On the first day of the new term, after lunch, we had Care of Magical Creatures together with Gryffindor.
Honestly, I felt nothing but anxiety.
"Assigning a book like this as a textbook. What are you going to do if someone gets hurt?"
Muttering complaints, Draco Malfoy pulled out The Monster Book of Monsters. It had been tightly bound with rope, and the other students were struggling just as much, wrapping theirs with belts or chains or stuffing them into cases.
As for me, after seeing the book go on a rampage in the shop, I bought one that a near-tearful clerk had tied up with rope for me. I still had not opened it even once.
"Everyone, gather around this fence!"
We were led to a paddock-like area near the Forbidden Forest, where Professor Hagrid called out to us.
"Today I've got somethin' good for you! Right then, the very first thing we're gonna do is open yer textbooks."
"How?" came Draco's cold, affected voice in reply.
"And just how are we supposed to open them safely without getting our fingers bitten off?"
"Well, yeh should've just stroked 'em."
As if to say, why are you asking something so obvious, Hagrid took Hermione's textbook, peeled off the tape, and gently stroked the spine of the book as it tried to snap at him. The textbook immediately calmed down, trembled, and flopped open.
"So that's it, you just stroke it! Why didn't I think of that!"
"I thought these things were meant to be amusing," Ron muttered.
"Trying to bite our hands off is a terrifying kind of amusement," Draco replied.
I caught sight of Harry and Ron looking irritated at the edge of my vision, but most of the students, even the Gryffindors, seemed unable to outright deny Draco's comment.
"Uh, right then. I'll go fetch the magical creatures, so just wait here."
A flustered Hagrid headed into the forest, and after a short while returned with more than a dozen magical creatures in tow.
"Hippogriffs!"
Beaming, Hagrid tethered the hippogriffs to the fence and introduced them to us. They were creatures with the bodies, hind legs, and tails of horses, and the forelegs, heads, and wings of eagles.
"Aren't they beautiful? You can come a bit closer, that's fine."
Up close, they were certainly an impressive sight. Each one was a different color: ash gray, reddish bronze, brown, chestnut, and jet black.
"They're proud creatures. They get angry easily, so never insult 'em."
Hagrid continued his explanation.
"This is how you ride 'em. Walk up to one, then bow. After that, you wait for the hippogriff to make the first move, got it? If it bows back, that means you can touch it. If it doesn't, back away straight away."
"Who's first?" Hagrid asked, looking around.
While most students shrank back, Harry bravely stepped forward.
"I'll do it."
"All right then, let's try with Buckbeak."
Hagrid positioned Harry face to face with a gray hippogriff, and tension rippled through the students. Draco narrowed his eyes maliciously, looking as though he were hoping for something to go wrong.
"Harry, don't look away. Don't even blink. Hippogriffs don't trust anyone who looks unsure."
Following Hagrid's instructions, Harry bowed. After a brief pause, the hippogriff bowed back. It seemed to be a success. As applause broke out, Hagrid shouted happily.
"You did it, Harry! I reckon Buckbeak'll let you ride him!"
Though a little hesitant, Harry put his foot near the base of Buckbeak's wing and swung himself onto its back. When Hagrid slapped Buckbeak's hindquarters, the creature leapt high into the air, circled above the paddock, and landed smoothly.
"Well done! Right then, let's have the rest of you give it a go!"
At Hagrid's call, bows began popping up all over the paddock.
＊＊
The first Slytherin to step forward, surprisingly, was Draco Malfoy.
Apparently spurred on by Harry's success, he arrogantly stroked Buckbeak's beak.
"See? Easy."
Draco drew it out, speaking loudly and theatrically so Harry and the others could hear.
"Potter managed it. Of course it'd be easy. Right, you ugly great brute of a beast?"
The next instant, a talon flashed. Draco screamed and collapsed, while Hagrid struggled to fasten a collar on the thrashing hippogriff.
"I'm going to die!"
A panicked Draco shouted, and the entire class descended into chaos.
"I'm going to die! That thing tried to kill me!"
"No, dead people don't talk like that. Crabbe, Goyle, help me."
Signaling to the two of them, I grabbed the hem of Draco's robes and dragged him away to put some distance between him and the hippogriff. When I looked at his arm, there was a deep, long gash.
"Episkey. Heal!"
Casting a simple healing charm slowed the bleeding a little.
"How is it? Does it still hurt?"
"Of course it hurts like hell!"
"That means you're alive."
