Our Friends had made a biiiig fuss about the lightning rifle and the grenades, which is why the Searles hadn’t closed us down yet, but the Searles said that he would of course have taken gear to protect himself in case of an unprovoked attack…blah blah blah…. The forensic morgue guys had even proved that he’d died instantly when she flamed him, so he had to have shot her first. But…
Several eons ago I’d been hanging around the ticket booth bugging Katie who has always been really good about being bugged (even before Eleanor was born). Snark was with me because he always was with me. I had him lying down. My parents had hammered it into me that if I was going to have a dog I had to train him because of all the tourists (and, of course, the park itself). This was fine with me. It’s not like I wanted to play football with my pals every afternoon after school. So I trained Snark to do all kinds of stuff. Lying down for a few minutes while I gave Katie a hard time was nothing to Snark.
There were only a few tourists around and I wasn’t paying attention. Snark was behind me, and Katie’s view was blocked by the corner of the ticket booth. I turned around in time to see some kid only a little younger than me trying to poke Snark in the eye—I don’t know, to get a reaction or something?—because Snark would have been ignoring anybody who was a stranger. Several things happened at once. I saw Snark jerk his head away from the poking finger, the kid said, “You’re a really stupid dog, aren’t you?” and poked at his other eye, I yelled, “Hey!” and Snark jerked his head again…and growled.
And the mother of this kid suddenly appeared from nowhere—where had she been a minute ago?—shrieking that this was a vicious dog and we were to destroy it at once and it was savaging her only child in a national park, and she was going to write to her congressman—I was screaming that her kid had been trying to poke my dog in the eye, and Katie was trying to shut us both up. Katie lied and said that she’d seen the kid—she knew Snark, it wasn’t really like lying—the mother said she didn’t believe it, I was nearly in tears—I now had Snark standing beside me with my hand around his collar—and it might have been a whole lot worse than it was except the kid tried to sneak around and give Snark a kick while everyone else was busy yelling at each other, and not only Katie but a couple of other Rangers who’d been drawn by the commotion saw it. The mother saw it too although she denied it. She didn’t deny it convincingly however and when Katie told her she had better take her freaky kid and leave, she actually went.
People are amazing. They’ll do stuff you can’t believe anyone would do and not believe stuff that is under their noses. You can’t trust them and you certainly can’t reason with them. The laws are schizophrenic because people are schizophrenic. So even if the Friends of Smokehill might win against the Searles about their should-have-been-drowned-at-birth son because dragons are rare and endangered and romantic (so long as you forget they have pouches), you still had to assume we wouldn’t survive the discovery of Lois. We’d not survive even worse if it came out about the eczema. It wouldn’t matter that it wasn’t her fault and that I didn’t mind (much). It would make her a bad dragon—and it would make all the grown-ups around me bad grown-ups for letting it happen. And she was a bad dragon anyway—look at her homicidal mom—and we were bad (and crazy and dangerous) for having sided with the dragons against our own kind by trying to save her.
Or maybe when Lois grew up crippled or something I’d be the bad human who raised her wrong. You just don’t know how other humans are going to react. And there were of course so many ways I could be raising her wrong. It was like even in my own head I couldn’t answer all the people who would tell me I was, if they knew I was trying to. ALL ways were ways for me to be raising her wrong.
…And at this point my synapses all snap simultaneously and one of the emergency circuits cuts in and diverts me onto a familiar worry loop before I self-destruct.
