Welcome to another adventure from the Thousand Acre Woods deep within Trollheim of the NJ Pine Belt! Tales Chronicled by Jonathan Hulton... This week Gramps tells me how the Nattrolls were captured and brought to the Swedish Colony as slaves; oh and his encounter with a giant.

I was sitting with Gramps around the campfire on Duckspond's white sand beach. The pond is one of two on the Davenport Branch of the TomsRiver.

"It's the first time I ever met a Muhwe last night." Gramps said nonchalantly while poking his stick in the fire.

"A Muhwe!" I yelled, a bit surprised and even scared that one actually existed. Muhwe are mythological Lenni Lenape cannibalistic giants.

I'm going to have to carry some cooked corn with me now. They return to normal if you would only smile and feed them.

"Where was he?" I asked. I was amazed he was still captivated by the fire and not with what he just shared with me.

"Come on, boy," he said, shaking his head at me, "he wasn't that big. I had some of Helgi's cinnamon, sugar, and butter lefse wraps on me.

"We sat, and he recounted his tragedy—I cut him short, no need to turn him into an energy vampire—and I asked him about his tribal history. Quite interesting folks. I learned a lot about the tribe before we came here."

"How long have you guys been here?"

"We came over on the Kalmar Nyckel with Minuit and the New Sweden Colony in 1638; rocky trip in those glass jars."

"Glass jars? How did you fit in a jar?"

"Don't play that Aladdin trick with me, little one!" snapped Pops, who was pointing his glowing stick at me. "I ain't no stupid Jinn.

"Glass jars…"

"What?"

"Glass jars."

"Damn sunflower seeds."

"What?"

"Are you deaf, sunflower seeds," he stops to see me dumbfounded. "Nattrolls are addicted to them—that was up to the Seelie Accords of 1640.

"We banned the consumption or even thought of sunflower seeds; well, mead seems less dangerous, at least for me and Karl. I can't vouch for those around us…"

"Downtown Tom's River, I think, still has banned the two of you for stacking their houses on top of each other."

"Well…we would shrink down to get some seeds that fell into these holes. Little did we know there were jars in them and crafty Swedes in the bushes.

"Next, we knew we were being stacked on shelves on these ships. Damn things were addictive. The Varangians brought them back from the Byzantine. We had been trying to ban them for eight hundred years. We did good most of that time, but Arnoff, a bergfolk, ratted us out, and the Swedes started using the seeds. I think they wanted new mountain homes overlooking the lake, so they started invading our strip in Norway. Gentrification…"

"So how did you escape?"

"Once they let us out of the jar, we just grew to our full height and climbed out over the palisades.

"Then they began selling us in the jars, but they had a nasty refund problem."

"How so?" I asked.

"Well, not only was there a refund problem, but they were liable for damages," he said, pointing his stick at me. "See, when they let us out in their log cabins, we just grew through the roof and just walked away."

"So you have been here for, roughly, two hundred and thirty years."

"That sounds about right."

"You never left?"

"I'm fine here; Bjorn is the one who likes to travel. Sometimes Karl and Bosco go with him. He loves intelligent and kind people wherever he can find them. He scatters what he learns from diverse sages wherever he goes. Us Trolls can encode ideas through our empathic sent glands.

"We leave markers behind to inspire empaths to feel our messages. Sometimes we mark people directly, and next thing you know, they are screaming, 'Eureka!' "

"Yeah, but you and Karl just pixelate people with a contact high…"

"Yeah, but they always have great dreams!"

 

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