"Dragonhaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

CHAPTER SEVEN

Westcamp was in a bit more of a mess than the permanent camps usually are. And I actually helped with some of the clean- and patch-up. It was weirdly exhilarating. It was because we were out in the middle of nowhere and I didn't have to watch Lois every minute. And also because I was doing something that both was not about Lois and was about helping somebody else out for a change. Even my time at the Institute, the last couple of years, had been about Lois really — about pretending everything was normal, to try and keep her safe and secret — even if most of the work I did was also useful that had been almost beside the point.

Of course like a good parent I quickly learned to shift my worries to the present situation so now that we'd got here and weren't immediately leaving again I was afraid she'd eat something that would poison her the third or fourth time she went by it because it had got familiar (or that she'd been snatching mouthfuls right along and the third or fourth time the toxic accumulation would finally get her) or get lost because she hadn't learned where the new edges of her new territory were or blunder into something like a herd of no-nonsense Bighorn that would recognize her as a predator even though she didn't know it yet herself, and stomp her to death. But she stuck pretty close to me just like she usually did (. . . so I started wondering how long that would last before she got used to the idea that I wasn't watching her every minute, and how her next developmental stage would be exploring beyond Mom, and then she would blunder into the Bighorn, etc.), and then after a while it wasn't so exhilarating but we had to do it anyway. Also I couldn't stop myself jumping every time the two-way yammered at us.

A tree had fallen on the roof and poked a window out on its way, in spite of the heavy shutters. Jane climbed up onto the roof to lop branches till we could get the rest of it off without doing any more damage (waste not, want not, I would be cutting it up and stacking it for firewood, but I like chopping wood, so that's okay . . . just so long as a baby dragon doesn't get in the way. Worry worry) while Billy looked to see if there was any spare glass in the store (there was) and if it could be made to fit (yes) and if there was a glass cutter and sealer (yes). And made notes to replace what we were using. Fortunately the tree hadn't taken out the solar panels for the generator — that would have been a disaster. Then all over again for the door frame, where some kind of Arnold-Schwarzenegger-wannabe sapling had managed to crack the door away from the sill. (That was a bit of a mind boggler to me since I believe that the Rangers, you know, rule, and that no mere sapling would dare.)

And the hole that sapling had made, with the window, meant that the indoors had been pretty well colonized, which is why the Rangers are so anal retentive about keeping the permanent camps as invader-proof as poss. It's a lot of remedial work when things go wrong. I did way more than my fair share of the blanket-mending because I was so cheezing good at it from all those months of patching diapers. I did a lot of muttering when I had a needle in my hands. Lois really did pick up that mood — she'd come and mutter too, winding around my legs like a cat except for the fact she wasn't built for winding, and she was tall enough now that my legs would go bumpbumpbumpbump down her spinal plates which did not help, and the blanket would fall or get pulled off my lap when she'd get tangled up in it, and. . . Billy managed not to laugh at this. Jane didn't. Manage not to laugh.

So anyway both Jane and Billy stayed longer than they'd originally meant to because there was all this work to do. Billy also went out hunting one afternoon. I'd noticed he'd bothered to pack in a rifle, which I was kind of surprised about, since we didn't have any investigators with us, ha ha ha. Maybe it was just a Ranger thing for longer hikes, although generally speaking a Ranger would rather sit up a tree for a week than kill something that had a perfect right to be there, and to keep themselves fed on long trips they mostly used snares or bows and arrows — no, I'm serious. I keep telling you our Rangers are good. Jane had her bow with her.

I suppose I must have noticed when Billy left Jane and me replacing shingles with his rifle cracked over his arm, but I didn't think about that either. He came back later and told me to come with him. He'd shot a deer and needed someone to carry the other end of the pole; to get it back to camp.

Lois came too and was very surprised by the deer. She was used to her food coming to her in small pieces in a bowl of soup, or flicked at her. (I'd managed to teach her "Yours!" without having to demonstrate grabbing stuff tossed to me in my mouth, but food is a great motivator to learning.) Dragons don't chew — they have pointy, widely separated teeth, for stabbing, tearing, and holding on — but along with all the other things nobody knows about dragons we didn't know when Lois' infant digestive juices might be up to bigger chunks, so she wasn't getting any yet. (Lois' teeth were one of her trouble-free zones. They just appeared. She never went through a chewing-everything-she-could-get-her-jaws-around-but-particularly-the-things-you-most-mind-being-transformed-to-gloppy-shreds phase the way puppies do. This was actually sort of off-balancing. It's one of the ways you know a puppy is growing up. There were no familiar markers with Lois, except that she kept getting bigger.)

She had a lick at the spilled blood where Billy had gutted it but didn't seem to think much of it. She was a little subdued on the way back like maybe she was thinking about it. I was a little subdued on the way back because why was Billy already laying in a whole deer? I'd seen the store cupboard, which was still about half stocked with usual stuff, plus everything Billy and Jane had brought, which seemed to me enough even for several Loises, or if one Lois put on a tremendous growth spurt, and it wasn't like they were going off and leaving me. Oh well. Maybe he just wanted a break from cabin repair.

