That look stopped my protests. I sighed and looked up toward the peach tree. One of the Tangs hung from a low branch by its tail and stretched his neck to smell me. I burst into laughter, and even Raleigh and Jean giggled. Some of the tension disappeared.
"And anyway", I added looking at Jean and Raleigh, "we don't know where he is, where he's going. So..."
Above us, the Tangs started jumping from one branch to the other, smelling the pink flowers. A dozen petals fell on our hair, and a small flower landed on Raleigh's cheek. She took it and turned it over between her fingers, in thought.
I knew that look: she just had an idea.
"What are you thinking about?" I asked her.
"Nothing...nothing", she mumbled. "I have to get back to the laboratory. I'll see you later".
She gave me a kiss and ran off.
"What the hell came over your girlfriend?"
I watched Raleigh leave the Garden and shook my head.
"I don't know, Jean. But I have a feeling we'll find out tonight".
That afternoon I tried to not think about what Whiskey could do and concentrated on my work at Wild Dragons.
Now that the number of dragons in the Garden had doubled, the work had increased just as much. Luckily Jean was there to give me a hand. I spent almost the whole afternoon convincing the ten Brits to move from their pear tree (when we got them from the auction I was forced to plant it). Those dragons, however, are so lazy they could be chess pieces. In the end I gave up.
At seven o' clock, as we were closing the store, Raleigh parked a van from the university in front of the window. I hadn't heard from her since that morning.
"Help me unload the equipment", she said coming in.
In the van were a dozen sealed boxes, really heavy ones.
"What are they?" I asked looking at them closely.
They were made of hard white plastic. On each one there was a label that read "Proyecto EcoSabueso".
"They're noses", she answered. "Electronic noses".
Jean and I looked at each other, perplexed.
"Noses?"
"Exactly. This morning, seeing that flower, I remembered an experiment Elen had participated in when she was a freshman. They mapped the flora in the Nukak natural reserve, in Columbia, using nose-drones to reach the most difficult areas to explore".
"Um, so you", I said pointing to the boxes, "want to use these to find Whiskey?"
Raleigh shook her head.
"Not Whiskey, the Pitahaya. Its flowers bloom at night, after ten o'clock. We could put the detectors on the ground along a perimeter and search the mountains with the drones".
I took Raleigh's face between my hands and kissed her.
"Geez, honey, you're a genius!"
"Yeah, I know", she smiled with her cheeks in flames.
We unloaded the cases from the van and brought them into the store. All in all, we had eight ground detectors - large poles with a detecting control unit on the top - and two exploration drones.
The two close dates between the first two attacks (Blackfoot and Bronson's pub just a few days from one another), made me think that Whiskey, after waking up from his apparent death, had headed south-east, following the Snake River path(14) up to the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. It was too cold north of Boise, and in the south there was only steppe, dry and with no shelter. With a climate suitable maybe for a Pitahaya, but not a dragon.
The area south-east of Idaho Falls, instead, offered a maze of tight valleys, as flat as pool tables and separated only by short mountain ranges. In those places Whiskey could feed, hide, and grow his adored plant. Even if we excluded the highest mountains from the map, however, the area to check was still pretty big.
According to Raleigh, the detectors had a range of five square miles. Not much, to tell the truth, but when we looked at the map of the area where we thought Whiskey was hiding, we immediately started excluding a good amount of places. From Bear Lake to Blackfoot we excluded all the inhabited areas, the plains with roads running through them, and the - few - rural areas.
The next day Raleigh called in sick and we left for Caribou county together. The Blackfoot reservation was a good place to start looking.
About thirty kilometers from the damn that formed the reservation, in McCammon, we ran into a National Guard convoy. Two trucks and a jeep crossed the main street headed south, on state road 91.
"They've been doing that for three days", said Serena, the waitress at the diner where we stopped for lunch. "Up and down. All following the monster".
"Where are they going?" Raleigh asked her.
Serena pursed her lips and rolled her eyes.
