days before we arrived there," Regis, always current on the goings-on of Ten Towns, commented.
"Then it would seem they are having great difficulty navigating the marshy ground," Drizzt replied.
"And might be other troubles they're findin'," came Bruenor's call from a short distance to the side, the dwarf stooping low over a small hump of grass.
The friends moved to join him and saw immediately his cause for concern: several tracks pressed deep into the mud.
"Yetis," the dwarf said distastefully. "And they came right to the wagon tracks and then went back. They're knowin' this for a used trail or I'm a bearded gnome."
"And the yeti tracks are more recent," Catti-brie remarked, noting the water still within them.
Up on Wulfgar's shoulders, Regis glanced around nervously, as if he expected a hundred of the shaggy beasts to leap out at them.
Drizzt, too, bent low to study the depressions and began to shake his head.
"They are recent," Catti-brie insisted.
"I do not disagree with your assessment of the time," the drow explained. "Only with the identification of the creature."
"Not a horse," Bruenor said with a grunt. "Unless that horse's lost two legs. A yeti, and a damned big one."
"Too big," the drow explained. "Not a yeti, but a giant."
"Giant?" the dwarf echoed skeptically. "We're ten miles from the mountains. What's a giant doing out here?"
"What indeed?" the drow answered, his grim tone giving the answer clear enough. Giants rarely came out of the Spine of the World Mountains, and then only to cause mischief. Perhaps this was a single rogue- that would be the best scenario-or perhaps it was an advanced scout for a larger and more dangerous group.
Bruenor cursed and dropped the head of his many-notched axe hard into the soft turf. "If ye're thinkin' o' walking all the way back to the durned towns, then be thinkin' again, elf," he said. "Sooner I'm outta this mud, the better. The towns've been livin' well enough without our help all these years. They're not needin' us to turn back now!"
"But if they are giants-" Catti-brie started to argue, but Drizzt cut her short.
"I've no intention of turning back," he said. "Not yet. Not until we have proof that these tracks foretell a greater disaster than one, or even a handful, of giants could perpetrate. No, our road remains east, and all the quicker because I now hope to catch that lone wagon before the fall of darkness, or soon after if we must continue on. If the giant is part of a rogue hunting group and it knows of the wagon's recent passage, then the Bremen merchants might soon be in dire need of our help."
They set off at a swifter pace, following the wagon tracks, and within a couple of hours they saw the merchants struggling with a loose and wobbly wagon wheel. Two of the five men, obviously the hired guards, pulled hard to try and lift the carriage while a third, a young and strong merchant whom Regis identified as Master Camlaine the scrimshaw trader, worked hard, though hardly successfully, to realign the tilted wheel. Both the guards had sunk past their ankles into the mud, and though they struggled mightily, they could hardly get the carriage up high enough for the fit.
How the faces of all five brightened when they noted the approach of Drizzt and his friends, a well-known company of heroes indeed among the folk of Icewind Dale.
"Well met, I should say, Master Do'Urden!" the merchant Camlaine cried. "Do lend us the strength of your barbarian friend. I will pay you well, I promise. I am to be in Luskan in a fortnight, yet if our luck holds as it has since we left Bremen, I fear that winter will find us still in the dale."
Bruenor handed his axe to Catti-brie and motioned to Wulfgar. "Come on, boy," he said. "Ye'll play come-along and I'll show ye an anvil pose."
With a nonchalant shrug, Wulfgar brought Regis swinging down from his shoulders and set him on the ground. The halfling moaned and rushed to a pile of grass, not wanting to get mud all over his new boots.
"Ye think ye can lift it?" Bruenor asked Wulfgar as the huge man joined him by the wagon. Without a word, without even putting down his magnificent warhammer Aegis-fang, Wulfgar grabbed the wagon and pulled hard. The mud slurped loudly in protest, grabbing and clinging, but in the end it could not resist, and the wheel came free of the soupy ground.