The smoker was already there, but I'm the one who kept the fire going. However smoking is smoking so you might as well do more than less so I told myself the deer was fine. Billy made me practice some of the cutting-up too but you could sure see which he'd done and which I had. You'd think all you'd need is a sharp knife and a steady hand. Wrong.

He also tried to make me practice a little with his rifle, but Lois hated the noise so he let it go. He'd taught me to shoot a few years ago and I had been a demon with old beer and soda cans (they recycle just as well with holes in them) pretty much up till Lois arrived, so I still knew the, you know, theory, and my hands still knew the motions, but I was way out of practice and Lois hating it meant I was freezing before I pulled the trigger which ruined my aim and my shoulder. I might not have been able to hit what I was aiming at anyway for thinking about why Billy was suddenly taking it into his head to have me brush up on my gun nonexpertise.

But then Billy merely shifted survival-skill gears and got me brushing up on snare-setting instead. (I'm not exactly hopeless with a bow, but . . . close.) But rabbits are smaller. I could've coped with the idea of the occasional fresh rabbit. Supposing I could set a snare properly. We'd eaten rabbit and pheasant on the hike in. But it didn't really matter because I was never going to be here alone, of course. There was always going to be a Ranger with me, and Rangers can set snares in their sleep (I mean snares that catch something).

We'd just about got everything fixed up so Jane was finally getting ready to go back. There'd been a lot of radio contact including about stuff Kit could bring when he came to take Billy's place. After this there was only going to be one Ranger at a time here with me. So Jane left and then Billy waited for Kit, and Kit turned up on schedule with various small crucial bits and pieces — including one to make the radio work better; it had been dropping in and out a lot in a pretty uncomfortable way and everyone on it sounded like they were being strangled while breathing laughing gas. We'd had a lot more problems with the twoways since the techies had monkeyed with the fence, so we all hoped the monkeying was working — there was no real way to know except backwards, by people not breaking in.

So Billy left (leaving me the rifle, just by the way, and spare ammo and reload stuff), but Kit finished making everything as everything-proof as you can ever make anything everything-proof out in the middle of a nowhere that didn't care if you were human, dragon, or squidgy tentacled blob from Alpha Centauri. Which was the good news.

Because the bad news was they had an outbreak back at the Institute. Nothing to do with dragons — flu. I'd been worrying about everybody's stress levels and why nobody had a heart attack or a nervous breakdown yet, right? Well they got summer flu instead. (Maybe it was because they all relaxed as soon as Lois and I were out of bus-tour radius.) First flu epidemic we'd had since I'd been alive, and believe me, tourists on holiday come and sneeze and cough all over you rather than miss their chance by keeping their germs at home. (No, you're right, I don't really blame them. I'd come to Smokehill with terminal body-parts-dropping-off-itis if it was my only chance.)

By the time Billy got back to the institute there were seven Rangers down and with it being summer which is high season anyway, the extra tourist load (and lingering investigative drones, although there were mostly only a symbolic crab and grumble of these left) meant everyone still standing was going crazy. Kit sort of hung around being twitchy for several days and then he asked me if I thought I could stay at Westcamp alone for a little while. The alternative was going back with him to the Institute. No way.

There's maybe a drawback to suddenly looking like a grown-up, which is what I had started to do the second half of the year I was fifteen. By now — and yeah, no doubt partly as a result of all that good-student crap first so they wouldn't take me away after Mom died and then later to protect Lois — I could put over maturity-beyond-his-years like you wouldn't believe. I'd also had my own growth spurt and was six-foot-something and bulky too you try hauling a baby dragon around and see if it doesn't grow you muscles like a furniture mover. So I knew what I had to do with Kit — I'd also guessed it was coming so I'd been like secretly practicing my role. I just about packed his gear for him and shoved him out. There was no question about risking Lois back at the Institute. That tourist who had bumbled past our cottage had gone missing when we had a full complement of Rangers watching out.

So I had to stay, and I had to convince Kit it was okay if he left me. Us. I did. And I'm afraid Billy's rifle helped — helped convince Kit. (He hadn't seen me try and shoot it:) But then I had to convince Dad. That really challenged my competent — maturity program, and it was only a beta really. Turned out that he'd just told Kit to bring me (us) back. When he mentioned that — almost in passing — like it was no big deal — then I mainly had to not lose my temper and yell. If I'd yelled Dad would've just yelled louder and ordered me back to the Institute, and the main thing about handling Dad is preventing him from giving an order, because then it's an order and that's the end of the discussion.

The problem was that I was scared. But it wasn't a scared that anybody else could do anything about. When I was younger sometimes being ordered to do something was secretly kind of okay because then it was Dad's (or Mom's) fault, I couldn't do anything about it. I kept telling myself it would actually be easier if there wasn't anybody else around; Lois' and my training-each-other-to-do-things sessions were getting more and more complicated, and if it was just me and Lois I could concentrate more on her, and not worry about explaining anything to anybody who caught us at it, and who knew how far we would get how fast.

But, you know, look at what had happened to me the last time I'd been in the park alone, which I know I've said before, but are you surprised it kept kind of running through my mind? Okay, maybe it had been a good disaster. But it was still a disaster and it had changed all our lives tremendously in a stretch-till-you-snap way and there was no stretch left for even a little tiny disaster-ette. This flu was pushing it. And I was also not absolutely sure I wanted to find out how far Lois and I could get how fast — or why didn't I want anyone around to notice?