While we were having that exchange, Hagrid, having calmed Buckbeak, hurried over in a panic.
"We've got to take him to Madam Pomfrey!"
Saying that, Hagrid easily hoisted Malfoy up and ran up the slope toward the castle.
The other students, still in shock, followed afterward and climbed the stone steps, entering the cavernous entrance hall.
"She should be fired immediately!"
"It was Malfoy's fault!"
Pansy said tearfully, while Dean Thomas argued back.
"Elaina, you think Hagrid was in the wrong too, right?!"
Glared at by Pansy, who looked ready to bore holes through me, and pressed by Harry and the others' silent expectations, I found myself stuck in an awkward position. Swallowing my honest thought of "Both Draco and Hagrid did something unnecessary," I answered like a model student, from a fair and neutral standpoint.
"Well… for now, wouldn't it be best to take the matter to the Wizengamot court?"
"Oh, she dodged it."
"She chickened out."
Ignoring Daphne and Millicent's unhelpful remarks, I urged the students of both houses to calm down.
"If you wish to defend either side, I believe it would be appropriate to stand in court as a witness. Of course, false testimony is punishable as perjury, so please keep that in mind when giving your statements."
In one way or another, the wizarding world is fundamentally a laissez-faire society. The Ministry of Magic's role is largely limited to concealing the existence of witches and wizards from Muggles, and it generally does not intervene in disputes between magical folk.
As a result, the principle of personal responsibility prevails. You are expected to protect your own rights. Conflicts between individuals are resolved through duels or lawsuits, making it a society of duels and litigation. Providing a fair venue to oversee whether such proceedings are free of injustice is precisely the role of the Wizengamot court.
In this case, Hagrid fulfilled his minimum duty of explanation by warning that hippogriffs must not be insulted, and Draco Malfoy ignored that warning and suffered an accident as a result.
At first glance, this places fault on the injured party. However, since Hogwarts students are minors, the teacher also bears a certain degree of supervisory responsibility.
That said, the scope of that responsibility, namely whether the accident could have been foreseen, must be judged on a case-by-case basis. Determining the likelihood that a student would ignore warnings and insult a hippogriff requires examining similar incidents, such as failed Apparition lessons or cases where children were injured while riding broomsticks. This involves gathering circumstantial evidence, including testimony, and ultimately seeking a jury's verdict in court.
Using the accumulated body of case law established through such time-consuming processes as the primary source of law, and then confirming and organizing those precedents into what are known as statutes or civil law, is a system that bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Muggle Britain.
In contrast to the deductive, rationalist continental tradition of statutory law that seeks truth through logical analysis and reasoning, the wizarding world also preserves Britain's empirical, customary law tradition, which pursues truth inductively through the accumulation of experience.
"There's a saying in the wizarding world: 'Dragons belong to dragon handlers.' Bringing disputes to court is, for now, the most transparent, democratic, and fair method, wouldn't you say?"
Both Harry's group and Pansy's looked at me with expressions that seemed to ask whose side I was on, unimpressed by my indecisive stance. Still, my exceedingly model answer left them with nothing further to criticize, and I somehow escaped the situation.
(Well, judging from the injury, it doesn't seem like it'll leave him with lifelong aftereffects. It'll probably be settled neatly with ordinary compensation for negligence.)
So I thought.
(There was a time when I, too, thought that optimistically…)
From the next lesson onward, there was a witch who wore a subtly vacant expression and spent the entire time endlessly chopping lettuce. Who might that be? Yes, it was me.
(I never imagined Hagrid would become this disheartened…)
After the first hippogriff incident, Hagrid completely lost his confidence, and we ended up taking care of "lettuce-eating bugs" almost every lesson.
"Hey, Elaina,"
At one point, Daphne spoke up as if she had realized something.
"This class is the same for other year groups too, right?"
"I think so. I remember Flint-senpai complaining that it was 'boring as hell,'" I replied.
"If that's the case, aren't we feeding them too much lettuce?"
"…."
Taking Daphne's words to heart, we tried leaving them alone for a while. Sure enough, the "lettuce-eating bug" in our group became the most energetic of all.
"Looks like Daphne was right. Doing nothing was the correct answer…"
"So then, what are we supposed to do?"
"Who knows."
Care of Magical Creatures had degenerated into a period whose purpose was no longer clear.
"…For now, maybe we should just read Newt Scamander's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and study on our own."
Regretting my decision to take the class far too late, I found myself thinking, "Maybe I'll drop it next year…"
(End of chapter)
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