Trolls spread like fire across the Eurasian continent. Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Germany, France, and Scotland were the locations of the most storied underworld kingdoms, though troll populations rose up as far away as China. However, as recently as the early seventeenth century—and seeing how trolls can live for up to a thousand years, that’s pretty recent—there was not a single troll on American soil.

That changed when a ship called the Mayflower set off from Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620, carrying an official list of one hundred thirty passengers. Human passengers, that is. As for the unaccounted trolls hiding in the cargo section, it is anyone’s guess. Estimates range from two dozen to triple digits, especially if you count the green, furry-tailed gremlins, which could easily pack thirty to a barrel. Not that any serious scholar would bother counting gremlins, of course.

The Mayflower trolls were not just courageous explorers willing to risk life and limb on a perilous voyage across a sunlit ocean, but also staunch separatists. A philosophical argument had riven the troll communities of the British Isles into two factions. Most kept a traditional conservative view of troll/human relations. That is, humans would continue to spoil the natural resources the trolls held dear, and the trolls, in return, would eat the humans.

But a splinter group led by Ebenezer ARRRGH!!! of the Lincolnshire ARRRGH!!!s believed that this relationship was not only unsustainable but immoral, and promoted to his believers a program of better living through four-legged consumption. Abolished were the tender main courses of human children. Gone were the spicy after-dinner snacks of human sausage straight from the smokehouse. Forbidden were the breakfast treats of sugared old-person skin. These trolls favored rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, rats, certain varieties of bird, and the occasional seasonal cat.

(“Are there any vegetarian trolls?” I asked. “In fact, for a time there was a sect called the Nilboggians,” replied Blinky, “who believed that trolls could live on plant matter alone. ’Twas a most virtuous experiment, though after nineteen days every Nilboggian spontaneously dissolved into a puddle of green slime.”)

No sooner had they landed in America than the separatist trolls fled the Mayflower by night and found bridges beneath which they could enter the underworld and begin to build livable homes. The Eastern seaboard flourished with fertile cave ground, and the trolls spread to new quarters in their characteristic fashion: slowly but steadily. No sooner would a new bridge be inaugurated than a troll and its family would take residence beneath it. Few trolls made the dangerous trek to the West and fewer made it alive, but many of those who did found themselves drawn to quiet San Bernardino, “The Cupped Hand of God.” At last trolls had found a temperate home that did not require the stocking of food for long winters.