Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  We got the buckets sorted and started carrying them out. Eleanor is not only only seven and the youngest but she’s not exactly large even for seven (Martha’s small for her age too but she’s twelve) and only an Eleanor-type seven-year-old would insist on carrying a bucket too big and heavy for her, but of course she does. “I’ll take russo,” she says every day. Russo’s her favorite. Russo is also at the far end of the row of cages and Martha and I have to dawdle getting the others set out to give her time, and then she and Martha have this little ritual of Eleanor pretending not to notice that Martha has to lift and dump the food through the chute, because Eleanor can’t.

  “She’s going to wear that bucket out, dragging it like that,” snapped Eric.

  “You tell her,” I said. Eric glared at me, but I was doing him a favor, giving him an excuse for a good glare.

  Once Eric was there to deal with the serious food Katie and I could get started on the cages. Here’s a good example of what passes in Eric’s case for a sense of humor. When I turned thirteen the grown-ups decided it was time I had some real chores, not just fun-food detail at the zoo or helping unpack and stack stuff for the gift shop. Especially given my talent for leaving drifts of Styrofoam munchies and stomp-popped bubblewrap in my wake. It had kind of seemed to me that my time at the orphanage should have counted, but maybe it didn’t because I never had night duty (a growing boy needs his sleep, etc.) and because there was always an adult there with me. Or maybe because I’d been getting underfoot at the orphanage since I was a baby and Mom used to bring me along while she put in her time, and it was like I was too regular and nobody noticed.

  Anyway I volunteered for cage cleaning because I knew odoratus doesn’t make me sick the way it does a lot of people, and by doing it I knew I’d get extra slack for when I screwed up elsewhere, which was definitely an issue. Eric accepted my offer fast enough, but he couldn’t let it go without telling everyone that the reason I didn’t mind odoratus was because I was a teenage boy. Very funny, Eric. That doesn’t explain Katie, who also volunteered for odoratus, who is not only a girl—I mean a woman—herself but has two daughters. And her slob of a husband isn’t around any more if the idea is you have to live with slobbishness to be able to deal. Katie’s husband isn’t dead but he might as well be since nobody ever sees him, including his daughters. That may be another reason I kind of like Eleanor really. I don’t think feeling sorry for people is ever going to come easily to Eleanor, but it wouldn’t occur to her to feel sorry for me because my mom’s dead. As far as she’s concerned we’re even, because her dad’s dead. Eleanor has a very black-and-white view of the world. That’s restful too sometimes, except when you’re on her hit list.

  She didn’t get it from Katie. Katie has no hit list. Katie volunteered for odoratus so no one else had to do it. That’s what she’s like. (And between her, me, and Eric, no one else does have to do it. Aren’t we just the three stooges of wonderfulness.) And she tried really hard to be careful after my mom died and not look at me funny or anything but it’s like she got it too well instead so when other people started forgetting she didn’t. I mean…well, I’ll give you an example. This happened only a few weeks before Eleanor got the okay to start “helping” at the zoo.

  You clean any of the Draco cages by halves, with you in one half and the Draco safely imprisoned in the other half, but odoratus is unique in that he and his harem and the juvvie males are not only behind bars but behind a glass partition as well: We say it’s for the tourists, but even us tough guys can only take so much. We also usually do odoratus in pairs to get it over faster. But we were doing it really macho that day, no masks and helmets (nice cool day with no breeze, you can just about get away with it with the overhead vent open, and you’re going to need a shower afterward anyway), so when this school group led by this thumping big assho—I mean nincompoop stopped to look at our big male odoratus who was busy flapping his ears (odoratus ears are huge and frilly, you know, the better to wave odoratus odor around, except, of course, when there’s a glass wall in the way) and showing off, right next door, we could hear exactly what he was saying to his students.

  He had one of those bellowing voices, like he was used to lecturing to thousands, so I mean we could hear exactly. The kids looked a little older than me, and that made it worse somehow. It should have been funny, the nincompoop baying and posturing and odoratus flapping and posturing back, but it wasn’t. I probably started to get sort of maroon, which could have just been the smell, but Katie knows me pretty well. “Steady, Jake,” she said.