There's another little tiny factoid about all this. Sure, I'd been Billy's willing slave since I was two. And I knew a lot more about Life in the Wild than your average seventeen-year-old. But that's not the same thing as knowing what you're doing out here. To the extent that you ever know what you're doing. And then I also had to work way too hard not to wonder what, exactly, Billy had been anticipating when he left me his rifle (even if I couldn't hit anything with it, except maybe stomping beetles with the stock end. The beetles in the cabin were kind of a plague).

But I smiled and did my responsible trick, and Kit was satisfied, and maybe Dad was so impressed that I hadn't lost my temper that he believed my beta program after all and said okay. Or maybe it was worse back at the Institute than I realized and what Dad really hadn't ordered me to do was not come back, but stay at Westcamp, and he'd told Kit to bring me to piss me off, so I'd be sure to do the opposite. (Although this is a little devious for Dad.) Martha sounded really worried when I talked to her, and she was obviously trying to figure out a way to tell me something we hadn't got into our code. There weren't any cop shows, she said, but there was new thriller that everybody was talking about but she hadn't seen yet.

"Maybe you should stick to science fiction," I said.

"Maybe I should," Martha said. "The problem with science fiction is . . . that it's just all made up, you know?"

Uh-oh. I knew. "Anybody else come down with the flu?"

"No, but Mom's driving one of the buses and I'm cleaning odorata's cage."

"Oh, yuck for you. You know about using lemon juice on your hair after?"

Martha giggled. It was good to hear her giggling. "Yes. I have to use so much it's making me blond."

Which proves Martha has superior hair too. All lemon juice ever did for mine was make it go kind of rusty in streaks, like there'd been a terrible chemical accident on my head.

And then we had to stop because the two-way went into one of its snits, which it was still doing, even with the new gizmo. Kit was out of earshot so I didn't tell him about the radio. It did not bear thinking about if the radio went seriously gazooey, but I was not going back to the Institute, so everything else was just going to have to be whatever it was, grotty radios included.

Kit took off the morning after I had that conversation with Martha. I checked in on the two-way as soon as he'd gone. I now had to check in twice a day, Dad said. He would've liked to make it three times but I said I was still going to go on with the dragon study even though there was no one to help me, which meant I'd be out a lot of the day. I could hear Dad thinking about ordering me to take the radio with me but fortunately he didn't. Reporting in even twice a day I was wondering if my crummy sense of time was going to be cover enough if the radio had too many hissy fits and I checked in at the wrong time too often. But I'd worry about that when it started happening . . . and then, before I had to think about staying here alone, where the nearest other human being would soon be a light-year or two away . . . Lois and I went for a walk. Lois was thrilled. Usually we were doing chores in the morning. I know, she thrilled easily, but she totally loved the greater freedom of the camp almost as much as she loved fires. She was either on a constant adrenaline high (insert Unknown Dragon Equivalent here) or two-year-old dragonlets are like that. She galloped and rootled and scrabbled and poked . . . and peeped and chortled and gurgled and burbled and purred and hummed and cheeped and chirruped and hooted and . . . her amazing range had only got amazinger as she got older; and her qualifications as a chatterbox had been established long ago.

And it was like she was in her element once she had the conversation all to herself and didn't have to wait for anybody but me. I was also kind of broody so I left her to it. And boy did she go for the opportunity. I couldn't help thinking about it some more. I'd never heard that dragons talked (all right, "talked") to each other. Old Pete had never mentioned it in any of his journals. And if his dragons had been anything like Lois he would have. In fact he'd've spent his life wearing earplugs. Also usually one of the limitations on animal "speech" is that animal vocal cords and larynxes aren't set up for a lot of variation. Lois had lots of variation. She could do anything but human words. She probably could have done the tentacled blobs from Alpha Centauri, but she was stuck with me.

Her humming had like expanded. At first it was just kind of a bumpy mutant purring — what I've been calling purring, although if any cat made that noise I'd recommend you call the vet fast — and then after a lot of time practicing with the shower it got pretty, well, hummy. Almost, like I said, like a human might hum. (Emphasis on the almost.) But after she caught on it wasn't only with the shower any more. And whatever it was, it went more up and more down, jiggedy jaggedy, more like a, well, musical scale than her other noises.

I had brought my old player from the Institute when I moved in with Billy and Grace, but I decided pretty much all by myself that arena rock probably wasn't a good thing for your infant dragon, and besides, I'd been reading up (a little wildly) on parenting and about how Mozart is soothing to fidgety kids, so mostly I played Mozart, and even got to kind of like it myself. (Except the operas.) And I sang to her sometimes the way all of us (even Eric) sang to our zoo orphans; once you've been caught saying the standard "Theeeeeere, isn't that gooooood?" a few times you have no shame left. Shamelessness is required if you sing like me. But humans are just so voice oriented, you want to say things, and you get bored with "Theeeeeere isn't that gooooood?" after a while. Singing is the obvious alternative to moronic monologue. You think you're being soothing, but does a raccoon or a robin think "Barbara Allen" or "The Ash Grove" is soothing? I think we're soothing ourselves. But there wasn't any music, soothing or otherwise, at Westcamp so maybe Lois was reinventing it for us.

