Billy must have been working on Dad. Billy misses Mom almost as much as Dad and I do, and I think he knew that Dad barely being able to let me out of his sight any more was starting to make me kind of nuts. (No comments on the "starting to" please.) Dad had offered to get me another dog but I just wasn't ready for that yet. I didn't know how to think about having a new dog; I'd had Snark since almost before I could remember anything. It would be like getting a new mom: no. (I spent some time worrying about this too. If there was ever a man who needed a wife to pry him out of his obsession occasionally, it was Dad. Except I couldn't deal with this either - worrying about Dad or worrying about the idea of a new mom. I can worry about anything, but as an idea it never really got very far because Dad didn't notice women. He'd notice people if he had to, but if any of them was occasionally single and female it didn't register.)
Anyway. I was keeping the homeschooling admin happy (speaking of checker-uppers) but I was spending way too much time blowing up aliens with a lot of other people online who apparently didn't have lives either. But my family had been cut down by fifty percent and there was like a cold wind blowing through that freaking great hole. On a computer you don't have to notice who's missing. I was almost beginning to forget Smokehill, in a way. I hadn't changed my mind about dragons, and I was still going through the motions (most of them), it was more like seeing everything through the wrong end of the telescope. The only stuff up close was just me and the hole, and a dad who only noticed scientific abstracts and problems about the Institute that got in his face and screamed at him, except that at the same time I had to be like the lucky charm he kept in his pocket or something and always there.
So it seemed like it came out of nowhere - I'd stopped asking - when I finally got permission to hike out overnight alone.
This is maybe the single thing I'd been wanting to do all my life. I'd always planned to grow up and study dragons like Mom and Dad, but that was a ways off yet. Presumably I'd get my butt out of the park for a few years to go to college . . . and then I'd think about living somewhere with a lot of other people around . . . all the time? We get to close the gates at night here. So then sometimes I'd think I'd chicken out and just stay here and apprentice to the Rangers. Most of our federal parks make you go to school for that too, but that's one of the things Old Pete set up when he set up Smokehill, our Ranger system. Billy had told me he'd take me if I decided that's what I wanted to do. He's never been away from the park overnight since he was born (both his parents were Rangers). His idea of a holiday is to hike into the park somewhere he hasn't been before, and stay there awhile, beyond the reach of f.l.s. (I admit I'd have to think about it, whether I'd choose hanging around too close to grizzlies and Yukon wolves, or f.l.s. Billy likes the really wild places. But maybe if I was his apprentice I'd feel more competent. I'd rather rather hang out with grizzlies and Yukon wolves, if you follow me.)
When the f.l. percentages were unusually bad I was sure I wanted to be a Ranger, but the rest of the time I wanted to have some PhDs like my parents because it meant more people would listen to me. I still wanted to be able to protect our dragons as well as study them and the head of the Institute is the head of the Rangers, as dumb as that is. And when the congressional subcommittee guys come here to stick their noses in and make stupid remarks, Billy has always left it up to Dad and goes all Son of the Wilderness silent and inscrutable if he's introduced to them. (It's proof of how much he thought of my parents that he would babysit the Institute when Dad and Mom took me and Snark for one of our summer hikes in the park. One of the higher-strung graduate students actually left with a nervous breakdown after one of those holidays. Apparently Billy didn't let her weep on his shoulder the way Mom had. Dad used to call her Fainting in Coils.)
But my PhDs were a long way off. I read a lot but I'm not so bright that any of the big science universities were begging to have me early. But I was a pretty fair woodsman for almost fifteen. I'd had the best teachers - our Rangers - and I grew up here, which is a big advantage, like you're supposed to be able to learn a second language really easily if you start when you're a baby. My French and German are lousy, but I've learned the language of Smokehill - some of it anyway. Before Mom disappeared I was going to have my first overnight solo after my twelfth birthday. Then she disappeared and we sort of stopped breathing for five months and then they found her. After that, as I say, Dad could barely let me out of his sight and he could never get away from the institute himself because he's doing both his and Mom's jobs.
And then one day out of the blue Dad calls me into his office (I go in flexing my hands from joystick Paralysis) and says, "Jake, I'm sorry. I'm not paying the right kind of attention to you and I know it, and I don't know when I'll have time either."
He glanced back at his desk which was a wild tangle of books, notebooks, loose papers, charts, bits of wood and stone and Bonelands fossils, coffee cups and crumbs. The Institute (of course) can't afford a lot of support staff so we do all our own cleaning and cooking. Although we'd shared it when Mom was still around Dad and I stopped doing any about a month after she didn't show up at her checkpoint. We had started to try to do it again but if it weren't for eating with the Rangers sometimes I might have forgotten food ever came in any shape but microwave pouches or that cooking ever involved anything but punching buttons. And cleaning? Forget it. I can run the dishwasher - hey, I can run the washing machine, are you impressed? - but my expertise ends there.
Dad rearranged one of the coffee mugs on the pile of papers it had already left smeary brown rings on. "I've been talking to Billy. You did really well in your last standardized tests, did I tell you?"
He hadn't. I'd thought he should've had the results by now and had begun to worry. I'd been trying to be extra careful since Mom died because I knew social services was just aching to take me out of my weird life at the Institute, but I could have missed something important because since Mom died I just did miss stuff, and sometimes it was important.