  “It’s all crap,” I muttered, so he couldn’t possibly overhear me: it doesn’t matter how pissed off any of us Smokehill lifers get, we always think of how something’s going to look to the tourists. “And he’s pretending to teach those kids—”

  Katie’s usually brighter than this. Maybe the smell was getting to her. She got sympathetic. “Jake,” she said gently. “There’s a lot of crap out there. It’s not worth getting mad all the time, okay? You’ve got better things to do. Think about the gate money this group brought us, and forget the rest.”

  I stared at her, feeling as if my whole head was getting redder and redder, like if they turned the lights off you could have seen in the dark by the glow of my head. Why was she saying this to me? Why was it upsetting me so much that she was saying this to me? She was only telling the truth. Crap was crap and there’s a lot of it around. But it was probably crap that killed my mother—nobody will admit this but what probably happened is that the guide she’d been promised didn’t show and didn’t show, and she had to sit there watching her six-month sabbatical from Smokehill going for nothing (that much we knew for sure), and she found somebody else to take her and the somebody wasn’t good enough and either got her into trouble or let her get herself into trouble and then fled. But we’ll never know, okay?

  After Mom died, and then Snark, my dog, only seven months and twelve days later, everything started getting to me a lot worse than it used to. All the time I’d been growing up we were both the biggest and acre for acre the poorest national park in the country. Because of the Institute we’re sitting ducks for all the dragon nuts out there, and lots and lots of them come, and while most of them are happy with the diorama and the film clips and the bus tour, and are perfectly normal okay humans with like manners, way too many of them want to bother the staff of the Institute and waste our time arguing and complaining about the traveling restrictions inside the park and the information available at the tourist center and the brush-off they get from our Rangers.

  The staff of the Institute, what a joke. That’s my dad and a short-term graduate student or two. (Sometimes they’re only part-time. Their grant pays for them to live here but they spend most of their time writing their PhDs.) Since Mom died they haven’t even given him an extra graduate student. But these people don’t get it that we have to be this way, this strict and cautious, and we’re not ripping them off, we need their ticket fees to stay alive. And the government doesn’t get it either, which is why they never let us have enough money.

  But Mom’s the one who had the sense of humor about it and while she was alive I used to think our fruit loops were funny because she did. She’s the one who started calling them f.l.s. It was after Mom disappeared that the f.l.s. didn’t seem so funny any more and my brain started zoning out and I started playing a lot more Space Marauder or Annihilate than I ever used to, and then when they found her at the bottom of that ravine with her neck broken and only her teeth to tell them who she was and no way of ever knowing what she was doing dead at the bottom of a ravine because she was a very, very careful person but what would you do if the only half sabbatical you were going to get that decade was being wasted because some pighead administrator had screwed up? And then my dog died and I was kind of a mess for a while. You don’t need to know any more about that, except that as almost-fifteen-year-olds go I was maybe a little twitchier than some.

  All this and a lot more besides went bo
iling through my head for about the millionth time when Katie told me not to be so mad about all the crap there was around, while the nincompoop went on scrambling his students’ brains (actually he probably wasn’t—I don’t think many of them were paying attention), and where I stopped thinking was If I go berserk right now—in public—start hammering the walls with my shovel and screaming—in front of a bunch of sixteen-year-olds—I’ll never forgive her. Which was true, even if it wasn’t her fault. There was a lump like a burning basketball in my throat and I didn’t dare blink my eyes for fear of what would spill out. But even Eric’s eyes water sometimes when he’s doing odoratus.

  The main thing I was thinking was, It’s been two years. Almost three. And a little thing like Katie being the wrong kind of sympathetic at the wrong moment and I’m going to pieces.

  At last I managed to say, “The gate money wasn’t much. They’d’ve got a school discount.”

  Katie took this as a joke, and laughed, and the danger was over. I went back to scrubbing, although I probably took some of the floor with it.