…For example Lois ate everything now, at least she did if I didn’t stop her, everything from raw spinach (ewwwww) to cream puffs with ice cream and chocolate sauce. Grace made cream puffs to die for, I admit, but you don’t necessarily expect a dragon to get the details. The funny thing about Lois is that unlike a dog she never went around nose to ground vacuum-cleaning the floor or the yard or anything. What she did was watch us and eat whatever we ate. She didn’t get many vegetables till she started watching Grace and Billy and not just me. But she’d eaten apples and popcorn almost from the beginning which seem even less dragony than vegetables. (You know the business of carnivores getting their greens from what the herbivore they’re eating has in its stomach. And a lot of dogs like graze. Snark didn’t eat grass so much as moss. He loved moss. Given the landscape around the Institute he had plenty of opportunity.) If she’d ever learned to open the refrigerator door we would have been in big trouble. Fortunately she didn’t. (I did keep her away from the cream puffs, after the first time, when I hadn’t realized how sneaky she could be: Chocolate is poisonous to dogs, for example, and sugar isn’t good for anybody, and Lois had enough marks against her already.)
And have I mentioned she snored?
But the point was that I was losing my nerve. The emergency-worry shunt was beginning to overload too because it was getting used so often. I began to feel like me turning seventeen was some kind of deadline—and the ads the Searles were paying for were so everywhere on TV now that Martha told me even Eleanor didn’t want to watch TV any more. (Billy and Grace didn’t have a TV. The farther-out Rangers’ cabins mostly couldn’t pick up the signal that the Institute’s Godzilla-being-attacked-by-a-flying-saucer special unique aerial/dish thingummy somehow squiggled through the fence.)
I was making up the deadline part, of course. Me turning seventeen—so long as the school equivalency went through okay—was going to make the game we were playing a little easier. But it wouldn’t change the fact that the game was a deadly one. And you do start going nuts under pressure eventually. Not to mention the increasing difficulty of keeping a perpetually hungry, German-Shepherd-sized, more or less untrained and so far as we knew untrainable, very-high-activity-and-curiosity-level illegal animal, who might start setting fire to things any day now and whose wings were finally beginning to sprout, cooped up in a small house.
And it’s a lie that Lois was untrainable. It’s just that the idea of training usually means that you’re supposed to end up where, if you ask someone to do something, they do it. If it’s a dog it’s like “sit” or “leave it.” If it’s a kid it’s like “do your homework” or “turn the TV down.” Or training like teaching a kid to get dressed in the morning, till he does it himself. Or a dog to go outside and not on the floor. I didn’t housebreak Lois, she did it herself, which Billy and Dad and I sat around agreeing probably means that dragons have dens where they raise their kids, even after the kids climb out of the pouch.
I forgot to tell you, Lois doing it outdoors began the era of amazing numbers of outdoor barbecues, to give some disguise—and some excuse—for the latest eye-wateringly peculiar smells that hung around Billy and Grace’s cottage. We were such barbecue freaks we were even out there in the winter and, trust me, at Smokehill, that’s wacko. We did stop as soon as it got cold enough that even hot dragonlet poop froze pretty much instantly…but Billy had to help dig the trench next spring when it all melted—and we dug that trench fast.
Lois in the winter was a hoot, by the way. By her first winter she was way active enough that I’d’ve had to get her outdoors somehow to run some of her energy off anyway, but she was little enough and short-legged enough that without her body temperature acting as a natural snowplow it might have been a problem. As it was I worried about anybody who didn’t know about her wondering about the weird snow mazes around the cottage, where Lois had melted some extremely bizarre trails. She didn’t run, really, she cavorted. And I had to cavort along with her or with my pathetic human heat production I’d’ve frozen into a Jakecicle.
By her second winter her neck plates gave me enough purchase that I could gra
b one and be kind of towed along, all bent over of course, and more clumsy than you can imagine. But laughing helps keep you warm too. The only drawback was that she ate even more after she’d melted a lot of snow. Just like in Old Pete’s diaries about dragons in winter. Also just like Old Pete’s diaries she showed no inclination to hibernate.