We went for a lot of walks after Kit left. Away from Westcamp I didn't feel quite so alone. Or rather, it was okay to feel alone away from the camp — away from the human place. And I took my notebook with me, and my marker sticks, and sometimes I brought a few scales back to the camp and labeled them and bagged them up like I was getting ready to take them back to the Institute, like this "project" was real.

The project was one more legitimate reason to keep me outdoors as much as possible — indoors at the camp my voice echoed. Of course the main thing keeping me outdoors as much as possible was Lois — but the dragon-scale-counting project suggested that I was still a part of the Institute. That I still had something like a normal place — and future — at the Institute. My security blanket. I don't think moms are supposed to need security blankets. Two or three nights after Kit left I dreamed that I was wrapped up in the holey old blankets Snark and I had watched TV on a few centuries ago, leaning up against Lois' mom's side in one of those flickery red caves, and my own mom was singing to me. At least it was her voice, although I couldn't see her. When she sang "Barbara Allen" you knew what it was.

It was a gorgeous summer that year. That helped. I'd brought rain gear of course as well as long underwear and a goosedown vest and wool socks and stuff. Even in August you can get a frost in Smokehill, and Westcamp wasn't in one of the milder bits of Smokehill either, and the Bonelands started just over the Glittering Hills to the north. (They're called hills, but they're mountains really. You'd know this if you tried to climb one.) But I didn't need any of it. The skies stayed blue and it was hot enough at noon to lie down in a meadow and soak it up and warm enough even early and late that if you kept moving you didn't get cold.

Lois had got a lot fitter since we'd left the Institute (well so had I) so i f I wanted to walk really fast for a while she managed to keep up with me, though she still did it in spurts. She'd walk — she'd finally learned to walk, I think because she discovered that you can be more thorough about prying into stuff at a slower speed — till she got far enough behind to make her (and me) nervous and then buzz past me at her funny gallop and then maybe walk again, although sometimes the enthusiasm level was just so high and the world was just so big and exciting she had to have an extensive hurtle. You know those cartoons where animals run by all four legs going forward at once and then all four legs going backward at once. I know no real animal runs like that but Lois sure looked like she was.

I ambled sometimes too so we could walk together. Her walk was me foot at a time, like a normal walk, although looked down at from above . . . you know the way a dog looks surprisingly sinuous, almost snaky — explains why they can curl up in a circle — well, maybe it was just the way the spinal plates waggled along her humpy back that made Lois look like she was coming unhinged.

She never offered to chase — or flame at — any of the wildlife we saw, and despite the amount of noise Lois made, both with her mouth and her feet — and I couldn't walk nearly as quietly as Billy even when I was concentrating, but there was no point trying with Lois around, we saw a lot. They'd stand there and stare at us like they couldn't believe their eyes. Is that a dragon? Is that a human? Are they together? Some things like raccoons do that anyway — but our four-legged dragon suppers couldn't seem to decide if they had to bother about us or not, and mostly they didn't, although I sometimes expected their eyes to pop out from staring. Once we even saw a lynx and lynx are usually really shy. The times the deer or the sheep or whatever would scatter they didn't seem to be paying attention to us at all. Which was kind of nervous-making in a different way. If those tales about cougar curiosity are true probably the local puma was following us around and maybe sometimes the suppers got wind of him. Or her.

But we still had to go back to camp eventually. I found out the hard way that I wanted to get back in daylight. I wanted to be indoors with the fire lit and one of the lamps burning before it got dark. There were bears around here — as well as the cougar — but that wasn't why. Nor was the fear of getting lost. It was that coming back to a silent dark cabin was too creepy. First time we did it, coming back in twilight, even Lois shut up, and that made it worse. You'd think the sky would get bigger in daytime, when you can see more of it. It doesn't. It gets way bigger at night. And the forest and prairie and desert don't go on for five million acres after dark, they go on forever. I pretty much turned my dragon-scale-counting project into a real project after all, sweating over my charts and graphs in the evenings, studying and noting down the differences from one scale to another to another (long, short, cleanly shed or ragged, color, texture, blah blah), marking where I found them (and the map this made was different from the readings from the other camps) to be doing something. Something that made me pay attention to it, instead of sitting there trying to count up to eternity.

And the rifle helped again, about that, about being alone. Just hanging there in its rack, it made me feel a little less helpless. And in spite of the deer all beautifully smoked and wrapped up in the store I did start setting rabbit snares — the pile of deer parts was going down, and that deer had been nearly the first thing Billy had done, and I (almost) always believe what Billy tells me, even when he doesn't say anything. Also once you get in the habit of counting up to eternity it seems to stretch in a lot of different directions. And after about a week — hey presto — my snares even started catching the occasional rabbit. Weird. Maybe I could learn to hit what I aimed at with the rifle if I had to. (Besides beetles.)