  When I was younger I used to say that I didn’t understand why so many nuts had to be crazy over dragons. What about Yukon wolves, cougars, grizzly bears, ichthyosauruses, griffins, several kinds of shark, lions, tigers, and Caspian walruses, any of which will eat human when it’s available, and every one of which is on the next-step-extinction super-endangered list, partly, of course, because of their eating habits? But no. The biggest, fruitiest fruit loops go for dragons. Enter “dragon” at your favorite search site, and stand back. In fact, go make yourself a cup of coffee, because it’ll still be churning out hits by the time you get back. None of the rest of the critters comes close. Well, Nessie does pretty well, especially since they found her a couple of boyfriends in one of those Scandinavian lochs. Now everyone’s standing around waiting for her to reproduce. She hasn’t though. Maybe she’s a he after all, or the hes are shes too. It’s not only dragons we don’t know enough about.

  For some reason I used to like to bring this up at breakfast, about dragons and fruit loops. Mom would say, “Yes, dear.” Or, “Eat your oatmeal, dear.” Or, “Have you done your homework, dear?” This last was a trick question because I’m homeschooled. If I wanted to spend my life on a bus I could’ve just about made it in to Wilsonville and back every day, to their crummy little primary school, but I’d’ve had to go to boarding school once I graduated from sixth grade and there was no way. And never mind being the freak who would have to have special transportation out to Smokehill. Mom had tried to get me to go to Wilsonville at first but she gave up.

  (That made a precedent then, so when it was time for Martha to go to school she said she wanted to stay at Smokehill with me. Katie did some wavering and I know she and Mom talked about it a lot, using phrases like “social development” and “peer group.” But Martha in her quiet way can be pretty stubborn, and then it turned out she could already read—of course she could read, I taught her—so they were going to have to jump her a year, and where’s your social developmental peer group then? Especially because Martha was small for her age. At six you could like barely see her. So they let her stay home and it was pretty interesting because that’s when Katie and Mom came up with the bright idea of getting some of the Smokehill staff to teach us stuff, now there were two of us, so it was a “class.” So it wasn’t just Mom, Dad, the computer, and the boring out-of-date textbooks from Wilsonville we barely pretended to use.

  I suppose we learned more about the geology and ecology of Smokehill than we’d’ve got at Wilsonville, and we never got to the exports of Brazil and the national debt of Taiwan at all, but we learned what our Rangers taught us and how many kids learn the exports of Brazil and the national debt of Taiwan? Then it was Eleanor’s turn, and as it happens, there were some other kids at Smokehill then, and they were going to Wilsonville, but then they had been going to normal school when they lived in a normal place and they were so freaked out by Smokehill that being on a bus all day didn’t bother them, at least not in comparison to staying here all the time. But Eleanor wasn’t having any of that. Of course she could read by then too—she wasn’t a big reader, like Martha or me, but it was clear to her that one of the ways to be older was to learn to read, so she learned—but that was just a way of making it easier for the grown-ups to cave. I don’t think turning Eleanor loose in a regular school would have been good for her social development anyway. I think if she’d got a taste for playground domination at an early age the world wouldn’t be safe by the time she was a teenager.)

  But at least Mom would answer me, even at 7 A.M. Dad was always buried in his latest conference abstract or the forty thousand pages of fax I’d lain awake the night before listening to churn through the machine, usually from somebody from some country that Dad only half knew the language of, so the table would be covered with grammars and dictionaries too. Mom read just as much as Dad did, but she never forgot there was a world outside Smokehill. Outside dragons. In some ways I take after my dad. But it was nice to have someone who’d talk to me at breakfast.

  Dad has tried to learn to talk at breakfast. It was pretty awful till I hit on the brilliant plan of trying to read some of the stuff he reads. I don’t get most of it (even when it’s in English—have you ever tried to read a professional monograph from some thumping big scientific conference? You’re lucky if you can get past the title) but it gave us something to pretend to have a conversation about. And I got credit for trying. (See: extra slack for when I screw up elsewhere.)