It was also pretty interesting—you do get a little claustrophobic here in the winter. Even being closed to tourists for three months doesn’t quite offset this, although, believe me, it helps. And the main Institute building is pretty big, especially when it isn’t full of tourists. (Snark and I used to have great games in the empty tourist hall.) But you miss being able to go outdoors easily—or being able to breathe without your nose gluing itself together and your lungs going into shock—or having to reshovel the path you just shoveled the last time you had to hack your way down to the zoo or whatever—everybody does a lot of shoveling, besides the big plows that fit on the front of some of the jeeps—and although the fence slows some of the wind down, it’ll still kill you if it can, and the big winter storms are just scary. How much bigger than you are are things like weather? A WHOLE LOT BIGGER. I guess you can ignore this most of the time if you live in a city, but you don’t forget it for a minute in a place like Smokehill, and it sort of comes after you in winter.
But having an igniventator-equipped companion had a really funny effect on me—suddenly I didn’t care about winter. If I felt chilly I could just warm myself against Lois for a moment; leaning over her to breathe would even unstick my nose. Except for the eating, and the relative increase of difficulty in cavorting due to whatever quantity of snow had to be melted first, the cold didn’t seem to faze Lois at all. Although I admit that not having up to several thousand visitors a day the way it was in peak season, any one of whom might manage to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, might have had something to do with my suddenly more liberal attitude toward deep winter.
But even Billy’s incense and me burying everything I found wasn’t enough, we needed to add charcoal briquettes to the bouquet. But while Lois getting it that the entire cottage was a no-go area might mean that she was preprogrammed by thousands of years of dragons raising their dragonlets in dens, I wondered if that was all it was. Because Lois was so amazing a mimic. When we were out in the park we all went outdoors so there was a precedent. I’m just grateful I didn’t have to teach her to use the toilet. But the mimic stuff gave me an idea about training. Which is how I trained her to fetch sticks—by fetching them myself first. Getting her to pay attention to me and what I was doing was never a problem. (Pity I couldn’t teach her to do French, or Latin.) I thought of fetching sticks because it was something I thought would translate—I wasn’t sure I could get “sit” across to something shaped like Lois, and while I tried to train her to lie down, she didn’t seem to think she had to do this unless I stayed lying down too. That’s the thing—I never felt like Lois’ owner, or boss. Mom, maybe. But how many little kids actually do what their moms tell them?
So I went to Billy and told him I wanted a project that would take me into the park and let me—us—stay there for a few months. As near to uninterrupted as we could manage. I’d still be under seventeen, but as I put it to Billy (I’d thought this out pretty carefully), the reason we were going to give was that I wanted to be sure that this Ranger thing was what I really wanted to do before I turned seventeen and signed the contract. Between having to stay home and keep Lois company and the rising worry level, I’d gone on acing every test the school guys could throw at me, and they’d been throwing them at me harder because of the early-acceptance Ranger thing that I think they suspected was undue influence or something. Which it was, of course, but not from the direction they were looking in. Also because I kept proving I could, which seemed really unfair. If the rat can learn to find the food at the end of this maze, let’s try a harder maze. Like just for laughs. I think school-equivalency bozos have too much time on their hands.
Why I still wanted to take all these stupid languages I was so bad at if I was going to be a Ranger no one ever asked me (if I’d wanted to make myself useful as a foreign tourist guide I should have been choosing Swahili or Catalan, the Rangers’ve already got most of the big languages covered)—but then I never let on how much I sweated those tests. And I guess it was a way for me (and maybe Dad) to pretend I still might get a PhD some day.
We cooked it up that Lois and I would stay at Westcamp, which was the smallest and the least used of the permanent camps, and study the incidence and patterning of found dragon scales, and any other signs of dragons, in that area. There’d already been dragon tracking studies at South, Limestone and High camps—North and East were too close to the Institute to bother—but nobody had bothered at Westcamp either even though it should have been the right general area. But there were too few dragon sightings there and grant writers had to go for numbers because the money givers tend to understand numbers.
