I don’t know how everybody else stood it, everybody else who knew about Lois, even if it wasn’t them she couldn’t be more than three feet away from all the time. Being a Space Cadet was also kind of a help, for me, being so out of it.
Anyway. However boring—and painful—scrubbing up to go to the Institute was, I had to do it. I had to go on leaving Lois by herself so she could be left (of course I worried about stressing her till she had a heart attack or whatever dragons have, and died; from my perspective at the time we could have afforded to lose a few staff members, they were only human) and I had to start going to the Institute as soon as I could and keep going because it would have looked even weirder than it did—about my conversion to early Rangerhood I mean—if I never came. And if the “nightmares” hadn’t cleared off pretty soon, they’d’ve had a psychologist in to test me for echoes, and I’d probably’ve resonated like a cave full of bats. Besides, there were the school testers and I really didn’t want to get on their suspicious side. So I went up to the Institute every day and tried to be as conspicuous as possible so it seemed as if I was up there more.
My time at the zoo and the orphanage of course got cut down to almost nothing. Eric was really pissed off (surprise) and tried to make out that I didn’t really want to be a Ranger, I was just looking for a way to get out of doing any work, i.e., at his zoo, because I’m a teenage boy and teenage boys are always lazy and dishonest. (Made you wonder what kind of a teenager he’d been.) But hindsight even makes Eric being his normal super-avoid-worthy self look different. Eric was the head of the zoo and the orphanage—if anyone would know about an orphan baby dragon, it would be him—and all he was doing was kvetching about that worthless lump Jake…like maybe he had a suspicion it would be a good idea to distract anyone from wondering if the worthless lump had a reason for disappearing, besides being a lazy and dishonest teenage boy?
I did start cleaning odorata’s cage again. The smell was still awful but it wasn’t as overwhelming as when I lived like a human being rather than an australiensis mom, and as another sign that I had lost my mind I began to notice how beautiful the damn critters are, no matter how they smelled: The parrot-green and crimson-and-yellow frills on the big male are really amazing, and if you can hold your breath long enough to appreciate it the way he flaps ’em around is almost choreography. And I was used to taking really violent showers these days so the prospect of another one after I took the last radioactive odorata barrowload to the pit where we buried the stuff was no big deal.
It’s funny though—another thing that’s funny—I got all kind of loosened up about all the things in the zoo. They were what they were and they were probably pretty interesting, even if they weren’t dragons. I almost missed having some herpetologist around studying the Effect of the Tourist Gaze on Draco somethingorotherensis. Hey, you lizards, how’s it going? Eaten any nice celery/rhubarb/beetles/snails lately? But the zoo was happening on another planet, which was almost like relaxing—I’m only a visitor and boy do I not belong here.
But not belonging here was an advantage, dealing with f.l.s. I’d smile at them and let what they said (because smiling only encourages them) roll over me. I found myself nodding calmly to a major f.l. one day from sylvestris’ cage, saying mmm hmm as I kept on with my shovel. He was talking about how something or other, I don’t remember which one he liked, is the real dragon, and most of that stuff at the tourist center about australiensis is just hooey to pull the tourists in, everyone knows australiensis is extinct, because when’s the last time anyone’s ever seen one, and it wasn’t like that even when it was alive…but then his wife interrupted to say that something had killed that poor man and it was criminal the way the Institute was flogging the story about his death to draw media attention when any half intelligent person knew that there’d been some human screwup and they just didn’t want to admit it and…
I was starting to straighten up over my wheelbarrow and reconnect with my surroundings and I don’t know what might have happened next but Eric came along and snarled at me to stop standing around wasting time when I was supposed to be cleaning that cage and then the f.l. and his wife turned on him and said that that poor boy should be taken away from this den of scoundrels and liars and given to good honest folk who would try to reverse the effects of the warped and wicked Smokehill brainwashing…but I’d picked up the handles on my wheelbarrow and was trundling as fast as possible out of earshot, and I hope Eric had a good time. Those letters to congresspeople about cutting off our funding never mention Eric, so he must actually know how to weasel. More hidden depths in our Eric.