Maybe because of Lois, but somehow the noises didn't bother me so much, even knowing that I was in the middle of five million acres of them. A lot of what I heard I knew from Billy's teaching me to recognize, say, the crunching noises a pheasant makes when it crashes through the undergrowth (pheasants are amazingly noisy) compared to the noise a deer makes compared to what a cougar makes. (That last is an easy one. A stalking cougar doesn't make noise. I saw the scat a few times, but I never saw our cougar. I knew there was one. Every neighborhood in Smokehill has a cougar.) That was pretty much my limit though.

But most of what I can do by myself is daylight ID. Sometimes I didn't know what the moving-around noises were at night and then I poked the fire to make it crackle or turned up the two-way, or rattled my graph paper. Or all of the above. I did hear bears occasionally nearby, but I buried our garbage a long way from camp and locked up the meat store every night like it was the crown jewels of the supreme commander of the universe, and they never tried to get in. They just snuffled around for a while and went away. Then there are the vocals. Coyotes and wolves are easy, and it's actually kind of reassuring to hear them far away. They never got very close. Since I can only tell a Yukon wolf if I've heard an ordinary gray wolf recently to compare it to I don't know which one I was hearing, and if it was Yukon I'm very glad it was far away.

The fact that I was never sure the radio was working — or, if it was, that it wouldn't suddenly stop working — didn't help me feel comfy and secure and in touch either. Fortunately it mostly was working. I'd only missed one check in by about half an hour while I shook the thing and called it weekly-allowance-eliminating names before it decided I had fulfilled my entertainment function for the day and coughed and hiccupped and kkkkkkahed and glahed into action.

There was a lot of squawking that I couldn't always make out but I kept it on all the time I was indoors after Kit left, partly because I really wanted some remote clue about what was going on, and partly because listening to human voices even if they weren't talking to me or saying anything I wanted to hear was kind of soothing. This made its sudden dramatic dropouts all the more dramatic — the silence would land on you in a deafening wham. Keeping it on like that wasn't good for the batteries, but the generator was working and except for recharge (and maybe a little hot water) I wasn't using it much. (I hadn't brought my laptop — camp solar generator power is a little spasmodic for laptops — although sometimes, those evenings rattling my well-smudged graph paper, I wished I had.) Even the static when the radio was in a semi-bad mood, or the stand-by when no one was using it, was better than nothing.

In the old days, before the poacher proved our fence could be broken through, we'd also believed that no one could hear our two-ways outside the fence. That was maybe still true but it wasn't just Lois we couldn't talk about because (in theory anyway) not all of Smokehill knew about her. Nobody trusted any of the damned hanging-on-and-on investigators-make that priers and nosiers — any farther than they could throw a full-grown dragon, and (Martha said) the grown-ups assumed that the Searles had bought some of the investigators anyway — that the bought ones would find reasons to stick around, and have pieces of legal paper that told Dad he had to let them. So everybody was talking in secret code speak, and sometimes it was so frustrating I stopped listening and pretended it was just white noise — that plus what the radio did to human voices sometimes I felt even more isolated when I was talking to someone.

When I did talk to anybody myself — at least anybody but Martha — we were pretending that everything was still all business as usual except for the flu. They probably didn't want to think about me being out here alone with Lois since it was still our best option, so they didn't, and I didn't tell them I left the two-way on all the time for the sound (well, sort of) of human voices and looked at Billy's rifle a lot. I can tell you I was hair-trigger on the "talk" button though. I didn't want Lois audibly adding anything to the conversation just in case anybody at the Institute end heard something that didn't sound like random static.

My birthday happened while Lois and I were in our Westcamp exile, and only Martha remembered. No, that's not an example of poor neglected Jake, all by his feeble self (aside from the dragonlet) and no one cares. It is an example of just how stressed out of their minds they were back at the Institute. Oh, and I didn't remember it either, till Martha told me happy birthday. I knew it was around there somewhere but I'd stopped trying to keep track of the days, and I wasn't going to bake myself a cake either.

I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone for more than a few minutes, because of needing to keep our teeny bandwidth clear for something more important. We had like no width left, I guess, after the practical-sorcery guys had done their worst on the dragon fence some more. One of the things Martha told me was that airplanes didn't fly over Smokehill any more — whatever the solder-and-sparks (ha ha ha) guys had done made aeronautic radar go berserk, even from thirty thousand feet up. This meant a surprising number of flight paths or what-you-call-'ems had to be changed, which caused some more uproar which was our dragons' fault again and there was too much stuff that was already our dragons' fault. Our conversations usually ended with Martha asking me if I'd seen any lightning.

"Nope," I always said.

After the first few times she asked this she added, "Not even at a distance? There are some big thunderstorms out there especially over the Bonelands, You know, Billy says."

I translated this without difficulty. "No. Not even a — a shooting star."

Martha said, "I can't decide what to hope for, you know? I — you don't really want lightning close up, of course, but it would be — exciting, to see it, like over the Glittering Hills, wouldn't it?"

Exciting. That's one word for it. Since I was out here supposedly counting dragons, if Martha just meant had I seen any dragons, she could've said that. But I had a dragon with me. If I saw any dragons I'd have to wonder if they'd notice Lois. We didn't know diddlysquat about inter-dragon communication — what it might do and how far it might stretch — whether baby dragons smell like that so big dragons can find them — or if that unmistakable flying-dragon shape would mean anything to Lois if she saw it. That was the sort of thing that Martha was thinking about. So was I.