"Preston, close to the border. Some idiot says he saw a "demon with wings"". The waitress covered her mouth with a hand and added, in a low voice: "I think it's bull. You know how the people from down there are".
And she made a gesture of someone drinking.
"Shall I bring you anything else, guys?"
Raleigh and I glanced at each other. Preston was just a few miles from the border with Utah, but it was within the areas we had excluded. On the other side of the valley, however, was Bear Lake.
A perfect place for Whiskey, I thought.
If it had been up to me, we would have gone there right away, but Raleigh's scientific mind had the best.
"We have to be systematic", she said when we went back to the van.
"And if the guys from the Guard were really on his tracks?"
"You heard her, right? Not even they know where to look. They're following gossip".
In the end I thought she was right. We had a plan and we had a trace, the Pitahaya. I had already followed a ghost made of gossip once before. I didn't want to do it again.
That afternoon we arrived at the Blackfoot reservation and created a first line of detectors, planting them in the ground at five mile intervals.
The hunt for the PItahaya had begun.
Every night, thanks to the software installed in our laptops, we checked the data that the electronic noses received from the surrounding environment. The next day, we would go back to get the poles and moved the front five miles south. It was a bit like playing battle ship, only that instead of the aircraft carriers there were Whiskey's cacti.
With that method, and a bit more time, we would have surely found them. But our time was about to be up.
The night of the sixth day, when we were more or less at the height of Soda Springs, three electronic noses, those closest to the city, discovered traces of Pitahaya pollen. So the seventh day we concentrated all the detectors in the hills around the city, on Long Ridge and Chester Hill, but when night fell, the traces of pollen had disappeared.
The next night, Whiskey struck again.
We were in our tent, ready to check the noses' activity. I, to tell you the truth, was whipped. Planting the poles wasn't easy at all. We had to walk up and down hills and fields, searching for suitable spots, with all the equipment on (my) shoulders (like a gentleman). Then we had to wait for a confirmation from the software that the nose was working and receiving data. We walked at least six hours a day, and after a week my legs and back begged for mercy. I, who at Wild Dragons lifted bags of feed and worked my ass off all day cleaning the Garden, was extremely tired. Instead Raleigh was "just a bit sore". That nerdy botanist was always as fresh as a rose, and I couldn't understand what her secret was.
LeBon video called us at ten at night all nervous.
"Hurry, turn on CNN", he said.
Online, the news was showing a special edition. On the screen, the correspondent Erin Coscarello, from Kemmerer, Wyoming, was talking with the studio. Behind her, an industrial warehouse was in flames. Dozens of people, most of them firemen, were walking close by her, moving her, pulling the fire repellant foam tubes and shouting orders.
"...the sheriff hasn't confirmed the rumors, but here everyone saw a large figure fly away into the sky, after the attack".
"Erin, what can you tell us about the bui
lding?" Asked one of the anchormen in the studio. "Were there people inside?"
"We still don't know", answered Coscarello. "The firemen just arrived a few minutes ago, but there's no talk of victims so far. The place was an old abandoned factory".
"What do you think?" LeBon asked us.
Raleigh had already opened the map of the region. Kemmerer was about thirty miles from Bear Lake and about seventy from Soda Springs, where we were. It was still too big of an area to make any assumptions. Half an hour later, though, CNN showed new images.
"These images", explained the anchorman, "were captured by Judy Sanchez, from Georgetown in Idaho".
"Georgetown?" I almost flipped out of the sleeping bag. "But it's less than twenty miles from here!"
The images went by on the screen. It was an amateur video, shaken and not very clear. A winged figure was darting in the night close to a mountain, almost grazing the tops of the trees.
"Look! Look!" Somebody in the video was yelling.
"Oh my God, what the hell is it?"
The dragon roared and Judy Sanchez's hands shook, moving the camera right and left. When the woman regained her composure, the dragon had disappeared behind the mountain.
"We've got it", I said. "His burrow must be somewhere around here".
