Part of it was familiar—skunk, stagnant mud—but the rest was the worst odor that had ever assaulted him! It was like sulfur, rotten eggs, and dung all wrapped around a three-day-dead fish sprinkled with garlic and urine.
His eyes watered.
His family—
He swung the axe in a wide arc—and the ogre jumped back and to the side, just out of range. Then a deafening growl erupted from it, and it pounded its chest.
Undaunted—except, perhaps, by the new scent of decay that its breath had brought—Arbid’s father stepped forward and swung his axe as if he were making notches in the trunk of a tall tree so he could climb up to trim off the limbs. It was a good swing—and the ogre simply grabbed the axe and pulled it out of his hands.
He froze. What else could he do? Trees didn’t take axes from him. Sometimes the axe stuck in the tree and he had to pry it out, but it never took the axe from him. The ogre had. If the ogre had wanted to, he could have chopped him into little bits, skewered those bits on a stick, and roasted them over an open flame. The ogre could have squashed him, stomped on him like he was a bug. The ogre could have just stood there, letting the stench waft over him until he succumbed to its foulness and fell faint. The ogre could have done all of these things while he stood there frozen in place, but it didn’t. Instead, the ogre tossed the axe away, stepped over to the garden, grabbed great handfuls of tomatoes, squashed them to a pulp, and started rubbing that pulp all over its midriff, legs, and—most peculiarly of all, inside its loin cloth. (Well, we’ll call it a loin cloth, but that’s being a bit generous.)
Now, this went on for about a minute before Arbid’s father realized the axe was lying in the grass about twenty feet away. A few seconds later, he unfroze and scurried over to pick it up. That’s when the other ogres barged out of the woods, banged into things, picked those things up, grumbled, and threw them hither and yon with a great deal of unfriendly intensity.
Arbid’s father didn’t freeze this time. This time, he ran.