"And I know" - he hesitated - "I know you've been keeping up with your woodcraft." The one thing he would let me out of his sight to do without a huge argument was go out for a day with one of the Rangers - as long as we were back the same night. And it was the one thing that would turn the telescope I was looking through around too. For a few hours. "You're fourteen and a half."
Fourteen years, nine months and three days, I wanted to say, but I didn't.
"And - well - Billy says you're more than ready to - uh - "
Tie my shoes without someone supervising? I thought, but I didn't say that either, not only because my shoes have Velcro straps. I knew Dad was doing the best he could. So was I.
"Well, I wondered, would you like to take your overnight solo? I know you were - we were - " He hesitated again. "Your first solo is overdue, I know. And Billy says you'll be fine. And the weather looks like holding. SO
"Yes," I said. "I'd love to." I tried not to sound sarcastic. I almost forgot to say thanks. Almost. But I did say it.
If I'd been twelve I'd've gone whooping out of the Institute offices to the Ranger offices which are right across the tourist center lobby and reception area, and probably telling everyone on the way, Nate in the ticket booth, Amanda in the gift shop, poor Bob doing detention in the cafe, Jo and Nancy answering questions as they shepherded gangs of tourists to and from the bus stop, and anybody else I recognized, but I was nearer fifteen than fourteen and it had been a long almost-three years in a lot of ways. I walked slowly through Nancy's busload (ID-ing the f.l.'s among them at first glance), waved at Nate, and told Dan, at the front Ranger desk, that whenever Billy had a moment I'd like to talk to him.
"He's hiding down at the caves," said Dan. "You could go find him." I've forgotten to tell you about the caves. As soon as the first geologist set foot near Smokehill they knew there had to be caves here. The Native Americans had known for a long time, but after a bad beginning they'd kind of stopped telling the European pillagers anything they didn't have to, so Old Pete may be the first whiteface to have done more than guess. The caves near the Institute aren't very good ones compared to what there is farther in, like under the Bonelands, but these little ones near the front door were busy being developed for tourists, so they weren't going to be much use for hiding in much longer.
Getting the work done was a huge nuisance and everybody who lived here hated it, but we are always desperate for money (I should just make an acronym of it: WAADFM, like some new weird alternative radio station), so we were going ahead with it. Of course in the short term this meant money we badly needed elsewhere was getting spent on making the caves touristproof . . . and tourists coming to the caves was going to mean more staff to keep an eye on them and more upkeep because tourists are incredibly destructive even when they're behaving themselves, but the grown ups (including a lot of bozo outside consultants - for cheez sake, what does some pointy head from Baltimore or Manhattan know about a place like Smokehill?) all seemed to think it was going to be worth it in the end, if we lived that long. Dad had told me that the caves were going to fund him hiring another graduate student, maybe even full-time, because he didn't think he was ever going to get one otherwise. I was sure hiring anybody was a bad idea because it would mean we could, and everybody would cut our grants accordingly.
Billy was sitting by one of the little pools near the entrance. As soon as my eyes adjusted to the dark - the construction crews had gone home for the day, and turned off all the lights - I could see both his lantern and its reflection in the water. I went up to him as quietly as I could, but the caves are totally quiet except for the drip of water (and the bats) and on the pebbly path with the inevitable echo I sounded like someone falling through a series of windows CRASH CRUNCH CRASH only without the screaming.
If you'll pardon the expression from someone who wants to grow up to be a scientist, there's something almost magical about our caves, even the little boring ones near the park entrance. Maybe all caves are like this and I just don't know the analytical squashed-flat-and-labeled word for it. But there's a real feeling of another world, another world that needs some other sense or senses to get at it very well, in our caves. I suppose you could say it's something about underground, lack of sunlight, nothing grows here but a few creepy blind things and sometimes even creepier rock formations, but that doesn't explain it. Cellars aren't magical. The old underground bomb shelter that's now a really boring museum in Wilsonville isn't magical. Our caves are magical.
It could have been the weird shadows that lantern light throws but the moment Billy looked up I knew he was worried about something besides more tourists. I was used to Dad worrying. He'd been worried about something since Mom disappeared, and once she died it's like his worry metastasized and now he worried about everything - and I worried about the holes it made in him, all the gnawing worry. If I lost any more family there wouldn't be any left. As I looked at Billy I wondered what I was missing. Like that the world's total Draco australiensis numbers were still falling and there had been only a few hundred left when they died out in the wild. Like that even with the zoo Smokehill was barely surviving. I knew both of these things. But dragons are so hard to count maybe they were wrong about there being fewer of them. Maybe they were just getting even harder to count. And Smokehill had always barely survived, from Old Pete on. But Dad's a worrier. Billy isn't.
"What's wrong?" I said.
Billy shook his head. He was a good grown-up, but he was still a grown-up, and grown-ups rarely talk about grown-up trouble to kids. Eric took the question "What's wrong?" from a kid as a personal attack, even when it was something like a zoo-food shipment not arriving when it should and it was perfectly reasonable to be worried. I'd often wished Dad would talk about missing Mom to me more. Not only because then I could talk to him back. We could barely mention her at all.
At least Billy didn't lie to me. "Nothing you can do anything about. Nothing I can do anything about either. That's what's wrong." He shook his head again and then looked at me, visibly changing the subject. "What's up?"
I thought again of how I'd've felt if this'd happened three years ago. It was almost hard to get the words out. "Dad says I can do my first solo. Hike into the park and stay overnight." I felt as if I needed to apologize for interrupting him for such a lame reason. It could have waited. "Dan told me I could find you here."