Raleigh crawled out of the sleeping bag and got her backpack.
"Okay, we can move numbers four and six, the ones close to Soda. If we move them east, close to - "
"Wait", I stopped her. "Maybe it's not necessary".
I showed her the map and pointed to Georgetown. In the video, Whiskey had disappeared behind the mountains north east of the residential center, whereas the day before, our electronic noses had found traces of pollen close to Soda Springs. Everything made it seem Whiskey's burrow was around a mountain, Sulphur Peak, which stood between the two cities.
"Let's try using the drones", I said and Raleigh nodded.
While she got dressed I went to the van and took the two drones out. We piloted them during the day, because the infrared camera sucks, and the olfactory sensors don't send images, just data.
But we had to try anyway, because both of us knew the National Guard, and all the fanatic hunting maniacs had seen Sanchez's video. Just a few hours, that's all we had.
Raleigh got her drone in the air first and directed it above Soda Springs, going around the northern part of the Sulphur. Instead I piloted mine toward the south. Damn, it was so slow. I crossed several farming fields, dark blue under the camera's infrared lens. A light breeze kept on setting it off track, and it took me almost two hours to get to the southern part of the Sulphur.
I found two small lakes, and for a while I concentrated on that area, flying over it in large circles. The olfactory sensors, however, didn't find any trace of pollen.
He's here, somewhere, I can feel it.
I went over the mountain's top, slowly going down the other side, on the northern side. My drone and Raleigh's were about a hundred yards apart. Together, we flew over a valley that had been dug throughout the centuries by a small ravine, the Johnson Creek. The valley separated that side of the Sulphur from another shorter mountain: Wolf Mountain. Going up the creek's bed we found two small canyons. Raleigh and I parted ways: she searched the Petterson, and I went in above Burchett canyon with the drone. We combed through them inch by inch for an hour.
At the break of dawn, when I started to think that wasn't the right area, Raleigh stood up in the back of the van, with a fist in the air.
"I found him!"
"Where? Where?"
I let go of the laptop, forgetting about the drone (we found it days later, stuck between the branches of a fir) and went over to see. Her device was flying around a small patch of woods. The side light of the sun reflected on the leaves in a weave of greens and silvers. A small pond, basically a muddy puddle of water no bigger than thirty feet, stood in a clearing on the edge of the woods. And where the last firs met the side of Wolf Mountain, you could barely see an opening. A cave. I say barely because it was almost entirely hidden by the Pitahaya's gigantic branches, that went up around the entrance and back down toward the ground like the branches of a willow. The Pitahaya's trunks were at least half a meter thick, dotted with beautiful white petal flowers. I had never seen such a large cactus, and neither had Raleigh.
We sat there for a while, fascinated, looking at Whiskey's shelter, almost hoping to see him come out of the cave. But the dragon wasn't home or was sleeping.
While Raleigh brought the drone back (just one, seeing as the other one had gotten lost), I drove the van toward the mountain.
I crossed Soda Spring, headed toward Blackfoot River Road and after about ten miles we cut down a dirt road (officially, the Trail Creek Road, in reality a line of pebbles in the middle of fields and hills) that followed Johnson Creek for a long while. The road brought us almost up to the beginning of the two canyons. From there, we left the van and continued on foot.
Before getting out, I took the hunting rifle from the bag and put it around my shoulder. I don't love hunting, on the contrary. But by law a Dragon Breeder has to own a rifle and know how to use it, in case his animals become a danger for him or other people.
From a sealed container I took a dart containing a dose of batrachotoxin, a lethal neurotoxin extracted from dart frogs, and put it in the rifle.
Raleigh gently touched my arm.
"Are you sure you want to do that?"
"I don't know", I answered. "But I have to be prepared for the worst".
We walked following a path up to the beginning of Petterson Canyon. Around us, the grass in the fields was already tall and colorless because of the spring heat. On our left Wolf Mountain, tall and dark, stood behind the forest of firs.