What I called a meadow, that's kind of a euphemism. As the scraggy, stony forest of eastern Smokehill starts breaking up into the Boneland desert and the prairies around it there's some weird in-between stuff. Westcamp was in a weird in-between area. The camp itself was on the edge of some semi-forest, and there was a semi-clearing on two sides of it, partly Ranger — (and lately Jake — ) maintained. Then there was a big pile of stones — say twenty feet high — like a thoughtless giant had left them there for no better reason than he didn't want to carry them any farther, and some tough little saplings had colonized one side of it where a little soil had somehow accumulated, and were trying to turn it into a hillock. Beyond that there was more mixed-clearing-scrub-and-the-occasional-obstinate-tree.

The clearer bits wiggled like some kind of game of follow-the-leader, and there was something nearly like a real clearing not too far from the camp, that Lois and I had found the first week with Billy. It was almost like having our own private playground. There was a series of small heaps of boulders with sand at the bottom as well as the usual local striated stone pocked by scrub underfoot, and several of the standard little eastern-Smokehill rivulets cutting up the stone and going nowhere but making nice noises while they did it, and reminding you what you Were going to be missing if you kept going west.

Amazingly though there was also a pretty good meadowy sort of meadow, mostly at the southeastern end but kind of snaking through the stony bits too, and surprisingly large — well, I'm an Eastern-Smokehill boy, it was surprising to me — which meant we saw a lot of sheep and deer there. They'd leave if we got too close, but usually a few of them just kept an eye on us while the rest grazed and did deer and sheep things. After the first week or so we even saw some of this year's babies, which were old enough to be getting serious about grazing too but still had to have regular outbreaks of rushing around and jumping over things that didn't exist. I suppose the old ones couldn't afford to ignore the grazing but they weren't entirely happy about us. Lois used to watch them watching us, and when she did her cheeps and burbles they sounded more tentative, like she was trying for a definition of what she was looking at. (Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Would it leap tall buildings at a single bound if there were buildings?)

After we'd been at Westcamp a while and fallen into some kind of schedule, going to the meadow and just kind of hanging out there became part of it. And I guess she was getting enough exercise elsewhere because sometimes she'd actually be quiet and still for a while without being asleep. (Although as I've said she was neither a quiet nor a still sleeper either.) And she was now watching the grazing critters silently, which in something (or someone) who was never silent and was always in motion (even when asleep), was interesting.

I started thinking again about what could happen when sonic thing of her size found out that she had a fire-stomach with fire in ii I doubted a dragon had perfect aim without practice. But Smokehill had no more fires than any other big park, so presumably there was an answer to baby-dragon target practice. Maybe dragon moms had a fire-extinguisher organ, tucked away like under the spleen (if dragons have spleens). . . . Westcamp had a fire extinguisher, of course, but I wasn't going to lug it around with us. Also you have to be conscious and have your arms working to use it. . .. But once we were alone at Westcamp, Lois really started growing — like if you stared at her long enough you could see the next scale spring into being to cover the stretching-out skin. Six weeks after we left the institute she wouldn't've fit into her baby-dragon backpack any more even with all the straps let out, and I probably wouldn't have been able to lift her even if she did. And the deer meat was going down fast, even supplemented by snared rabbits.

I've already said we were training each other to do tricks. I haven't told you a lot about this because . . . well, because. I'm not a Good Scientist who knows that animals are animals and humans are humans, and I think the situation on Mars is really funny and anyone that is freaked out by it needs to calm down and get a grip, but there are limits. Particularly when something with a face like a small rockpile and little bulgy, beady eyes is staring at you and going, Weeeeeeeerrrrrrup? And you know she's not just doing the large scaly version of the parakeet thing. How do you know it? There are little old ladies who swear their parakeets know what they're saying. I'm not going to say they're wrong either. But the little old ladies probably aren't getting any other weird signals at the same time as their parakeet is saying "Give me a peanut or I'll peck you to death." Although this may be because the parakeet is clearly saying "peanut" and I needed help understanding Lois', uh, words.

So we were training each other to do tricks. It seemed the obvious way to . . . well, create a language. I don't want to get into exactly what I mean by a language. About three years before this when I was looking for more creative reasons to get out of doing Latin I read a lot about the history of language and how us humans are hardwired to learn it blah blah blah and also a lot about whether or not animals have it. I had a kind of crisis of faith there about wanting to grow up to be a scientist because while I knew my parents made jokes about Good Scientists and Bad Scientists I thought they were jokes. I couldn't get my head around these bozos who were so dead set against believing that animals have anything but like an autonomic nervous system to keep their hearts beating and so on and a lot of instincts saying things like "eat grass" or "bite that rabbit." Okay, a boy loves his dog, but I couldn't see this at all. Of course animals think and feel. Any moron who's ever met a dog or a cat should know that, and how many people have never met a dog or a cat? Even scientists were little kids growing up once even if they haven't come out of their labs for the last sixty years.

Anyway. Getting pissed off had made me think more about how Snark and I talked to each other, and I'm not even going to put quote marks around talked, although I never did construct a good argument against Latin. So maybe I was a little more set up for talking to Lois than some people might have been. So let's say that when you teach your dog to come and sit and not pee in the house, that's part of a language.