Billy nodded. My solo wasn't news to him - Dad would have discussed it with him first. Even though I knew this was logical and responsible and necessary and all that it made me feel about four instead of almost fifteen. I wasn't really tying my shoes by myself. Dad and Billy were both watching me. I wished Snark was there. Snark was my responsibility. And furthermore he didn't seem to mind. That's being a dog, I guess, not minding being totally dependent on someone who may talk over your head to someone else about you and not let you in on it till everything's already been decided.
"I'm going to Northcamp, day after tomorrow," said Billy. "If you want to come with me you can hike on from Northcamp alone and meet me back there the next day."
Northcamp was one of the permanent camps, and it was five days' hike from the Institute, after the first day in a jeep as far as the jeep track went. I didn't get that far in very often - never in the last almost-three years. This was a really nice offer. "Great," I said, trying to mean it and almost succeeding. "Thanks."
Billy gave me a look that suggested that he knew what I was thinking, and it made me wonder if he felt about his troubles - whatever they were - not so much different from how I felt about mine. Maybe we both needed a dog.
But by the time we were ready to leave, I was up for it, maybe as much as I'd've been if I was only twelve and Mom was there to wave me off: Dad didn't - waving wasn't his style - besides, he was at his desk, like he was always at his desk. I don't mean that as bad as it sounds - we'd had breakfast together and he cross-examined me about what I was going to do in the park by myself and what to do if anything happened. We both knew that if I didn't know it all already he wouldn't be letting me go, but it was a ritual, like waving.
The answer to most of those if-anything-happens questions was "call Billy on the two-way, and stay put," so it wasn't like it was as grisly as Dad's cross-examinations when they were on stuff like algebra and Latin. I suck at languages but Latin's the worst. Maybe "call Billy and stay put" should have made me feel more like a kid too, but it didn't. That's how everybody goes into the park, with a two-way, and someone - a Ranger - always there to listen on the other end. Even Billy didn't go anywhere without someone to check in with. Anyway Dad gave me a hug on the way to his desk and told me to come see him the minute I got back, which should be about two weeks from now. Of course Billy would make me call Dad every day while we were gone, but that was okay too.
Our jeeps were as beat-up and held together with string as everything else at the Institute but the best Land Rover in the world wouldn't get far in Smokehill. Katie drove us in with Martha, deeply envious, in the backseat with me (Eleanor didn't come: one of her few weaknesses is getting carsick, although riding in the back of a Smokehill jeep is more like walloped-by-tornado sick) and late afternoon they let us off by the Lightning Tree, which is one of our landmarks, and a lot of walking trails going all over the park start there. Another way to look at it is that it's maybe one of the (few) good things about never having any money - we couldn't afford to put in any more road even if we wanted to.
"Good luck," Martha said quietly. Martha was born polite, it's like she knew she was going to have Eleanor as a little sister in less than six years and needed to get practicing being nice immediately. Martha is two and a half years younger than me so she was maybe close to her first solo, if she wanted to. I knew she was envying me right now. Maybe it was just the idea of getting away from Eleanor for two weeks.
Billy and I did about six more miles before we camped for the night, and that's good going, believe me. I slept like a log, and woke up as stiff as one too, from sleeping on the ground. I didn't do it enough. Billy's older than Dad, but he didn't creak out of his sleeping bag. I did.
Four days later I felt about four years older when we made it in Northcamp and I got to sleep in a bed again. The grim little bunk beds at all our permanent camps aren't very welcoming, but they look pretty good after five nights on the ground. So does the hot water after you get the generator going. Northcamp smelled funny the way any building does that's been shut up for too long - a little dusty, a little moldy, a little mousy - but we cranked open the windows and got a fire going in the woodstove (and the mice living in the kindling box were not happy, speaking of mousy) and it was pretty nice.
I admit I had a few butterflies in my stomach the next morning - in spite of Billy's cornmeal pancakes, which I swear must be the best in the world - but five days' camping with Billy had reminded me that I still knew how to do everything I needed to know how to do, and I was ready to go by sunup and I went. I wanted to cover some ground. I wanted to make as much of a thing of my first solo as possible, so they'd let me do it again. Which meant I had to make the right kind of thing of my first solo or they'd never let me do anything again. I wanted to come out here for weeks and study dragons. I wanted to come out here for weeks and find some dragons to study.
I had my radio and a compass (and a squirtgun and a flare), the weather was perfect, and I'd been drilled since I was tiny to recognize Rangers' marks. And while Northcamp was a long way into the park by my standards, the area was well used and well designated by the Rangers. There was no way I could get lost if I even half kept my head. There were no grizzlies around here, and you only had to think about wolves later on in bad winters. It was, in the old Institute joke, a walk in the park.
I really poured it on. I covered twenty miles that day. I knew it because I got to Pine Tor, which is nineteen and three-quarters miles from Northcamp, and another Ranger landmark. (I'd never seen it before except on the charts.) Yes, it was stupid of me, and even I knew it. Sure, I was walking on broken trail, but the emphasis is more on the "broken" than the "trail." Northcamp is a long way from the Bonelands but it's still all pretty ankle-breaking going. And if I missed getting back to Northcamp next day because I was too tired and beat up, it would be a huge black mark against me, and all the grown-ups would give me lectures, especially Dad, and they'd all be disappointed, which is the worst thing grown-ups do to kids - can't they just yell at you and get it over with? - and it would be a long time till they let me go out alone again. Like maybe next century or when pigs fly, etc. But I had to go as fast and as far as I could. I'm not going to try to explain it because I can't. But I had to. I'd get back to Northcamp the next day somehow.
