“They”—and furthermore who the hell was they?—“feel that we who…live here, or who have been at Smokehill a long time, may have grown negligent through familiarity.”
I didn’t dare say what I was thinking: Do they think I might need rescuing? Because it had occurred to me that Dad didn’t merely sound like he was assuming there might be someone monitoring our two-ways. He sounded like there was someone in the room with him, listening intently to every word.
“Your…youth has also been a source of concern.”
“Oh,” I said. It probably wasn’t the moment to remind him that I had turned seventeen, which probably wasn’t that much protection anyway.
After another pause Dad said, “Jake. Be careful. Be as careful as you possibly can.”
I almost laughed but I was too scared. Be careful about what. “I will.”
“I’ll talk to you tonight,” said Dad, and the two-way went dead.
I’d spent the last two years so paranoid that my brain went into killer overdrive like Dr. Frankenstein closing the circuit when the lightning storm struck his tower. And I was probably moving like Boris Karloff when I walked away from the table where the two-way sat. And that was exactly the problem: I was freaked, all right, but I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to do about it. Sure, I could round Lois up and make a dash for it, but a dash where?
Even in the middle of summer you don’t want to pack into Smokehill without knowing where you’re going and what you’re going to do when you get there. Even supposing I took the rifle with me on the assumption I could use it to feed us. You can get sudden, savage, dangerous storms any time of year in Smokehill, including midsummer—we’d had a Ranger concussed by a fist-sized hailstone once when I was a kid, and another one nearly drowned in a flash flood only a few years ago, and as I keep saying our Rangers are good—and Westcamp was the last, the farthest into nowhere, of the human-built-and-maintained full-service generator-op shelters in Smokehill. Although the cave network all over Smokehill would probably make any number of Neanderthal tribes delirious with joy I was a spoiled modern human and while a cave was better than nothing—especially, say, with lightning stabbing around looking for Boris Karloff—I liked the four walls, roof, and closing door system. Cougars and bears lived in caves, and I didn’t want to disturb any tenants either.
And what happened if Gulp followed us? Or if she decided I was running away from her? Trying to take Lois away from her?
Also I didn’t think there was any way to wipe out the signs that I had been here at Westcamp with some, um, large animal. Even if it took them a while to figure out that if it was this big hairy secret it just had to be a baby dragon—and they’d have to be great creative thinkers to get that far, and I don’t think they’d have been helped much by what there was to look at. Lois wasn’t shedding yet and baby dragon dung doesn’t look like anything we’re trained to look for when we’re trying (or pretending) to track dragon movements (especially a baby dragon fed on canned hash, rabbit soup, and venison stew). Still, whatever it was was pretty good-sized and strange, and if they came looking for me and I wasn’t there, and there were signs of a large strange animal having been here with me….
No. It was worse than that. A lot worse. Because there were clear signs of Gulp’s having visited the meadow—repeatedly, if they had any idea how to read signs—and while she was actually amazingly discreet about bodily functions there’s no way to disguise that something the size of a dragon has been around a lot over a short space of time and in a constricted area—for example sure dragon dung disintegrates fast, but the ash sticks around a while longer, and dragon-dung ash is identifiable from other kinds. Dragons also scrape their big selves across the ground in open areas and scratch themselves on boulders as well as trees and take the occasional munch of leaves very high up too. (Do top leaves taste better? Or do dragons do it because they can?) Not to mention standard scale-shedding. Gulp did all these things. It was pretty amazing actually watching, instead of reading about it in a book, like checking off stuff on a list or something. I kept wanting someone to talk to about it. (And I had some imaginary conversations with Old Pete. And Mom of course. And Martha.) And Gulp spent probably more than the usual amount of time scraping along on her belly, to make herself small for us.
The only thing I could think of to do that might work had the drawback of being deranged and impossible. I had to convince Gulp to take Lois away with her—and convince Lois to go. I felt my heart break—crack! snap!—but I was now so preoccupied with Lois’ safety I barely noticed. Or maybe if my plan had seemed more plausible I would have been more miserable about it.
