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Pip!squeak was troubled by Pettigrew in Hagrid's milk jug (although she soon got over her dismay by laying it at the feet of Well-Nigh-Omnipotent!Dumbledore):
Was hiding in Hagrid's hut Pettigrew's very own idea? Or did Hagrid deliberately find him and keep him there? Why didn't Pettigrew slip past the Dementors before the scene in the shack? If Sirius could do it, so could he, and leaving Hogwarts wouldn't be half as dangerous as staying (not with Black and a mad part-kneazel to contend with).
Eloise confessed herself similarly troubled:
Now Pettigrew hiding in Hagrid's hut, I have to admit, I always found pretty odd. He was so likely to have been found - as he was.
Mmmm.
You know, I have always found this an extremely troubling plot point as well. In fact (she says, smiling shyly and apologetically at Charis Julia), I seem to remember once making one hell of a mess on board the ELGINMARBLES barge just to try to account for it. In that speculation, which was so horrifically silly that I was only able to bring myself to offer it up in a state of self-imposed exile over on OTChatter, I proposed that Peter had been waiting around Hagrid's hut all that time in the hopes of making contact with the Centaurs, who had been entrusted with the safekeeping of Voldemort's wand some thirteen years before.
But another possibility has just occurred to me.
What if Peter was hanging around Hagrid's hut in the hopes of retrieving Voldemort's wand -- not from the Centaurs, but from Hagrid himself?
No. Seriously. Just think about this for a minute.
Who was the first on the scene at Godric's Hollow after Voldemort was reduced to vapor?
Well, many people have speculated that Peter himself was. The underlying supposition here is that the nature of the Fidelius Charm necessitated that Peter show Voldemort to the Potters' hiding place in person, and that he therefore must have been present for their deaths and Voldemort's destruction. He picked up the wand, so the theory goes, fled the scene, and then went and hid it somewhere safe before framing Sirius and disappearing into obscurity as a rat. After the events of PoA, he then went and retrieved it before he went off to Albania to look for Voldemort.
Well...okay. Even if Peter was there first, though, Hagrid got there awfully fast, didn't he? Hagrid is the first person whom we know to have rrived on the scene after the Potters' deaths, and from his description in the first chapter of PS, it would seem that he arrived even before the bodies were cold.
In response to Dumbledore's asking him if there were any problems, Hagrid reports:
'No, sir -- house was almost destroyed but I got him out all right before the Muggles started swarmin' around.'
In short, Hagrid got there even before the first of the rubberneckers arrived. That's fast work. Very fast work. In fact, the phrasing makes it sound as if the house might even have still been in the process of collapsing when Hagrid showed up to rescue baby Harry from the ruins.
What else might he have done while he was there? Is it possible, given what we know of Hagrid's character, that he might have picked up a spare wand that he noticed lying around in the rubble?
I think that this is not only possible, but quite likely. Hagrid is both curious and child-like, just the sort of person who picks up strange objects without giving too much thought to their provenance. It has also been well-established that he is highly resistant to his status as a "de-wanded" wizard. He may even resent it. He constantly violates the restriction against expelled students practicing wandwork. Even while on a mission for Dumbledore, he chooses to use magic that Dumbledore has not authorized him to use -- and then he asks an eleven year old boy to agree to keep his secret for him. He hides the broken pieces of his snapped wand so that he can use them to perform illicit magic, and then lies (badly) when Ollivander asks him about it. When it comes to his wandless status, Hagrid is not law-abiding, and he is not honest.
Hagrid can also be secretive -- again, often in remarkably child-like ways. Both as a teenager and as an adult, he shows a marked and child-like tendency to try to hide away evidence of his wrong-doings. As a student, he smuggles Aragog into Hogwarts, keeps him hidden away, and then, when it seems that he might be called to task for it, smuggles him right back out again. He follows precisely the same pattern of behavior as an adult with Norbert, whom he first hatches illegally on the Hogwarts campus, then keeps hidden away in his hut, and finally allows to be furtively smuggled away when circumstances threaten to expose the secret. He keeps the evidence of his illicit wand use hidden away inside a pink umbrella.