The thing that makes it seem the dumbest is what was I tearing over all that landscape for? I was so busy watching where to put my feet and for the next Rangers' mark that I barely looked around. I could have steamed by any number of dragons - or grizzlies - and never noticed. And our park is beautiful. Wild and strange and alien and not very friendly to humans, but very, very beautiful, if you aren't freaked out by it. Lots of people are. Some people find the Institute as much as they can handle - the institute with its smell of dragon, and shed dragon scales on sale in the gift shop, and the five million acres out back sort of looming. Even as wilderness parks go, Smokehill is pretty uncivilized. It's supposed to be, but it can still kind of knock you over with it.
I didn't see anything that day but ordinary eastern Smokehill landscape, and little stuff like squirrels, and a few deer and wild sheep. But the weirdest thing is that by the time I got to Pine Tor I had this huge harrowing sense of urgency, instead of feeling good and tired and pleased with myself - and maybe deciding to go a last leisurely quarter-mile farther to make it twenty miles and then find a nice place to camp didn't register with me at all. I was so wired I couldn't stand still, despite how tired I was. I had to keep going. Where? What? Huh?
I have to say I'd made unbelievable time. That sounds like bragging but it's important for what happened. I got to Pine Tor and it was still afternoon. I stood there, panting, looking around, like I was looking for a Rangers' mark, except I'd already found the one that was there. I wasn't even very interested in the fact that Pine Tor itself looked just like Grace's - Billy's wife - drawing of it and so it was like I had seen it before. It was like I was waiting. . .
Waiting. . .
I knew what the smell was immediately, even though I'd never smelled it before. The wind was blowing away from me or I'd've smelled it a lot sooner. My head snapped around like a dog's and I set off toward it, like it was pulling me, like it was a rope around my neck being yanked. No, first I stopped and took a very close look at where I was. Pine Tor is big, and I needed to be able to find not just it again, but the right side of it. I was about to set off cross country, away from the Rangers' trail and the Rangers' marks - the thing I was above all expressly forbidden to do - and I had to be able to find my way back. Which proves that at least some of my brain cells were working.
It wasn't very far, and when I got there I was glad the wind was blowing away from me. The smell was overwhelming. But then everything about it was overwhelming. I can't tell you . . . and I'm not going to try. It'll be hard enough, even now, just telling a little.
It was a dead - or rather a dying - dragon. She lay there, bleeding, dying, nearly as big as Pine Tor. Stinking. And pathetic. And horrible. She wasn't dying for any good reason. She was dying because somebody - some poacher - some poacher in Smokehill - had killed her. If everything else hadn't been so overpowering that alone would have stopped me cold.
I was seeing my first dragon up close. And she was mutilated and dying.
She'd got him too, although it was too late for her. When I saw him - what was left of him - I threw up. It was completely automatic, like blinking or sneezing. He was way beyond horrible but he wasn't pathetic. I was glad he was dead. I was just sorry I'd seen him. It.
There were a couple of thoughts trying to go through my head as I stood there, gasping and shaking. (I was shaking so hard I could barely stand up, and suddenly my knapsack weighed so much and hung on my back so clumsily it was going to make me fall down.) We don't have poachers at Smokehill. The fence keeps most of them out; even little halfhearted attempts to breach it make a lot of alarms go off back at the Rangers' headquarters and we're allowed to call out a couple of National Guard helicopters if enough of those alarms go off in the same place. (Some other time I'll tell you about getting helicopters through the gate.) It's happened twice in my lifetime. No one has ever made it through or over the fence before a helicopter has got there - no one ever had. Occasionally someone manages to get through the gate, but the Rangers always find them before they do any damage - sometimes they're glad to be found. Even big-game-hunter-type major assho-idiots sometimes find Smokehill a little too much. I'd never heard of anyone killing a dragon in Smokehill - ever - and this wasn't the sort of thing Dad wouldn't have told me, and it was the sort of thing I'd asked. Nor, of course, would he have let me do my solo if there was any even vague rumor of poachers or big-game idiots planning to have a try.
The other thing that was in my head was how I knew she was female: because of her color. One of the few things we know about dragon births is that Mom turns an all-over red-vermilion-maroon-with-orangebits during the process, and dragons are green-gold-brown-black mostly, with sometimes a little red or blue or orange but not much. Even the zoos had noticed the color change. Old Pete had taken very careful notes about his mom dragons, and he thought it was something to do with getting the fire lit in the babies' stomachs. It's as good a guess as any.
But that was why the poacher'd been able to get close to her, maybe. Dragons - even dragons - are probably a little more vulnerable when they're giving birth. Apparently this one hadn't had anyone else around to help her. I didn't know why. Old Pete thought a birthing mom always had a few midwives around.
You don't go near a dying dragon. They can fry you after they're dead. The reflex that makes chickens run around after their heads are cut off makes dragons cough fire. Quite a few people have died this way, including one zookeeper. I suppose I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking about the fact that she was dying, and that her babies were going to die because they had no mother, and that she'd know that. I boomeranged into thinking about my own mother again. They wanted to tell us, when they found her, that she must have died instantly. Seems to me, if she really did fall down that cliff, she'd've had time to think about it that Dad and I were going to be really miserable without her.
