than cannibals!”

Fingers digging into the writhing soft pelt, teeth gritting over the words, “And just what is wrong with being a cannibal? If this creature can think and speak as well as us, then it knows the pain of starvation—of looking death in the eye every single day. And I’m not going to do it another minute. I’m getting out. We’re getting out!”

“I won’t help you,” Hansel declared, moving away from them both. “I don’t think you should do this.”

Gerhardt thought to break the neck of the hare right then and there. His stomach screamed for it, aching like he’d swallowed broken glass. He pulled his fingers against the throat, he tightened them, and that soft fur, the warm pulse beneath his fingers…

The act sickened him, even in his urgency.

He scanned the area for a rock. A big one.

Something that would make it fast, even if it would still be a horror.

It wasn’t as though he hadn’t eaten meat, nor as though he hadn’t killed chickens, winters ago, before the Great Famine took hold in his part of the world, before all the animals disappeared and the crops died.

But this felt wrong. Not only the voice in the animal’s throat, but the scrabbling desperation of the act.

Him, on the ground, lost in the forest, about to destroy an intelligent animal with his bare hands. No better than a wolf.

Yet he didn’t let go. He couldn’t. It was this or death, and not just for him, for Hansel, too. He needed to do it. He needed to be strong for Hansel, because Hansel wasn’t strong like that.

He clambered to his feet, taking the hare up with him. “I’m going to kill it. I am going to kill it, and I’d appreciate if you didn’t make me feel bad for doing it.”

“What did I ever do to you?” the hare sobbed.

Hansel swivelled around, placing two hands on Gerhardt’s arms. “Not this one. We’ll find something. This one is clearly magical—”

“You don’t know that,” Gerhardt returned, ridiculously.

Placing a hand on the hare’s twitching ears, Hansel asked it, “Are you magical?”

The pink nose popped up over Gerhardt’s forearm. “Yes! Yes, I’m very magical. And if you don’t put me down right now, you’ll regret it. I shall rain wrath down upon you, such as you’ve never—”

Gerhardt’s hand smothered the furry face.

“You would say that.” His eyes snapped up to Hansel.

“It would say that! It doesn’t want to die, any more than I want to kill it.

” He reeled away, making for the water’s edge, intent on drowning the animal, speaking to it over the muffled squeaks and pleas.

“Don’t take it personally. It’s a matter of survival.

It’s me or you, and it’s Hansel too. So that makes two lives in exchange for one, and that’s a fair deal. ”

Hansel bolted after him. “I think this is a very bad idea. I think if you do this, we’re both going to regret it.”

“You and your ridiculous superstitions, Hansel!”

“You’re the one who believes in oceans!”

“Oceans are real!”

“I’m just saying.” He pulled Gerhardt to a stop. “There are magical lights in that forest. There are magical vines, and magical gnomes, and this is a magical hare. And-and-and…” He threw his hands up. “How are you going to cook it?”

Gerhardt stilled, deep down grasping at this late stay of execution. “What?”

The whiskers flickered over his hand. “That’s right. You’ll need to cook me. I’m absolutely riddled with fleas and lice and ticks.”

“I’ll skin you well enough,” Gerhardt replied.

He took another step towards the water, but the hare screeched. “I’m sick! My joints ache all over. I threw up three times yesterday. Oh, but if you kill me now, you’ll be doing me a mercy to make it fast. But not drowning. What a horrible way to go. Have mercy!”

“The hare’s right,” said Hansel, ignoring the comments about the horror of drowning, focusing on the hare’s claim it was sick. “I once heard about a man who ate raw hare. He had a fever for a week. Almost died. Couldn’t leave his bed for months.”

“And did father tell you this tale while you were preparing his hare for dinner?” Gerhardt asked.

“No,” Hansel lied. “No, I believe I’ve heard it from several sources.”

There were no ‘several sources’ in his poor brother’s life, but Gerhardt let this go, both out of sympathy for his lonely condition, and mostly because he genuinely did not want to drown the hare in the river, then tear into its raw flesh with his bare teeth.

Hungry as he was. “Fine. Fine. I’ll let it live.

But just until we find a way to cook it. ”

Gerhardt hated the relieved smile that lit Hansel’s face so immediately. He hated to see the hope there.

“I’m sure there will be another hare,” Hansel tried. “A less talkative one. We could just leave this one here—”

“Oh, really?” Gerhardt’s head dropped to the side. “And when was the last time you saw a hare?”

“When was the last time you saw a killer gnome?” Hansel countered. “The Dark Forest is different from our part of the woods. Perhaps it’s full of life.”

On a scoff, Gerhardt muttered, “Then why was that gnome so desperate to eat us?”

The stark words brought Hansel’s eyes down to the helpless animal, and his hungry stomach sank.

Gerhardt was right.

This hare probably was their only means of survival.

“Okay,” Hansel said. “Let’s take it with us. But if we don’t find a means to cook it soon, then the game’s up, anyway.”

“Very well.” Gerhardt glared down at the hare. “You’re coming with us.”