Would it not be perfectly in keeping for Hagrid to have picked up Voldemort's wand, perhaps planning to keep it for his own use, and then, when he realized whose it actually was, to become frightened, hide it away somewhere in his hut, and try to put it out of his mind, rather than owning up to Dumbledore that he had such an item in his possession?
Yes. I think that this would be perfectly consistent with everything that we have seen of Hagrid's character so far.
Now what of Peter? If Peter really was still on the scene when Hagrid arrived, then he must hidden himself away. He would not have wanted to be seen, and indeed, he was not seen, either by Hagrid or by Sirius.
What if he saw Hagrid pick up Voldemort's wand and leave with it?
This would explain what Peter was doing in Hagrid's hut. He was looking for Voldemort's wand, on the off-chance that Hagrid still had it secreted away somewhere in his hovel. To remain at Hogwarts for so long looking for Voldemort's wand was certainly a risk, but it is one that I believe that Peter would have been willing to take, for the simple reason that Peter is absolutely terrified of Voldemort. He has resolved to go crawling off to Albania to look for him, but only because he genuinely believes that only Voldemort's protection can possibly suffice to protect him from Sirius, Remus, and the entire Ministry of Magic, all of whom he thinks are going to be hunting for him. Had Sirius never escaped from Azkaban, Peter would have died of old age (or perhaps of emphysema) as the Weasley family's amazingly long-lived and decrepit pet rat.
Peter is willing to risk seeking out Voldemort because he thinks that it the only way to save his own life, but he is terrified. He needs something to produce as an offering, doesn't he? Especially after so many years have passed? Some proof of his devotion, some proof of his loyalty? At the very least some proof of his usefulness? It is how submissive little sycophants like Peter think. Just look at how he behaves with Bertha Jorkins: he offers her up to Voldemort not even knowing whether or not she will prove useful, but instead as a kind of token sacrifice. He's like some frightened little acolyte, Peter is, making desperate random offerings to his mad, cruel, and unpredictable god.
I think that Peter did find Voldemort's wand in Hagrid's hut. I think that when Hermione caught him, he was just waiting for Hagrid to leave the building so that he would have the opportunity to steal it. This would explain why he was so very poorly hidden -- he had picked a hiding place from which he could easily see and hear when Hagrid had left the building, and also from which it would take no time at all to jump down onto the floor and then transform.
This would also explain why he reacted with such extraordinary panic when Ron took him in hand and would not let him go. Yes, his cover had been blown. But all the same, surely he never thought that Sirius would really believe that "I've been killed, honest!" story a second time, did he? The story was for the benefit of the children and for the vicious Crookshanks, never for Sirius himself. Sirius is nowhere in sight when Peter first starts writhing and struggling and biting at Ron's hand. He is so very desperate to escape there, I think, because after weeks and weeks of searching Hogwarts in a very high state of anxiety, he was finally on the verge of being finally able to escape for good, with Voldemort's wand in tow, and that was when the kids showed up to interfere with his plan -- at the worst and most frustrating possible moment.
If this theory holds true, then it also explains how Peter can have been the one to restore Voldemort's wand to him and yet not have had it in his possession in the Shrieking Shack, without begging the question of precisely where Peter could have hidden such a item and still been certain that it would be there over a decade later. No special hiding places are necessary. After his escape at the end of _PoA,_ Peter simply would have needed to return to Hagrid's hut (hardly the most secure place in all Hogwarts), stolen the wand, and then set out on his long trek to Albania.
Thoughts?
—Elkins
(who is afraid that she just can't quite stomach LeCarre!Rowling, but who has noted with profound approval that Pip!Squeak is named after a character from an Agatha Christie novel in which [SPOILER ALERT] the author consciously manipulates the fact that many of her readers are likely to assume one of the book's major clues to be "just a typo.")
Posted to HPfGU by Elkins on June 13, 2002 3:15 AM
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