The small rock in my head was rolling around thudding into things, which is to say that Lois was worried because she knew I was worried. I looked down at her. The rock stopped, got hollow on top, and began to teeter back and forth, which meant that she was suggesting that I sit down and let her get in my lap (oof) for a while, for mutual comfort and support. I sat down, on the floor beside the table where the two-way stood (suddenly it looked like some malign alien thing glaring at us), with the door still open from where we’d been playing outside while I waited for morning check-in time. It was a beautiful day, with the sky going on forever in all directions but in a friendly way, and the trees with Smokehill’s signature spires and accordions of stone sticking up through them, stretching almost as far as the sky.
I put my arms around Lois (this was getting harder and harder) and she started to hum one of her soothing hums. It sounded like a lullaby. To be more precise it sounded a lot like one of the Arkhola lullabies I sang to her when I first noticed that she was trying to mimic human speech. I sang that one because the melody only had about four notes in it which is about the limit of my capability. Or Lois’, although she was probably mimicking my singing ability too.
I sat there listening to her and thinking how Gulp had been almost completely silent around us, after that more-than-terrifying initial roar, and I wondered all over again if that’s because dragons, or grown-up dragons, usually are silent, or whether she was still trying not to scare us (after that more-than-terrifying roar). Even at a whisper, the voice out of something that size was probably pretty extreme. Or was it that living with humans had taught Lois to make mouth noise which was now so totally ingrained a habit that like all the other ways she was growing up wrong, it was going to be one of the reasons Lois never fit in with other dragons, despite Gulp’s best efforts (maybe Gulp was as dragons go soppy and sentimental and any other dragon would know better than to try) and maybe dragon culture or dragon safety or something required silence and…
It took several minutes for it to occur to me that Lois had asked me to sit down and let her get in my lap, and that I’d done it and hadn’t thought twice about it. Or that she was humming a recognizable human melody (in fact she carried the tune a lot better than I did)—and I had recognized it.
A lot had happened in the last month.
So maybe my plan wasn’t totally impossible and deranged.
Gently I dumped Lois back out of my lap again, and for some reason picked up the two-way too and clipped it on my belt. Usually I left it at the cabin, but it was some kind of token that morning—or my only source of breaking news. Then I led her to the meadow. Dad hadn’t said that anyone was coming to rescue me. Would he know? Would they tell him? Would they let him tell—warn—me? What kind of warning would he have? How would they come? If they hiked in and they started now and they were in a hurry, I had maybe six days. But if they thought I needed rescuing, they might choose something else. The meadow would serve perfectly well as an emergency set-down for a helicopter.
Smokehill was supposed to have dragons. And I checked in every day! Leave me alone!
That morning, while we waited for Gulp to show up (I’d never waited for Gulp before, merely steeled myself for her arrival), I tried to teach Lois the idea of stay or go with or go that way. She already knew a kind of stay because we used it to make our races
after the stick more interesting. She found my jogging along beside or behind her kind of a snore, if we started even, and I’m sure she knew I was faster than she was. So she’d learned to wait—stay—somewhere while I went a little distance from her and threw so that the stick was nearer her than me, and then we could both tear after it. It was more fun for me too. It only occurred to me that morning that maybe the reason it was more fun was because I was putting out more fun vibes as I hurtled after her trying to catch up.
I wasn’t putting out any kind of fun vibes that morning, which is probably why my attempt to teach her something new was a total disaster. It was a great big drooling object lesson in “I’m not going to do what you say when what you’re doing is way big-time something else.” Also to the extent that anything I taught her—or she taught me—was based on vibes, it was doomed. Any kind of teaching, you have to keep your mind on business, and maybe she could even pick it up that I was worrying about her safety, and her safety had always and only ever meant one thing to her: me. She wouldn’t stay in one place at all but glued herself to my leg and wouldn’t listen to anything I was saying and that began to make me angry, except it wasn’t her fault.