How do I know what a mother dragon thinks or doesn't think? But it was just so sad. I couldn't bear it. I went up to her. Went up to her head, which was like nearly as big as a Ranger's cabin. She watched me coming. She watched me. I had to walk up most of the length of her body, so I had to walk past her babies, these little blobs that were baby dragons. They were born and everything. But they were already dead. So she was dying knowing her babies were already dead. I'd started to cry and I didn't even know it.
When I was standing next to her head I didn't know what to do. It was all way too unreal to want to like pet her - pet a dragon, what a not-good idea - and even though I'd sort of forgotten that she could still do to me what she'd done to the poacher, I didn't try to touch her. I just stood there like a moron. I nearly touched her after all though because I was still shaking so hard I could hardly stay on my feet. Balance yourself by leaning against a dragon, right. I crossed my arms over my front and reached under the opposite elbows so I could grab my knapsack straps with my hands like I was holding myself together. Maybe I was.
The eye I could see had moved slowly, following me, and now it stared straight at me. Never mind the fire risk, being stared at by a dragon - by an eye the size of a wheel on a tour bus - is scary. The pupil goes on and on to the end of the universe and then around to the beginning too, and there are landscapes in the iris. Or cavescapes. Wild, dreamy, magical caves, full of curlicue mazes where you could get lost and never come out and not mind. And it's hot. I was sweating. Maybe with fear (and with being sick), but with the heat of her staring too.
So there I was, finally seeing a dragon up close - really really up close - the thing I would have said that I wanted above every other thing in the world or even out of the world that I could even imagine wanting. And it was maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to me. You're saying, wait a minute, you dummy, it's not worse than your mom dying. Or even your dog. It kind of was though, because it was somehow all three of them, all together, all at once.
I stared back. What else could I do - for her? I held her gaze. I took a few steps into that labyrinth in her eye. It was sort of reddish and smoky and shadowy and twinkling. And it was like I really was standing there, with Smokehill behind me, not Smokehill all around us both as I stood and stared (and shuddered). The heat seemed to sort of all pull together into the center of my skull, and it hung there and throbbed. Now I was sweating from having a headache that felt like it would split my head open. So that's my excuse for my next stupid idea: that I saw what she was thinking. Like I can read a dragon's expression when I mostly can't tell what Dad or Billy is thinking. Well, it felt like I could read her huge dying eye, although maybe that was just the headache, and what I saw was anger-rage-despair. Easy enough to guess, you say, that she'd be feeling rage and despair, and it didn't take any creepy mind-reading. But I also saw . . . hope.
Hope?
Looking at me, as she was looking at me (bang bang bang went my skull), a little hope had crept into the despair. I saw this happen. Looking at me, the same sort of critter, it should have seemed to her, as had killed her.
And then she died.
And I was back in Smokehill again, standing next to a dead dragon, and the beautiful, dangerous light in her eye was gone.
And then I did touch her. I forgot about the dead-dragon fire-reflex, and I crouched down on the stinking, bloody ground, and rested my forehead against a tiny little sticky-out knob of her poor ruined head, and cried like a baby. Cried more than I ever had for Mom - because, you know, we'd waited so long, and expected - but not really expected - the worst for so long, that when the worst finally arrived we couldn't react at all.
Twenty rough miles in a day and crying my head off when I staggered to my feet again, feeling like a fool, I was so exhausted I barely could stand. And while none of this had taken a lot of time, still, it was late afternoon, and the sun was sinking, and I needed to get back to Pine Tor tonight if at all possible. I began drearily to drag myself back the way I had come. I had to walk past all the little dead dragonlets again. I looked at them not because I wanted to but to stop myself from looking at the poacher's body. Which is how I noticed that one of them was still breathing.
A just - born dragon is ridiculously small, not much bigger than the palm of your hand. Old Pete had guessed they were little, but even he didn't guess how little. I'm not even sure why I recognized them, except that I was already half nuts and they seemed to be kind of smoky and shadowy and twinkling. The color Mom goes to have them and get their tummies lit up lasts a few hours or as much as half a day, but no one - not even Old Pete - had ever seen the babies or the fire-lighting actually happening and maybe that's not really when they're born or lit at all, and it's just Mom's color that makes humans think "fire."
But I did recognize them. And I could see that the smokiest, twinklingest of the five of them was breathing: that its tiny sides were moving in and out. And because no one knows enough about dragons one of the things I'd read a lot about, so I could make educated guesses just like real scientists, was marsupials. If I hadn't known that dragons were marsupial-ish I think I probably still wouldn't have recognized them, nuts or not.
They look kind of lizardy, to the extent they look anything, because mostly what they look is soft and squidgy just-born things often look like that, one way or another, but dragons look a lot worse than puppies or kittens or even Boneland ground squirrels or just-hatched birds. New dragonlets are pretty well still fetuses after all; once they get into their mom's pouch they won't come out again for yonks.