I might still have gone stir crazy, trapped in the cabin with increasingly hyperactive Lois and only brief nerve-twangling paroles up at the Institute and the zoo—the dragon dreams, for better or worse, did begin to tail off as Lois started climbing out of the sling more and I started going to the Institute regularly—but then for a while the more active she got the harder it was to leave her because she wouldn’t stay buried in her nice smelly sheets any more. For a few days there this looked like it was going to be Jake’s Last Straw and one day as I was trying to leave and I’d only just got her buried and (apparently) settled but she’d started to cry before I got to the door, and I don’t remember what I said but it was in the “aaaaugh” category.
Grace said mildly, “Children are like that sometimes,” and I said, “But she’s not a child, she’s a dragon, and what if—” And Grace said, “Every mother says, ‘But my child….’ That’s how it works.”
“But I’m not her mother,” I wailed, hearing in my own voice that I sounded like a baby myself, crying for a toy or an ice cream. “That’s the point.”
“You’re the only mother she’s got,” Grace said, smiling, “just like Eric was the only mother Julie had.” Julie was the first, and only, Yukon wolf cub any human had ever successfully raised and successfully released into the wild—without getting eaten in the process, that is. Even Yukon wolves thought twice about Eric, although Julie had left a few marks. “Go on, Jake,” said Grace. “I’m here. Lois will be fine.”
I wanted to say, How do you know she’ll be fine, but I didn’t. I went. And she was fine. Even if that was when I had to start really working at wearing her out so she’d actually sleep while I was gone.
So what is the point of living on the edge of five million acres of wilderness if you spend all your time inside four walls? But Billy took me out with him every chance he could invent, and while as Lois got bigger walking around carrying her got harder, Billy was really clever with his sling making and at the point I really wasn’t going to be able to carry her in front any more she hoisted herself up another of those developmental stages, and agreed to ride on my back, and even more exciting, over the T-shirt. I think this must have been the moment when she would have started looking out of her mom’s pouch sometimes, if her life had been normal, because she used to look over my shoulder (and snorkel around in my hair, making it stick together with smelly dragon spit) and (except for the spit) that was kind of fun, although it meant Billy had to be even more careful where he took me. Having a large bulgy restless stomach was bad enough, having an obviously exotic animal riding in your backpack is something else. Although I don’t believe anyone could have recognized Lois as a dragon yet (she looked more like the Slug That Ate Schenectady, only lumpier), still, she was obviously something pretty strange, and anyone who caught us would have wanted to know what, and why whatever it was wasn’t safely at the zoo in a cage being studied.
So anyway that was my life. Meanwhile…
The very very first instant thing that had happened after Billy gave the bad news over the two-way from Northcamp, is that our rules for anyone getting normal permission to enter the park to study something, any farther than the usual short, guided tourist treks, suddenly got impossible—even the zoo lizard note-takers got banned. You have a certificate signed by God that you can come in? Sorry. God’s not good enough.
At first since
as I’ve told you, I wasn’t into the big picture about anything, I just thought “some good out of a whole cheezing lot of bad” that we weren’t going to have nosy prying researcher types around at all. But we’d only ever had a few researcher types around at a time, and their nosying and prying was usually pretty focused—and actually some of them were pretty nice too—and instead we had all these investigator people hanging around wanting to, well, investigate, and there were a lot of them, and none of them were nice, and they wanted to investigate EVERYTHING, so we didn’t finish ahead after all.
Almost everything. At least they didn’t want to investigate the Chief Ranger’s house and even the Institute director’s nutcase son was mostly only interesting as a side issue, of how living in the wilderness was bad for children, I guess. Because I was a kid—and because of the nightmares and what the cadaver removal guys had said—and Billy had somehow managed to subtract the “solo” out of it so most people kind of thought he’d been there too—they didn’t insist on interviewing me all over the place. Some nice-cop type took my statement once and then they left me alone. Maybe I put over “pathetic idiot” really well too and they decided they weren’t going to get any more out of me. Although that meant they immediately wanted to take their high-tech magnifying glasses and deerstalker hats (ha ha ha) and stuff into the park where it happened, but they were going to do that anyway.