But when you get a dog you have some clue about dogs. About what they're good at, about how they respond to people. And the stuff you don't know, or get wrong, you can order a book from the library that will tell you. And if you don't live some place like Smokehill you can go to a dog-training class. Lois and I only had each other. Sometimes I felt like Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, and I was afraid that Lois was playing Annie.

She seemed to like it that I talked to her. Well, that's not strange, dogs like to be talked to, although they don't talk back so much usually. So I kept talking, although even my decision that she "liked" it seemed to me dubious when I was in a gloomy mood. Maybe frolicking around and thwumping her tail and flapping her wing nubs and cheeping was an expression of frustration and despair, not pleasure. I tried to keep all open mind. She couldn't be too miserable, could she? How could I tell? She was still eating and still growing. And curiosity about her world had to be a good sign, didn't it? It was also hard to be in a had mood myself, when she was dancing around apparently, by irrelevant human standards, being as happy as a kid on the first day of school vacation (even us homeschooled exiles know about this), which she usually was, so why fight it?

Gestures are a huge amount of language. Aren't they? But most gestures out of context are silly. I had started out trying to "teach" her to wave — this was back a long time ago at the Institute, after I'd had my uncomfortable little jolt about her trying to say "Hey, Lois" back at me — but she didn't get it with me sitting on a chair, I guess, and as soon as I sat on the floor or ground she got too excited, and I sort of lost conviction about the idea anyway because why did I want a dragon that waved? That's when I hit on teaching her to fetch sticks. Like a dog. And the good reason for that would be that it would help use some of her endless energy. That was the first time I'd tried to train her to do anything, as opposed to just hovering over her in a universally paranoid 100 percent way and worrying about keeping her alive. Except that I taught her by throwing the stick, going after it, and bringing it back to where I'd been when I threw it. I told you she was always more interested in me than she was in anything else, so keeping her attention was easy.

This had been a while back, as I say, really when Lois was only just getting big enough to like experiment with, including that she'd be willing to go far enough away from Mom to fetch a stick. So I got a stick, waved it at her a moment so she'd notice it instead of me, said, "Fetch!" in a firm, no-nonsense manner, and then I threw it. First time I went after it she went after me because that's what she always did. Second time you could see her thinking about it. Please feel free to insert a verb you like better than "thinking." Third time I threw it and yelled "Fetch!" she came with me when I went after it like she was still thinking about it but hadn't reached any conclusions. Fourth time I hesitated a little bit at the end so she got there first. She sort of pawed at the stick for a moment and looked at me inquiringly. So far so dog really. The fifth time I went after it a little more slowly yet, just to see what would happen and this time she positively shot in front of me (those legs a blur and her panting a little harsh grunting noise with breathless I'm-sure-explanatory peeps in it), and started to pick it up. . ..

She tried to pick it up with one of her forelegs. Fourteen-month-old dragons don't have much grasping strength, and they're also still effectively four-legged. According to Old Pete they start using their front legs more like arms when their wings get big enough to provide a different balance, before they can fly. In Lois' case that started happening when she was about three, although that may be early because, of course, she was still trying to be me, in spite of . . . no, I'm getting ahead of myself believe me, it's getting harder and harder not to . . . she was trying to be me and I'm two-legged and two-handed. And so she tried to pick up a stick with a front claw, and she couldn't do it.

And the joy instantly drained out of her. It was awful. She flopped down on the ground beside the horrible stick and started to cry. No, there weren't any tears, but I didn't have any trouble translating what the noise she was making was, any more than you don't know what a dog's wails mean when you've locked him up and are leaving him behind. And the sound she was making went right through me and aggravated the Headache till I was seeing her through this twinkly red haze and that did not help the situation.

I raced up to her, threw myself down beside her — swearing at myself for a fool — and picked the stick up in my mouth. (This was not easy. Human faces are too flat, and your nose gets in the way.) And then began waddling back the way we'd come, on my hands and knees.

She stopped crying and followed me. It was a measure of how demoralized she was that she wasn't instantly thrilled that I was down on her level. But she'd never seen me go any distance on my hands and knees before (ow ow ow ow ow, just by the way: also yuck yuck yuck yuck about the taste of the stick) and she got, I think, so interested, she forgot to be her usual kind of excited. And I swear she suddenly got it about how helpless I was on all fours. It was like this aspect of my strange reluctance to get down on the ground with her finally made sense to her (so far as I know she never understood about my eczema. For which I am very grateful. Awful sort of thing to know, that you burn your mom every time you touch her). I went all the way back on my hands and knees, and very tired and cramped and chafed I was when I got there too. But I wanted to be sure that if she was getting the lesson at all this time she was going to get it RIGHT. Then I threw the stick again.

We both started after it. I didn't hurry and she got there first. She picked it up in her mouth. She carried it back to where I'd thrown it from, and then danced around peeping and burbling (through the stick in her mouth. A sort of urrrrrglrrrrrr noise). "Hot stuff, Lois," I said (there was no way I was going to say, "Good dragon, Lois!" and "hot stuff" seemed kind of a relevant praise-phrase for a dragon), and gave her a hard rub between the eyes, which she liked. (Rubbing her between the eyes would actually make her sit still for a few minutes, while you did it, which was useful, till your fingers started getting tired, because you had to do it hard.)