  But too many of these people who get hung up on dragons don’t know what a dragon is. A Yukon wolf is a Yukon wolf, which is to say two hundred odd pounds of tawny hair and long teeth, and you’re not going to mix it up with a chipmunk. Calling Draco odoratus a dragon just because of the Draco is as stupid as arguing that a chipmunk is a small striped wolf that eats acorns.

  But you can’t say that, and there’s only so many ways to say “that’s a very interesting theory” before even an f.l. catches on that you’re blowing ’em off. And when a fruit loop decides he or she hasn’t been treated with due respect and consideration by the staff of the Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Studies, the f.l. writes to his or her congress-person and says our weeny miserable funding should be cut because we’re not doing what we’re paid to do with their, the taxpayers’, money, which is study dragons, and they can prove this because we don’t agree with them.

  And we live here, Dad and me, right here in the Institute, like I told you—the rest of the staff are either in the Rangers’ barracks or they have their own little houses, there’s a sort of little compound set back behind a lot of spruce and aspen, away from the tourist sprawl. (A few commute from Wilsonville but mostly only part-timers.) Sometimes I go hide out with Martha and Eleanor—at least Eleanor has some sense, even if she’s not real open to negotiation with alternative points of view about things she doesn’t agree with, like bedtime for seven-year-olds. (I’m a useless babysitter, but that doesn’t stop Katie using me when she’s got an evening meeting. Admin usually has evening meetings because during the day everyone is chasing tourists.) Actually I can’t wait till she gets old enough to tackle the f.l.s on their own ground but that’s still a little in the future. No matter how good at arguing you are it’s easier if you’re taller than the other guy’s belt buckle.

  Most of the f.l. crap lands on Dad now—a few of ’em talk to the Rangers, but most of ’em want someone they can call “Doctor”—and Dad tries to keep me out of the way because since I’m a kid I have to be even more polite to them. When Mom was around it was different—at our best we’d had Dad, Mom, and three graduate students, two of whom already had their first PhDs and therefore also answered to “Doctor”—but that was a long time ago. Dad’s the only real scientist we’ve got now and he shouldn’t have to waste his time.

  The ones who think that the peculiarities of dragon biology and natural history can be explained by the fact that dragons are an alien
species dropped off by a passing spaceship a few million years ago are so far out there themselves that sometimes they’re kind of interesting. I’ve had good conversations with some of them. I’ve had a lot of good conversations with ordinary tourists, people who just think dragons are really cool and get a bit gabbly when they’re actually here at Smokehill and want to talk to somebody, which I perfectly understand. The f.l.s that are a pain are the ones who want to drone on about all the Dracos that AREN’T DRAGONS. You could say it’s our own fault because of the “Integrated” in our name, but that’s nothing to do with us. The director before Dad and Mom almost went under, taking Smokehill with him, and the only way he’d managed to dig himself out was by agreeing to have a sort of zoo of all the other Dracos, and call the Institute Integrated. But there is only one real dragon; there’s nothing to integrate, not really.

  The Institute is near the front gate of Smokehill, of course, the front gate having been put there at the spot nearest to a road and a town, although the road is only two lanes and the town is only Wilsonville. Since Mom and Dad came and the zoo was built we’ve got popular enough that there are eight motels, two of them like shopping malls all by themselves, and four gas stations between us and Wilsonville, and the track in from the main road is paved and wide enough for buses and trucks. Having them breathing down our necks like this (in the summer the first coachloads are already there waiting when we open at 8 A.M.) is a drag but it does mean we get regular deliveries of gas to run our generators. I admit I wouldn’t like living without computers and even hot baths (occasionally). We’re festooned with solar panels but they aren’t enough. Too many trees and too many clouds, and solar panels don’t seem to like the dragon fence much either. (Our solar-powered tourist buses do most of their tanking up in the parking lot outside the fence.) There’s the barracks and the staff houses and a few permanent camps farther in, but that’s about all in terms of human stuff. It’s enough in terms of upkeep to get through our winters.