A long time later I asked Dad if they hadn’t thought of pretending not to know anything about the poacher or the dead dragon—Pine Tor is twenty miles from Northcamp, and Billy had only officially scheduled us as far as Northcamp. Dad said that of course they had but had rejected it. In the first place, we don’t like lying. You have to work too hard on keeping your story straight if you’re lying. (We know.) But the big issue was, as always, PR.
Some of the other big predators bag the occasional human in some of the other wilderness parks, but that’s okay or something (except to the bagged guy’s friends and family), part of the natural order out in the wild, the risk you take by going there, yatta yatta. Dragons are different. Like those two speleologists who disappeared on their way to the Bonelands twenty years ago—you know about them, right?—are still getting brought up pretty much every time Smokehill gets mentioned in the national press, and the point is they disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to them. Quick—how many people have been taken out by grizzlies—are known to have been taken out by grizzlies—in the last twenty years? You don’t know, do you? But it’s more than two. Maybe it would be easier if more people did deny that our dragons exist.
We couldn’t risk it that the villain hadn’t told someone what he was going to do, and then having to arrange our faces in the appropriate expressions of surprise and consternation when someone came to ask where he was. Which in fact he had done—left a record of what he was planning to do, I mean. (“I’m going to break into Smokehill and ruin everything because I’m a sick, greedy bastard.”) With his girlfriend. Can you imagine a guy like that having a girlfriend? But our Rangers cover eastern Smokehill pretty thoroughly, and a dead human might have turned up anyway (even if the dragon was ash by then), and it would be major bad press for us if it didn’t because nobody but someone who lives there realizes what “wilderness” really means, and, as I keep banging on about, everybody’s really jumpy about our wilderness because it has dragons in it.
So anyway we had the investigative police-type people and the investigative scientist-type people and the investigative tech-type people—and a few investigative spy-type people, who tried so badly to look like the rest of ’em that even I noticed: I hadn’t realized dragons counted as intrigue—and of course the investigative journalists who were a total pain because if it wasn’t bad it wasn’t good copy.
Especially now that a dragon had killed someone (circumstances irrelevant) there was no way anyone, which is to say investigative creeps, was going to be allowed into the park without an escort, and Dad did manage to prevent our being swamped with the National Guard right away (that came later), which left the Rangers, and then some high-ranking jerk insisted that as a condition to not being swamped by the National Guard, all the escorts carry guns. If anyone had stopped to think about it they would have noticed that the grenade launchers and bazookas and things that the poacher had been carrying hadn’t done him any good…. Anyway this made even our Rangers cranky, and it takes a lot to make our Rangers cranky, but being investigator-minders meant that they weren’t doing any of the stuff they felt was their real job, about keeping an eye on the park. And the dragons. And Rangers only carry guns if they want fresh meat for dinner. Not to mention what a big rifle weighs.
But since the fence went up, and Smokehill became Smokehill, we hadn’t had any successful burglars, thieves or murderers. At least we didn’t know of any—the two guys from twenty years ago still haven’t turned up. That’s an eighty-six-year clean record. Till now. And the first conclusion everyone had jumped to was that someone must have finally managed to steal the fence specs—that that had to have been how our poacher got in. And if it had happened once presumably it could happen again. The thieves might even be out there flogging them on eBay. Speaking of feeling insecure. We’d trusted that fence. The techies were working like blazes to change the waves or fields or the particle flow or some damn thing or things so that if there were stolen specs out there they wouldn’t work any more, but the fence had been hard enough to invent in the first place….