This baby was still wet from being born. It was breathing, and making occasional feeble, hopeless little swimming gestures with its tiny stumpy legs, like it was still blindly trying to crawl up its mom's belly to her pouch, like a kangaroo's joey. I couldn't bear that either, watching it trying, and without thinking about it, I picked it up and stuffed it down my shirt. I felt its little legs scrabble faintly a minute or two longer, and then sort of brace themselves, and then it collapsed, or curled up, and didn't move any more, although there was a sort of gummy feeling as I moved and its skin rubbed against mine. And I thought, Oh, great, it's dead now too, I've got a sticky, gross, dead dragonlet down my shirt, and then I couldn't think about it any more because I had to watch for the way to Pine Tor. The moon was already rising as the day grayed to sunset, and it was a big round bright one that shed a lot of light. I could use all the breaks I could get.
I made it back to Pine Tor and unloaded my pack but I didn't dare sit down because I knew once I did I wouldn't get up again till morning at least. I was lucky; Pine Tor is called that for a reason and in a countryside where there isn't exactly a lot of heavy forest (pity you can't burn rock) I was really grateful that I didn't have to go far to collect enough firewood. The moonlight helped too. I hauled a lot of wood back to my campsite, being careful not to knock my stomach, because even if the dragonlet was dead I didn't want squished dead dragonlet in my shirt. I hauled and hauled partly because I was so tired by then I couldn't remember to stop, and partly because if the dragonlet was still alive I had a dim idea that I needed to be able to keep it warmer than my own body temperature, and partly because if it was dead I didn't want to know and hauling wood put off finding out. There'd been too much death today already.
I got a fire going and started heating some water for dinner. There's plenty of water in most of Smokehill (except where there isn't any at all), and pretty much anywhere within a few days' hike of the institute has streams all over it running through the rocks and tough scrub so it's less a matter of finding it than of trying not to find it at the wrong moment and get soaked (or break something in our famous fall-down-and-break-something streambeds). I pulled out a packet of dried meat and threw the meat in the water. We don't buy freeze-dried campers' supplies in shiny airtight envelopes from the nearest outdoor-sports shop - there isn't one nearer than Cheyenne, and the outdoors isn't a sport to us. We live here. Besides, we couldn't afford it. We dry our own stuff. One of the suggestions for the gift shop was that we sell some of our own dried meat but the Rangers already have enough to do, although the pointy-head tourist consultant guy seemed to think that tourists would go for wild sheep and wild goat and bison and stuff as exotic. Exotic. I ate at a McDonald's once, and I thought their hamburgers tasted pretty exotic.
But what I was thinking as the water got hot and I could smell the meat cooking is that we've always shared the dragons' dinners. Old Pete had figured out what dragons liked best of what he could offer them while he still had them in cages and fortunately there was enough of it that could live here. This wouldn't be a dragon haven if dragons only thrived on rhino and Galapagos tortoise, neither of which would do well at Smokehill. And Old Pete ate what the dragons ate because the dragons were the important thing. We still do and they still are.
This smelled like deer, but would sheep be any better? I'd just picked up the first couple of packets. I didn't care.
So I sat there and looked at my supper and thought, Even if it's still alive, how am I going to feed it? We don't know anything about dragon milk, or dragon juice, or whatever, even if Mom makes it from eating wild sheep and so on.
I put my hand into my shirt and the dragonlet woke up at once, if it had been asleep, wriggled around like crazy, and managed to attach itself to one of my fingers, sucking so hard it hurt. So it was still alive and it was hungry. If I'd been thinking clearly I'd've known it was alive, though, because it was so hot. It was hot enough that when I unbuttoned my shirt to get it out there was a red mark on my stomach. It didn't like being out of my shirt; it let go of my finger and started, I don't know, mewing, kind of, a tiny, harsh sort of noise that I didn't want to think sounded like a scream of absolute terror, and trying to burrow back where it came from.
I was tired, and hungry myself, and my head really hurt, and I was all wound up about what had happened, and about the fact that I had landed myself with an orphan dragonlet that I hadn't a clue how to take care of, and how it was all going to be my fault when it died and I already felt as if everything that had happened was my fault - even though I knew that was stupid - and when it died too I'd never forgive myself and go crazy or something. I was way out of my depth. I wasn't a mother dragon and I didn't have a clue. Oh yes and what I was doing was totally illegal. Don't ask me who makes the laws or why they don't like get together sometimes and notice if the laws make any sense. But while it's illegal to hurt or kill a dragon it's more illegal to try and save a dragon's life.
Dad tried to explain it to me once, that it's about non-interference-like the way big parks (including this one) let lightning-started fires go ahead and burn everything up because it's part of the natural cycle. Okay. Maybe. But people get bent about dragons in ways they don't get bent about other natural cycle stuff. Apparently the witless wonder who was pushing for the dragon legislation got so bent about the anti-harming-a-dragon part of the bill that he pulled all the stops out getting really vicious language into the anti-preserving-a-dragon's-life part of the bill. The result is that trying to raise a baby dragon would be like the most illegal thing you could possibly do, next to assassinating the president maybe, and is probably one of the extra reasons the Institute has to beg for money, because we might do something illegal with it, like learn how to save dragons.
Well it would all be over soon and it would be dead and I would be crazy and Dad would have to put my gross baby-dragon-yucky clothes through the washing machine because I would be in a padded cell and couldn't do it myself.
I rebuttoned my shirt except for one button over the belt, muttering to myself, or to it, and tucked the dragonlet back in, tail first and belly up, with its head near the opening. It stopped struggling and lay there like it was peering out through the gap and looking at me. Its eyes were open - unlike a puppy or a kitten's - but they were blurry like they didn't see much, like a baby bird's. They were also a funny purplish color. It was really ugly all over, not just the eyes, sort of bruise colored, not just purplish but also yellowish and greenish, as well as smushed-looking and crusty with dried whatever.
