When Harold arrived in the forest on the outskirts of Ringsetter where he had last met with Master, he was not overly surprised to find he was not there, but he was disappointed nonetheless. He now had the onerous dilemma of deciding what to do with the unpleasant burden he was carrying around. Master had told him to “bring” him Max’s head, but was he perhaps being a bit figurative? Surely, having separated Max’s perfidious head from his torso was sufficient; after all, Master would know whether Harold was lying upon hearing the report that he had killed Max. He didn’t need the head as proof.
Harold was finding himself more eager by the moment to get rid of it, so he decided the next best thing to handing Max’s head to Master in person was to deposit it in the same part of the tree where Master had been sitting when they last spoke. Although . . . that wouldn’t quite do: One good gust of wind, and that head would go flying off into the forest. No, he had better insert it inside some nook of the tree.
Harold scanned the tree with his telescope eyes, and quickly enough he discovered an adequate spot. He felt a prodigious burden lifted from his spirit as the gruesome object disappeared into the small hole of the tree.
Now, he had a new problem. He had absolutely nothing to do.
A sudden rumbling of his stomach begged to differ. He hadn’t eaten in a couple days now. To his delight he realized that he could make that a very short-lived problem. There would be no poking around for worms like in the old days. No, he was going to have a hot meal.
He immediately took off into the air, and once he reached two thousand feet he began scouring the ground for the meal of his choice. As he now knew of no animal—other than perhaps the largest of bears or the longest of anacobras—that would be too dangerous to take as his dinner, he now had the problem of an overabundance of options.
He had always had a particular dislike of cocky personalities, so he thought that so long as there were multiple options available he may as well see if he could sniff out any prey items that seemed particularly worthy of becoming dinner. His stomach told him not to be overly picky about it.
As he soared above scanning the ground closely, he noticed a rather obnoxious wolf who kept giving terrible nips to his fellows who were attempting to obtain their fair share of a kill they undoubtedly had assisted with a great deal. In fact, in Harold’s estimation, it was most likely the others had done more than their fair share. He had seen enough.
With the sun at his back, he wrapped his wings around his body and began to spin as he plunged headfirst two thousand feet towards the wolves. Once he felt he had adequate speed—which was nearly three hundred miles per hour—he unwrapped his wings and let his accumulated speed drive him forward in a low swooping motion.
Just as the wolf prepared to give another terrible nip to a fellow wolf who—after patiently waiting for the greedy wolf to satiate his hunger with one bloody mouthful of meat after another—dared take a small piece of the kill, Harold struck. His talons sunk deep into the wolf’s sides, puncturing his heart and lungs. Harold whisked him off in an instant, and though shocked, it did not appear that the other wolves particularly missed the nipper.
Harold looked below him, as he soared upwards, and noticed that all of the previously excluded wolves were now munching away contentedly on their meal. Harold felt happy knowing he was adding a bit of justice to the world, something he intended to do quite a bit more of.