We walked past the pond I had seen from above, with the drone's camera. The Petterson wasn't very long. A mile, more or less. The path went up to almost halfway, then it veered off to some woods on the east side of Sulphur Peak. It wasn't the right direction. We left the path and went into the field, headed toward the cave.
"That way", Raleigh said.
She pointed to a piece of rock under which a small group of pines had grown like the prickly beard of the mountain. The cave was just beyond, in a tiny sunlit clearing.
Just a few feet from the entrance, we almost froze in surprise. The Pitahaya cacti were bigger than Raleigh and I had imagined. The cave's opening was almost thirteen feet, and the cacti were so tall they covered it entirely.
The cave was deep, humid and dark. On the ground, close to the entrance, we found claw marks. Enormous marks. Up until that moment we weren't sure if Whiskey was there, but the marks took away all doubt.
Now all we need to do is ring the bell and see if the owner's home.
Raleigh and I looked at each other, standing still in front of the entrance.
"Stay here", I whispered to her.
She punched me in the shoulder. Really hard.
"What the fuck are you saying, Jack?" she whispered back. "I'm coming with you".
"Damn it, Raleigh..."
I didn't know how to convince her to stay out of the cave.
We heard some rocks roll down to the ground creating a weak tlick tlack. A gigantic body moved against the dark cave's floor, and a deafening roar came out. Whiskey had heard us.
I almost jumped in surprise. With my hair on end because of the fear, I gave her the first excuse I could think of.
"If I go in there alone and something happens to me, you can call for help".
"No, there's no discussion", she protested.
I took her by the shoulders. I was really shitting my pants, but I would never risk Raleigh's life.
"It's a matter between me and him", I told her. Then I showed her the rifle. "If he tries to attack me, I'll use this".
Whiskey roared again and Raleigh seemed convinced.
"Okay, but I'm staying right here".
I nodded and turned toward the cave.
Okay, Draco.
Let's end this story.
I can't say I didn't know he was waiting for me, hidden in the darkness, because I knew it. I raised the rifle and went into the cave walking with my head between my shoulders, pointing the weapon at every suspicious shadow, every tiny movement, real or imaginary. My hands and arms were shaking. I went ahead step by step, trying to make as little noise as possible.
After a few feet, a warm breath swept over my sweaty forehead. It smelled like bitter almonds. I went over a rock that was up to my waist and blinked my eyes a couple of times, to get used to the darkness. The light came in from outside, and lit the first part of the cave, about twenty, twenty-five feet. Then, the contours of the walls became less defined.
As I went into that humid burrow, I couldn't stop asking myself if Whiskey's true nature was the one he had showed me at the amusement park, and I had gotten everything wrong from the beginning, or if it had been Tajihara's men to change him into a monster. All the moments Whiskey and I had lived together flashed before my eyes. The day I had seen him poke out of the egg, and when, still a little dragon, he had gotten colitis and I had spent two nights at his side; when I had brought him to the ArK to find his beloved plant and when, at the farm, he had attacked the hit men.
My throat closed up. He had saved Jean from death, I hadn't forgotten that either.
The rifle was becoming heavier, and my hands started sweating.
I crossed from light to semi-darkness. Just a few feet in front of me something moved, and all of a sudden Whiskey came out of the dark, his scales shiny and black. He was so tall he could look me in the eye now. His snout was almost three feet long, and his wings, folded on his back, were gigantic. Under his throat, where Monstron had wounded him almost fatally, there was a star shaped scar, as big as a fist. I brought the rifle up with a jolt, and he opened his jaws a bit, hissing.
Is this really how it has to end?, I thought, with my finger on the trigger.
For a long moment we stared at each other. The dragon pushed his chest out, raised his neck until he almost grazed the cave's arch, and with a paw he clawed at the floor. He growled, but didn't attack.
I lowered the rifle and put it around my shoulder. Then, I searched around a pocket in my pants.
The Dragon Seller: A Tale of Love and Dragons Page 20