"You are the ugliest damn thing I have ever seen in my entire life," I said to it, clearly, like I wanted it on the record what I thought, and I swear its blurry purple eyes tried to track where the sound was coming from and it made a little grunt like an acknowledgment.
Have you ever tried to raise a baby bird or a raccoon or something? Something, you know, easy. They die a lot. We're way too good at raccoons - that's Eric again - since our successes are now bringing their great-great-great-grandkids for evening handouts behind the institute - but we all still sweat when the Rangers bring in new orphans. And even with Eric's voodoo and all the info every bird society or raccoon society or beetle society (that's a joke) can give us (actually we wrote some of it), so you know exactly what to do and you do it . . . they still die. A lot. And it hurts. And that's when you even know what they eat and for stuff that is at least already, you know, born. Which a new dragonlet isn't, not really.
I locked open my camping spoon and dipped up some of the meat broth, gave the dragonlet my finger to suck again, which it was happy to do, and poured some broth in the gap between its mouth and my finger. You'd think I'd know better, but remember I was pretty deranged.
Of course most of the broth went all over me and the dragonlet, but some of it must have gone down its throat because it choked and gargled and then I knew I had killed it. I whipped it out of my shirt again and held it up head down in the air and it gacked and gagged and then started mewing again and trying to get back in my shirt. Poor awful little monster. I'd be crying here again in a minute. This time I unbuttoned my sleeve and stuck it in tail first (against the thin skin on the underside of my forearm and let me tell you its body heat hurt) till only its face was showing, and I cupped my hand around its head and it subsided, and I swear it looked traumatized, ugly and weird as it was.
I was still muttering. Now I was saying things like "it's okay, stupid, relax." I'm not sure if I was talking to myself this time, or the dragonlet. I stuck a finger from my cupping hand in sort of the side of its mouth to give it something to suck on and tipped just a drop or two of broth into its mouth. (This was way more awkward than I'm telling you.) It went gulp and went on sucking. Oh hurrah. A lot of your orphans just won't try to eat and that's that. So the dragonlet wasn't going to die of starvation, it was going to die of being poisoned or of not getting enough of some kind of vitamin because deer broth isn't anything like close enough to dragon milk. As I say, no one knows what goes on in those pouches.
I fed it broth till its belly was stretching my sleeve. It was almost beginning to look kind of cute to me. I was in a bad way. But you do get like this with your orphans. If they eat you feel all . . . mothery. (Mom had been really good with the orphans - maybe almost as good as Eric. I remember getting old enough to ask her, kind of anxiously, if taking care of me had been as bad as the stuff at Eric's orphanage. She'd laughed and said oh no, I was much, much worse.) I slid the dragonlet out of my sleeve again and it was either falling asleep because it was full and happy or slipping into its final coma, but it didn't struggle so much this time. I pulled my shirt off and wrapped it up in that because I had a clean shirt in my backpack, and if one of us was going to have the clean shirt I'd rather it was me, and then I put it as near the fire as I thought I could without making dragonlet toast, or anyway setting my shirt on fire.
I looked at the inside of my wrist where it had been lying. The skin there is even thinner than on your stomach, and it was actually burned. Jeez. So I got the wound salve out that is part of the basic kit Billy makes you carry, like waterproof matches and a hatchet to make kindling and a pot to boil water, and put some on, and then I had dinner, which took about three minutes because I was so hungry and tired and shaky.
But by the time I'd finished eating, make that bolting, the wretched dragonlet was mewing again, and trying to get out of the shirt. "Oh, give me a break," I said. I thought maybe I'd put it too close to the fire, so I picked it up, and it went floppy instantly, but then the moment I put it down again it was mewing and thrashing, to the extent that something the size of your hand and with legs an inch and a half long and is maybe three or six hours old can thrash. "You're ugly and you smell," I said.
So fatalistically I put it back inside my clean shirt and it scuffled a little like you might thump your pillow with your fist, and then went to sleep. Which made one of us. It had managed to relieve itself on my old shirt, so that was really delightful, and I got my jackknife out and hacked off the dirtiest bits and then sort of tucked the rest of the old shirt around its rear end where it was asleep inside my new shirt and leaving fresh red marks on my stomach. I lay down gingerly on my side clutching it with my other hand so that the old shirt around its rear end wouldn't fall off and wondering if I'd get any sleep at all because what if I rolled over on it? Not merely squished dragonlet but squished full-of-deer-broth dragonlet. By then I was probably a little hysterical.
I did sleep but I didn't sleep much. Every time it moved I woke up, and I suppose my brain had been working in my sleep or something because by the first time it woke me up I'd figured that a dragonlet probably had to be fed every ten minutes or something because if it was in its mom's pouch it would probably be permanently stuck on a nipple for the first six months or so, which is what happens with the ordinary true-mammal marsupials we know about and makes sense. And a lot of ordinary orphans you do have to feed round the clock. (Maybe Eric's personality was just the result of chronic sleep shortage, although all of the-human-adults took turns for the middle of the night, and Mom and Katie and Jane never got anything like Eric gets, even on no sleep. Although Dad got a little scratchy.) I was trying to remember how long they think the full-time pouch span is for a dragon, but if I'd ever known I'd forgotten and it didn't really matter at the moment since this was only the first night.
