The threesome followed the rest of the class out into the chill of the day, hunching their shoulders against the steady wind and blowing, stinging wraiths of snow. Hagrid’s hut was barely a mound of drifts, with only one window and the chimney visible, its smoke tattering in the wind.
“We should go check on Hagrid after class,” Rose called into the wind, speaking James’ thoughts. He nodded in agreement. Ralph would come along as much for one of Hagrid’s mugs of hot tea and huge misshapen gingerbread cookies as for the visit, but he, James knew, was also curious about whatever was occupying their old friend.
The next hour was a smelly and unhappy affair, partly because the stalls and cages of the barn represented a daunting duty under any circumstance, and partly because Argus Filch enjoyed making every task as painstakingly fussy and difficult as possible. He ambled from corner to corner, stall to stall, clucking his tongue in righteous indignation at the unsatisfactory progress he encountered at every turn. He did little work himself, apart from when he yanked a broom or pitchfork from a students’ hand to impatiently show how it was properly used, clearly wishing to use the instrument as a rod of punishment instead.
James endured one such demonstration, accepting the brush back from the caretaker with a tight frown and watching Filch’s back as he stumped away, fuming gleefully.
“It’s not like anybody’s going to be eating out of this thing,” he muttered, reaching inside one of the cages and resuming the awkward task of scrubbing its interior.
“Well,” Ralph said, grunting with his own arm crooked into a cage, scrubbing its mesh ceiling, “something will probably end up eating out of it, eh?”
“Wargles don’t count,” James replied. “They lick their own nethers. I don’t think they give a care about ‘the excrement tarred into the crevices’.”
Ralph merely shrugged as much as his awkward posture allowed.
James knew that Ralph, as Head Boy, felt a constant pressure not to criticize even the most odious of the Hogwarts staff. James felt no such pressure, of course, and found Ralph’s clumsy discretion grating, at best.
By the time they finished and stepped back outside, weary and smelling of moldy hay and innumerable flavors of beast dung, the sky had grown dark and leaden, whether with early evening or another impending snowfall no one could tell. The tracks of their earlier footprints were already half consumed by the blowing snow, which shone slate blue in the gloom. Hagrid’s hut, however, glowed from its single visible window with buttery lamplight and the flicker of the hearth. They angled toward it, not attempting to speak over the wind that buffeted across the drifts, blasting them with ice crystals.
The door of Hagrid’s hut creaked swiftly open even before they reached it, letting out a push of deliciously warm air and firelight.
Hagrid stood framed in the door, half lit by the interior behind him, half by the blue evening gloom, his breath pluming huge clouds into the wind.
“S’about time yeh three showed up at my door,” he called out with such sudden impatience that James nearly stopped in his tracks.
“What yeh waitin’ for? No sense pretendin’ I didn’t know yeh was gonna come out and check on dim ol’ Hagrid, with his silly umbreller wand and hardly enough wits t’ read a simple letter. Come in, come in…”
He stepped back from the door and waved a slab-like hand into the warm clutter of his hut. James shrugged and tromped inside, doing his best to shake the snow from his shoes onto the mat. Ralph and Rose crammed in behind him, shrugging out of their coats and shaking snowflakes from their hair. Hagrid swung the door shut with a firm slam and shot the bolt before stumping back across the small living space and standing near his table.
The interior of Hagrid’s hut hadn’t changed much over the years. It was still a comfortable shamble of miss-matched, oversized furniture, bare wooden floors, and dusty rafters hung with all manner of baskets, nets, and traps. Trife, Hagrid’s old bullmastiff dog, twined happily around the three students, snuffling their hands with his wet nose and nearly knocking them over with his excited greeting. The hearth roared, making the room almost uncomfortably hot, so that James immediately flung his coat onto a nearby bureau, which was already weighed down with nested pots and cauldrons. Hagrid merely glanced back and forth from the new arrivals to the huge green book open on the table, propped before a lantern. A mostly empty iron tankard of butterbeer sat next to it, and James could tell that it hadn’t been Hagrid’s first of the evening.
Rose spoke for all of them when she asked, “Are you all right, Hagrid?”
“Oh, Rosie,” Hagrid cried, raising both of his hands to his face with such a sudden shift of mood that James was again taken aback.
Hagrid folded backwards onto one of his kitchen chairs, which chalked a few inches backwards in alarm. “Oh, Rosie! Yeh remind me so much o’ yer mum. That’s ‘ow I knew yeh three would come. Cuz they would’a.
Ron and Hermione and Harry. They did, yeh know. They came t’ see me back when Norberta was just a wee egg, not even ‘atched. Did I ever tell yeh that story?”
“Only about a thousand times,” James said, not unkindly, moving to join Hagrid at the table. The normal clutter of wooden plates, cheese rinds, and tea mugs had been pushed back in an untidy jumble by the enormous, musty-smelling book. “What is all this, Hagrid?”
“It’s a letter from Grawpie, s’what it is!” Hagrid sniffed hugely, half embarrassed, half exasperated, and lifted the front cover of the green book momentarily, revealing a huge, heavy parchment unrolled beneath it. “An’ I can barely read the blasted thing! I see the symbols fer dragon, which can only mean Norberta. And a few other symbols that are worryin’, t’ say th’ least. But th’ rest is complete gibb’rish to me. I was never partic’ly good at Giantish, and it’s been so many years, I’m nearly useless. Can’t even read a letter from my own dear brother an’ his byootiful bride!” A fat tear trembled and ran down the side of Hagrid’s nose. He swiped it away with a callused thumb.
Ralph shouldered closer to the table and lifted the cover of the green book again, closing it to reveal the letter beneath. “Can’t be that hard, can it? I mean, Giantish is a language made up of, like, cave drawings and stuff. Stick figures and arrows and hands with not enough fingers…”