It had been a very agreeable day spent with Zimzi yesterday. Derufin’s eye fell on the two covered buckets sitting just inside the stable door that they had brought back from their ride. And he caught himself smiling as he prepared to go about the morning routine – feeding the horses and ponies, putting them out in the pen for the morning, mucking out their stalls. The rhythm of the work allowed him to think as he went through the familiar motions.
They had collected several buckets of clay from the river bank above Bag End. He had raised an eyebrow when she bade him scoop out the grayish muck, or so he thought of it. But he gamely took off his boots and socks and rolled up the cuffs of his breeches and waded into the slow moving water to the place she showed him.
She had gathered up her long skirt to one side and tucked it neatly in her belt, splashing her way across the shallow flow to the other bank. Her long legs were well muscled he noted, tanned. And she was graceful as a waterbird as she walked from stone to stone to reach the other side. The light played on the ripples of the stream, threw small diamonds of brilliance about her feet as she moved . . .
Lost in this pleasant thought, he heard the squawking of the chickens and felt the tremors of nervousness in the horse he was brushing. Going out to the yard he noticed a saucy crow croaking at him from the fence to the chicken yard. Shooing the bird away, he watched the curious one-legged flyer flap off in a northerly direction. The chickens quieted down as he spoke softly to them and threw them some feed. He thought nothing more of the incident as he quieted down the nervous horses with his hands and voice.
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‘Many are the strange chances of the world,’ said Mithrandir, ‘and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter.’
– Gandalf in: The Silmarillion, 'Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age'
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