So why we didn’t have staff dropping like hailstones in a spring blizzard with weird stress diseases and panic attacks and stuff I have no idea. But we didn’t. We all hung in there. Even Dad. He’s a great guy, my dad, even if he tries to hide it sometimes. Sometimes I think about those first months with Lois, before we were like used to unbearable strain, and I think Dad and I probably never looked each other in the face that whole time. Although Dad came down and had dinner with Billy and Grace and me (and Lois) almost every night. And started a joke about how he’d let me sign on as an apprentice when he found out I’d be living with Billy so he could sponge up more of Grace’s cooking. So at least he got something good out of it.
But somewhat strange behavior on the part of the only child of the widowed head of the Institute wasn’t too much commented on. I heard one cop investigator say to another one, “You know I think this has addled Dr. Mendoza. He’s pretty well turned his only kid over to the Rangers, you heard about that?”
I was sorting postcards on my knees behind the counter in the gift shop. This was the sort of thing I did now, to make myself noticeable, instead of mooching around in tourist-free zones. You wouldn’t have caught me dead offering to sort postcards in the gift shop before Lois. And furthermore I’d got there on time. I’d said I’d be in at three, and here it was 3:05, and I was already here with a lapful of boxes.
In this case while postcard-sorting was making me very noticeable to Peggy—and to Dan, who’d almost tripped over me when he came to steal some pens, since tourists are always walking off with the info booth’s pens—it was making me invisible to the cops, although I’d seen them come in, through the gap in the counter so the staff can get in and out. I looked out of the corners of my eyes and could see Peggy wearing a very fierce, un-gift-shop-like frown (mustn’t scare the customers). But I could imagine her trying to decide whether to tell me to stand up or the cops to shut up. I stopped peering out of the corners of my eyes and looked up at her. She looked down at me and I shook my head. Her frown deepened (any deeper and her face would fold up like a fan), but she didn’t say anything.
The other one said, “The kid’s apprenticed. Nothing wrong with that.”
“The kid’s fourteen. Three years too young.”
Just by the way, I’d turned fifteen by then. Only two years too young. I sat there staring at the photo of Indigo Ridge. It’s one of our best sellers, for good reason. I thought, They could at least find out my name, and use it.
“I think if I were Dr. Mendoza I might think my only child w
as safer in the Rangers’ hands too.”
“If I were Dr. Mendoza I’d think my only child was safer outside the park somewhere. Send him to live with relatives and go to a normal school. The fence gives me the heebie-jeebies. Have you noticed what it does to the sunlight? At least we don’t have to stay here, and I can get some real daylight with my coffee in the morning before we have to report in.”
Oh, good. Some really balanced individual who can get claustrophobia in five million acres. Our fence only does something funny to sunlight if you stand next to it all the time.
“He probably doesn’t want to send him away because he’d never see him.”
“But the Rangers are crazy. They seem to think this park and the damned dragons are some kind of sacred trust or something.”
Peggy’s head snapped up at that. She’s still only an apprentice, and she’s black and grew up in Chicago, but in a way that shows how much she wants to be here and a Ranger. She’d survived the vetting to get here and after three years she was still here. I didn’t hear the cops apologize, but they did suddenly move out of earshot.
It is a sacred trust, I thought fiercely. It is. And then the box of Indigo Ridge fell off my lap and two hundred postcards plunged across the floor.
As I said, mostly I was preoccupied. But even I could see all these flaming (I wish) investigator people trying to find more people like Nancy and Evan who weren’t even apprentices, trying to get them to dish some dirt, but people who aren’t crazy (yeah, okay, crazy) about the place don’t work here. Eric, who hates everybody who doesn’t have fur or feathers or scales, hates everybody outside of Smokehill worse than everybody inside, so even he wasn’t any use to them. (In fact he was so nasty that they decided he had something to hide and began to investigate him. At the time I was hoping they’d find out he’d escaped from jail for extortion or bigamy or something which was why he was willing to disappear in a place like Smokehill but no such luck.) I complained to Grace about the way they acted like escapees from a bad secret-conspiracy movie but she only laughed. At least she could still laugh. “If you’re an investigator, you want there to be things to investigate,” she said. Yes. Exactly. They might find out there were.
Dragon Haven Page 12