When Gulp showed up I was lying on the ground with Lois draped over my legs, humming. This time it was one of her own hums. (Very Winnie-the-Pooh-ish. Similar waistlines too, although Lois was built that way. She was also growing too fast to have any slack to get fat.) Lois would have been sitting on my chest while she hummed only I couldn’t breathe if she sat on my chest for more than a minute any more, so I’d shoved her farther down.
I had an arm flung over my eyes so I didn’t see Gulp land but I felt her. I felt—and smelled—the wind of her coming, and the faint—tinily faint—tremor of her landing. Maybe it was because I was lying down that I felt it this time. And I felt the shadow—and the wash of heat—when she…
My eyes shot open and I moved my arm. She was standing right over us. She’d never done that before. An adult dragon is big enough that when you’re lying down you might as well be a beetle. My first instinct was to get up and run like hell…but if she’d been going to eat me, she’d’ve done it weeks ago. I didn’t think my lying down was likely to be some kind of irresistible come-on. Dragons aren’t carrion eaters if they have a choice.
And then she lay down beside us, like she had that first day, when she was apologizing, if that was what she was doing, and seeming to make an even greater effort to make herself as small (yowzah) as she could. She’d never put all of herself down next to us before, if you follow me, she’d like tried to leave most of herself at the other end of the meadow. But then we’d never been lying down when she landed either.
She curved her ridiculously long neck in an arc, so that while her body was already really close to us (really close), her head was too. (Well, comparatively. There was still fifty-feet-plus of her relative to six-feet-plus of me.) Once she got herself settled, Lois and I were the center of a spiral, and the spiral was all dragon. Maybe it was just as well I was preoccupied with Dad’s check-in because if I’d panicked and tried to run, there wasn’t anywhere to run to, except into the dragon. The hump of her body, especially with the spinal ridge plates, pretty well shut out the sun. It had started to get chilly lying on the ground (except where Lois was on my legs), but being that close to her body heat was something else—although adrenaline surges kind of warm you up too. I had noticed her being hot before, of course, but this was another something or other. Degree. Dimension. I noticed Lois’ body heat because she was usually pressed up against me. I know, why would dragons waste their fire heating their surroundings? But Gulp was close. I could hear her breathing. It sounded like wind in a cave, and one in-and-out breath took several minutes.
On a whim—a whim I didn’t dare even recognize as a whim—I stretched out an arm. I did it quickly so I wouldn’t lose my nerve, which is never a good idea with a wild animal—doing something quickly I mean—but I did it anyway. Besides, what was she going to be afraid of? It would be like having a toothpick attack you. I wasn’t quite close enough, so I hitched myself over a little closer to her, trying not to dislodge Lois (still humming). I put my hand on Gulp’s jaw. I could touch my baby dragon without gloves (except on her belly), as long as I was careful that only the palm stayed in contact. I assumed I could keep my hand against Gulp’s greater heat—and probably her thicker skin helped.
The hot part went okay. The hot part and the Gulp not moving her head with a dragon equivalent of “ugh” part. It was still a sensationally stupid thing to do. Like maybe telepathy works better with a conductor, like those tin-can telephones you maybe made (if you were poor, or lived out in the middle of nowhere, or both) when you were a kid. They don’t really work very well, but that they work at all is weirdly exciting (if you’re pathetic enough to have made them, then you’ll probably find them exciting, okay?). I started thinking at her. I guess I started out thinking words, as if I was talking to her, but words aren’t really all that good, you know, one picture is worth a thousand, etc., and especially if you don’t speak the same language, and while maybe dragons had been keeping up their English since they spent all that time with Old Pete (and he says in his journals he used to talk to his dragons, although his never talked back), there’s a limit, I guess, to what an insane whim will stretch to.
