Hah and Grr: A Retelling of Hansel and Gretel Read online

  Part 2: The Gingerbread Cottage

  Grr hunkered at the base of a tree and shivered. Today, her stomach growled as loudly as Mother could when Grr did something wrong. She wished Mother were here, now. Hah was doing something bad and Grr was too small to stop him.

  She wished she had Father's bulk, or Mother's bark, or one of her sibling's sharp teeth. She would grab Hah by the neck and shake him till he went limp so that when she dropped him he would show her his belly. Instead, she leaned uneasily against the bark of a tree, watching while her brother sniffed his way around thinning bushes - while he skulked closer and closer to a forbidden place: a den of Man.

  She growled - small, little belly growls that showed her displeasure. She let one bubble up every time Hah lifted his head above the bushes. He glanced at her but ignored the warnings. Prowling on all fours, he was fixed on a hunt for the source of the smell that had drawn them both there. The smell was the reason she had followed him this far, instead of running away when the trees thinned and their paws found easy purchase on a soft path that signalled Man. She was hungry, and she smelled something that made her mouth water more than bloody meat or raw greens - something new. Something wonderful.

  The pack had run to hunt, and Hah and Grr had been left behind as they always were because their feet were not as fleet as those of their pack-mates. Usually, by the time they tracked the others, the kill was made and they ate whatever remained once everyone else had feasted, or whatever Mother or one of their siblings might tear off and toss their way. But today, as they were sloping their way through the forest in the pack's wake, following their spoor, Hah's head had lifted and turned. That smell had drifted to them both upon the wind that blew through the trees. Grr had followed Hah readily enough; they were side-by-side in their eager pacing, and Hah had marked the path with droppings so they could sniff their way back to the pack.

  It was only when Grr realised that they were in the territory of Man that she had flinched, scampered backwards, cringed away, nipped at Hah to draw him back, but the smell called to him like the squeak of a wounded hare, and Grr, whimpering with fear, glancing back the whole way, had followed.

  Only once before had Grr seen Man, a creature that walked on two legs and stood tall in the forest, taller than any but Bear. Unlike Bear, Man never dropped to all paws. He was tall at all moments, and ran far fleeter than Grr ever could. He could remove his fur, and he carried a stick that spit out sharp claws that killed from a distance. Mother had been with Grr that day. Mother had jumped on Grr and held her down, down and still, while Man hunted the deer Mother had been following. Both had watched as Man had killed Deer with his stick then bent and thrown the meat about his shoulders to carry it away. His face was flat, in a way that reminded Grr curiously of Hah, but that semblance was forgotten when she saw Man's eyes. They were like the eyes of the snake or the raven, alien and sharp. Only when Mother licked her neck did Grr move. Now she trembled to think that she might see such a creature again! Or worse - it might see her and Hah and sting them with its flying claw.

  When Hah bolted through the bushes, Grr wailed and rushed forward to the leaves that shook in his wake. She peeked through the branches as her brother scampered unevenly towards the strange place the smell was coming from - a place where trees had been shaped with mud and stone to form a den above the earth. An acrid smell was pouring from a long spoke at the apex. Grr watched the curling grey mist and moaned, grinding her teeth.

  "Hah!" she barked around the leaves, staring after him. "Hah!" she whined pitifully. Hah turned his head to look at her but kept loping towards the den. It had a hole high up in its side and Grr saw him use the den's wall to balance his forepaws as he came up on his hind legs, looking inside. Craning her neck, Grr could see there was something on a ledge poking out from the hole.

  "Grr!" Hah growled. "Grr!" A snap.

  Haunches low, she reluctantly stole out from behind the bushes and slunk across the ground to his side. He was sniffing intently at the ledge above them, and Grr came up awkwardly on her hind legs to join him. This was where the smell was emanating from, this ledge. Odd-shaped objects were scattered across it. They did not look like food but they smelled delicious.

  Abruptly, Hah took one of the small brown things into his mouth and, dropping to his haunches, chewed, salivating. His wide, awed eyes astonished Grr, so she snatched up a brown thing, too, and dropped to her paws, chewing quickly. Her senses sang as she ate. Never had anything tasted like this. By unspoken agreement, she and Hah ate more of the brown food, until it was all gone, then Grr gripped a larger, log-shaped object in her mouth and Hah bit into a wide, round thing that smelled like apples. Grr scampered rapidly back to the bushes with the scavenged meal. There she hunkered down, chewing at the edge of the log. She looked back for Hah, but he was still at the hole in the den. The round thing had broken from his mouth and lay smattered on the ground. He was making pleased munching sounds as he licked at it. Since it could not be carried away, Grr scurried back to help him eat it.

  Absorbed in the new sensations of this feast, neither smelled the approach of warm, living flesh. Neither felt another's gaze - until they heard a high-pitched scream. Then they looked up, into the terrified eyes of a creature as different as could be to the first Man Grr had seen, and yet she knew it was still Man, for it stood on its hind-legs and wore oddly-coloured furs. It seemed much older and smelled different, and the look in its eyes, although unsettling, was not the same. Hah growled at it, but when Grr took off, he followed her. Grr snatched up the log-thing from the bushes as they passed and then they ran, far into the woods. When they stopped, Grr was noisily sick. Hah came and licked her face then ate the log she had dropped onto the leaves. Grr recovered enough to snatch the last part before it was all gone.

  Then they sniffed about for Hah's dung, but the trail was lost. When dark came, they lay close on the forest floor, missing the pack's thick fur and warm backs and bellies. At dawn, they sniffed about more energetically and Grr had just found the faint scent of Father when she heard Hah howl for her. She found him panting, staring in the opposite direction from which she had come, his eyes fixed and blank, like one of their siblings stalking Deer. She smelled it then, too, and her mouth filled with wet hunger. She glanced back down the trail towards the promise of Father and the pack, but the anticipation of more succulent food was overwhelming, so she and Hah followed their noses through the woods, Hah marking their trail with urine as they went.

  They hid in the bushes for barely a moment this time before breaking out and scampering to the hole. Grr clambered up so that her forepaws rested on the ledge, but there was no food to be found upon it. Hah joined her and together they peered over the ledge into a strange space. It was much, much bigger than a usual den and there were no pups and the space was stacked with parts of trees and other strange items. Hah's busy eyes scanned the room, stilling on the creature that bent over a large rock at the bottom of a stone tree trunk. It was the Man who had screamed the day before, the one with the terrified eyes. Hah and Grr looked at each other then dropped to all paws.

  They padded around the corner of the house, sniffing loudly. There was no other den near this Man-place in the woods. The nearest spiralling grey mist was some leagues distant. Hah and Grr exchanged glances. Together, it was decided that the Man within was no real threat, for it had been scared of them, and they wanted more of the food they smelled. So they sniffed their way to another hole in the den, this one at paw-level. Cautious, Hah shuffled his way inside and Grr followed.

  The food was in another space, laid out on a long, low rock covered in furs. Grr and Hah rushed for it, growling and panting. It was only when their messy feast was done and they had licked each other's faces and twisted about to depart that they found that they were trapped. The way back out now had a flat tree trunk blocking it - and in the top half of that trunk was a small hole, through which Man was staring at them, its eyes no longer terrified but horrified and wondering
. Hah pitched himself against the flat tree, barking, and Grr put back her head and howled. She flung herself about the small enclosed space, desperate to get out, to get through - back to the woods, to the sky, to the earth beneath her paws.

  The small hole through which Man watched them snapped closed and, although the wood wobbled when Hah and Grr hurled themselves against it together, it would not move. Finally they lay down, whining and panting, licking their grazes, and lapsed into sleep.