Okay. This is pretty cool. Training stage accomplished. She was happy, I was happy, it worked, we're back on track, trauma averted (I hoped). So it's time for rationalization. Dogs aren't trying to be you, they automatically do stuff with their mouths because that's what their instincts tell them to do. (Although I don't think a dog ever brings a stick back first time. They've got it that it's a game, but they have other ideas about the rules.) So dragons imprint on their moms more individually than puppies do. No big deal.

Except that there's one other thing. She took the last three steps back to me on her hind legs, or she tried to. She fell over between each step, mind you, but she got up again, half-swayed and half squunched on her butt forward, and fell over, three times.

I could have got round the picking-it-up-in-her-hand, I think, but this was a, ahem, step too far, ha ha. I don't know about yours but my okaymaybe-they-sort-of-have-a-kind-of-language-sometimes-but-animals-are-only-animals-really rationalization faculty goes screeeeeeeeek at this point and then breaks down entirely, and like suddenly it's a whole new world and anything is possible.

Maybe it won't seem like that big a deal to you, because you already know what happened later. But it was a big deal to me. The Headache was so bad at that moment that I'd had to sit down, so Lois pranced over and sat on me, complete with victory stick. The red haze began to clear, but my vision was still kind of distorted, and I had a stronger than usual feeling that if I looked really carefully into the trees I'd see some of those big deep shiny dragon eyes that I saw in my dreams looking back at me. It's hard to think clearly when your skull is trying to explode, but this is the idea that I suddenly couldn't get rid of That the reason why I'd got away with this Scam of Scams, this Swindle of Swindles, this Flimflam of Flimflams, this human raising a dragonlet, was because Lois' mom was hanging around keeping an eye on me. Plus Grace's cooking of course.

But it's way too late for you to send for the small white van with the smiling men holding out the jacket with the sleeves that tie round the back, so you might as well relax.

And Lois did occasionally remind me of Snark. This was one of those times. Possibly because this was a very special stick she was compromising her principles and chewing on it, and drooling lovely gooey wood fragments all over my jeans.

Anyway. It wasn't some kind of geometric progression of insanity after that. I don't think. It was like only a small gradual worsening in the mental terrain (with about as many switchbacks as hiking across Smokehill). I still missed having someone who spoke good English to talk to about it, but because of stuff like this, I mostly hadn't told any one else about it. So once we were alone at Westcamp I didn't feel so much trapped-with-Lois-the-baby dragon-my-unique-and-dangerous responsibility as the people back at the Institute might have thought I did. Although I was and she was. And I did have the two-way on all the time I was indoors.

And this was when the Headache changed again. It had sort of given warning on the trip out to Westcamp but had then subsided when we arrived and started dragging the trees off the roof and killing deer and so on. Maybe it had been regrouping. I know you're bored with me and my Headache. My fairy tale about Lois' mother keeping an eye on us is creative but unconvincing, right? A headache is a headache. No it isn't. Lois headaches had always been different, had always had a slight sense of the Alien Spy Thingy in Your Brain. This latest model was definitely several rungs higher on the ladder of weirdness.

Usually a headache just sits there and throbs, right? It may get bigger or smaller and it may be in one place rather than another and it may spread, but it doesn't feel like it's shouldering aside your gray matter and putting up signposts like for other travelers. (Note: eeeeek.) When I'd had them when she was a baby they'd been . . . smaller, although in a weird way they hurt more, like I wasn't used to them yet, like my brain muscles weren't up to it, like a couch potato trying to get into hiking. Except the ones that came with the dreams about her mom. They had always felt like they were going to crack me open somehow, and maybe as if they'd been slowly cracking me open over the last two years, so that other stuff could get in. . ..

I did remember faithfully to check in morning and evening with the Institute (and the two-way continued to cooperate, with a few sniggers and the occasional firecracker noise). And I still talked to Martha every chance I got. The second week we were out at Westcamp by ourselves, when Dad told me they were now fifteen down with the flu and had had to take on some temp help as well as a full-time nurse who was staying in my old bedroom at the institute, and in spite of everything I've told you about missing everybody and counting to eternity a lot, I found I had to he careful not to sound a little bit happy about the fact that they still couldn't send anyone out to keep me company (Crazy Nature Boy: film at eleven).

Of course I was worried about everybody, and I was also missing the human bond to balance the growing dragon bond, like I was getting too dragony myself (Lois hammering away at me during the day and the dreams hammering away at me at night and the Headache hammering away all the time). But it was also impossible not to be a little bit pleased just to let the dragon bond happen without having to second-guess it or you or us all the time because some other human would be coming back soon. Soon I'd have to figure out what to tell (or show) the people who did know about her, because someone would eventually come back out here and see what we were up to . . . but not yet. People had stopped getting the flu and the first ones who'd had it were getting over it and Dad was beginning to say things like "We should be able to think about sending someone out there soon" . . . but not yet.

It was the end of the fifth week Lois and I were at Westcamp alone that I almost died.