And there are so many times when words are nowhere near enough even when you’re talking to an ordinary human person who speaks the same language. And that’s even when you’re talking to someone who knows you well and knows almost everything about you, like Dad or Billy or Kit or Katie or Martha knows me. I didn’t deliberately shift over to pictures, talking (or whatever) to Gulp, but I did, since I was in my head anyway and could do what I liked and it was all either crazy or imaginary so who cared.
And then it really started getting weird. The pictures started like going through my head faster than I was thinking them, like they were getting sucked out of me; but as they went they were getting all distorted. Not like Dad suddenly had six legs or Billy was eight feet tall and green, just…I don’t know. But you know how sometimes when two of you who were there start to tell a story to a third person who wasn’t, and you keep laughing because it’s like you’re telling two different stories and one of you is crazy? It was a little like that. And if I wasn’t imagining it, well, a dragon’s point of view and attitude would be a lot different from a human’s, wouldn’t it?
But what was the dragon perspective doing to my story?
By the time I got to the guys in black with the machine guns and the helicopter—and why I was imagining guys in black with machine guns I don’t know, too many TV shows at too young an age I suppose—I had a headache so bad I could hardly bear to keep thinking at all, and the pictures I was making seemed to rip at me as they were pulled away—a little like skinning a sunburned arm, only worse—and with every picture the Headache got even worse and worse and worse. I suppose that’s why I didn’t hear the two-way immediately. I might not have heard it at all except that I noticed that Lois had stopped humming. My brain (or my Headache) was thundering in my ears so hard I couldn’t hear her either, but my legs had stopped vibrating—and my hip had started (vibrating). Even Gulp shifted her head very slightly—not enough to shake my tentative hand though. And there was the hiccupping brrrr that was the two-way asking for me to answer it.
I seemed to be paralyzed. My brain was doing or having done to it things it didn’t understand, and it didn’t have any neurons left over for telling my not-on-Gulp’s-nose hand to reach down and flip the switch. There’s an emergency override for talking when the other person doesn’t pick up, if the two-way is at least turned on. I’d left mine turned on. But you’ll never believe the voice that screamed out of it though.
Eric.
“Jake, can you hear me? Your dad’s been pretty well taken hostage, and I’m pretty sure they’re monitoring unscheduled use of any two-way which means they’ll be coming for me in a minute. They’re on
their way, and they know you’re at Westcamp. I don’t know when they left, so you may not have much time. Hell. I didn’t expect them…I’ve still got to…Do what you have to do, Jake. Can you—” And there was a clatter and thump and that was all.
But there was something else too, which I could hear more clearly now that the two-way had gone silent—and after what it had said had sharpened my ears for anything that wasn’t wind or dragons. Another sort of buzz or brrrrrr. Distant but coming closer. A sort of heavy, rapid whompwhompwhomp. Unless I was imagining that.
And I would have thought I was imagining it, if it wasn’t for Eric. I would have thought I was just being paranoid. I was so used to being paranoid it wasn’t even doing its job any more.
No. I wasn’t imagining it.
The paralysis splintered like stomped ice and fell away. I shot to my feet, tumbling poor Lois off very roughly. I heard the two-way lose its grip on my belt and clunk to the ground. (The second two-way I’d killed in the business of saving Lois.) I stooped down and picked her up—heaved her up—I could only barely lift her any more, let alone hold her. She gave an anxious, protesting little grunt, but she didn’t struggle. Gulp was sitting up by then too, her head stretched up at the end of her long neck—she’d rolled up away from us, so she was now like far away by being the distance of the length of her body, although she’d left most of her tail behind—looking as tall as the Devil’s Tower, as if the hard blue of the Smokehill sky was something you could touch, and she was touching it. She was looking—or listening—hard.
When she looked down at me again, from twenty or so feet of neck, I took a step forward, and tried to hold Lois out to her, although my arms were shaking—maybe not only with Lois’ weight.
Dragon Haven Page 23