But Dad had actually wanted a dragon survey done at Westcamp for years because what signs and sightings there were were odd, even for dragons, and that was why Westcamp had been built, and Dad might have done the study himself if Mom hadn’t died. Maybe that was why he let Billy and me talk him into letting me go. Maybe he’d been trying to get used to the fact that I really wasn’t going to be totally answerable to him any more soon enough anyway—and while Dad’s a control freak he tries to be a fair control freak, and he would have been thinking about this. And not letting me out of his sight just wasn’t an issue after Lois, it no longer existed in the new universe with Lois in it.
Maybe he’d been braced for my asking to do something much worse. I’d thought of worse things, certainly. I’d thought of trying to go to Silver Valley where we all knew there were dragons, and trying to introduce Lois there, like taking your kid to the local playground to meet other kids. I doubted that would work, and I also—selfishly if you like—didn’t want to die, which seemed to me a possible side effect. I know I keep saying dragons don’t kill people, but don’t forget we’d just killed not just any old few dragons but a mom and her babies, and even if this didn’t piss them off it could certainly have made them twitchy.
Because the dragons seemed to have noticed the poacher too, or the death of Lois’ mother, after all. They’re only animals, right? What really would they notice? Everybody dies, even dragons. I might keep telling myself that the dragon dreams were only dreams and what I remembered about Lois’ mom was just some side effect of how awful that had been…but I kept remembering and I kept having the dreams and they had an effect. So I didn’t seem to have the luxury of the old they’re-only-animals thing much any more. What I kept thinking instead was stuff like if there’d been any other dragons on the spot, presumably they’d’ve taken Lois with them before I got there—perhaps if they’d got there soon enough they’d have rescued some of her brothers and sisters too—and all these thoughts brought me back to the pissed-off place. The weird thing, it seemed to me, was that it seemed to have taken almost two years for them to notice.
But the dragon movements that the Rangers could read had changed…and then a busload of tourists had been thrilled, almost into seizures, by the sight of a real live dragon flying by. It was so far away it was only just recognizable—but there really isn’t anything that looks like a dragon except a dragon, if it’s big enough to be even a speck with wings. A weirdly long and humpy speck with fantastically long wings, even as a speck.
And no ordinary tour-bus tourists had ever seen a live dragon before in the history of Smokehill.
It was a headline in our local papers and it made the national wire service. (Martha told me that the Searles tried to insist that we’d faked it somehow to get the public on our side, but this time the public definitely liked our version better.) As a result we got even more tourists, and we were already getting more tourists because of the Searles and their vendetta. But while a bunch of tourists seeing a dragon really made our numbers soar, which we were just
about able to deal with and the money was nice, that made it even more urgent that Lois and I get as far away from the tourist area of Smokehill as possible.
I said we were just about able to deal with the latest increase in numbers. Usually we have like one person a year who manages to get away from their guide and start poking around where they’re not wanted. In the two months after the tourists saw the dragon we had three escapees, and one of them (from where Nate had found him) must have gone right past our cottage. What if it had been one of the afternoons that Lois and I were outdoors training each other to fetch sticks and roll over and play dead? And talk. It wasn’t. But it might have been. It was right after that that I asked Billy to help us think up a project to take us deep into the park.
The last week at the Institute I was jumping at shadows and I had to control myself really hard when I went down to the zoo because Eric knew I was leaving and while I suppose the idea that you’re going to be stuck cleaning odorata’s cage more often—I was cleaning it twice a week again by then—is enough to put anyone in a bad mood, Eric on a tear makes Krakatoa look like a hibachi. I was having a lot of trouble not giving him any kind of reaction that would please him. At least I could scowl because since I was a teenage boy my face was expected to be paralyzed in a sullen adult-defying expression till my twentieth birthday. But I really wanted to tell him to get the hell off me and then what to do with himself, only he would have enjoyed that. He got on my nerves so much I nearly put a pitchfork through my foot, which would have been really great, since it would have stopped me from taking Lois to Westcamp, and that made me even madder.
Dragon Haven Page 16