Every time it wiggled I woke up, groggily - now I was definitely talking out loud to keep myself awake - and the first time I had to pour the rest of the broth back into the pot and heat it in the embers because it's not a good idea to leave food around even in summer when there's plenty of other stuff to eat for anything wandering by But after the first time I thought the hell with it and just put the top on the pot and left it in the fire, and I know this completely destroys your respect for me as someone who should be allowed to go on his first solo, and you're right, but you weren't there. And it was still a horrible night (even though nobody tried to eat our broth and then have us for dessert), and I used almost all of the firewood I'd collected after all, keeping the fire going.
And to the extent I did sleep, it was like I was afraid to move at all, so I woke up every time in exactly the same position because it suited trying to hold the damn dragonlet in the position it liked, and by morning when I stopped even pretending to sleep my whole right side was like paralyzed and I had a headache like you wouldn't believe, although really I'd had the headache since everything happened yesterday afternoon. And to think a few days ago I'd been feeling that just relearning to sleep on the ground was tough. I may have slept as much as an hour that last spell before dawn. When I tried to sit up I yelped like a dog when you've stepped on its tail. But I felt the dragonlet stir. My stomach felt scalded so I already knew it was still alive. It was probably hungry again too. I hurt too much to be hungry. "You still there, Ugly?" I said.
I got the fire going properly again (nice hot embers, I thought resentfully, regularly blown on and fed sticks - the dragonlet would have been fine lying next to the fire all night) and put some more water on to heat and threw another chunk of meat in. At home Dad makes me eat vegetables but when I'm in the park I turn carnivore. Billy never makes me eat vegetables even though most of the year he can usually find green stuff to eat wherever he is. Even I know about waterweed. I just don't eat it. And I bet dragons don't either. I wasn't going to endanger the dragonlet's fragile welfare by threatening it with vegetable matter.
It had done some more on my old shirt, so I cut those bits out. I needed to get back to the Institute soon because I was running out of shirt. Then we did the broth thing again and while in one way it was easier because I was getting in practice it didn't seem to want to open its mouth any wider than it absolutely had to and now in daylight again the corners of its mouth looked sort of, well, chapped, maybe. So I put some wound salve on it and wondered if maybe that would poison it, and some more on the inside of my wrist, and then I cruelly let it lie near the fire in a nice warm pile of ashes (I checked) while I cleaned up in the hope that it would do some of its business before I had to wrap it up in what remained of my old shirt again and put it next to my stomach, and it did. So that was something.
But it had also mewed and thrashed while I left it - it had added a sort of high-pitched peep to its repertoire on its second day of life - so by the time I finally did put it back inside my shirt it was exhausted and went to sleep instantly. At least I assume that's what it was doing when it did its pillow-punching trick and didn't move for a while. By now I could feel it breathing - I don't know if it was breathing better or I was learning the mom marsupial drill - and, of course, it was burning holes in the skin of my stomach.
I can't begin to tell you what a long day that was. I was aching all over, particularly my head, and tired into my bones. I don't think I'd ever realized what that phrase meant before. It's a good thing I've been trained since I was a toddler to follow Rangers' marks because I was doing it mindlessly, not thinking because I couldn't think. There was no thinking left in me. And it's ridiculous to say that something the size of a day-and-a-half-old dragonlet weighed, but it did. It weighed more than my backpack did somehow. I suppose it was just that I couldn't stop worrying about it. I worried about whether or not it could breathe, because I had to tuck my sweatshirt in over my shirt to make sure it didn't fall out while we were moving, but mostly it wasn't anything so logical. It was just worry worry worry about everything. Worry on legs. Worry walking. Worry staggering and lurching.
I didn't anything like cover twenty miles that day. I think I did about ten, which under the circumstances is amazing. I decided after the first stop to feed my new responsibility that if it could live with human body heat it could probably live with human-body-heat food, so I put the pot of broth under my shirt too. The idea that I had to stop and make a fire every half hour was a whole lot too much. And I was sure I should be feeding it more often than every half hour anyway, I just couldn't. Fortunately the broth pot was small. Mind you my shirt had not been made to hold both a dragonlet and even a small pot of broth so I had to tuck the pot sort of down my pants which made walking harder, and cradle the dragonlet with one hand so it didn't fall down the hole, and the pot leaked. Well, so did the dragonlet. After a while I stopped paying attention. Ordinarily I don't think I'd've been able to ignore getting increasingly covered with runny infant dragon poop but there was nothing ordinary about that day. If I hadn't kept telling myself "Billy will know what to do" I'd never have been able to make myself keep moving at all.
When sunset came I pulled myself together enough to look for the next Ranger mark so I'd know exactly which way to go in the morning. Besides, camping near one was almost like company. Human company. I knew that tomorrow was going to be even worse than today had been. I mopped myself up as well as I could out of the nearby rill while a new pot of water was heating over the fire. I didn't even try to put the dragonlet down this time. Sometimes I think personal hygiene is kind of overdone but I would have loved a hot bath. And lots of soap.
I had to clean up carefully, moving the dragonlet around so it didn't get any nasty cold water on it, and it wasn't thrilled with the operation anyway, from the amount of scrabbling and peeping, but when it was broth time again it settled right down and started to suck and swallow. I felt kind of funny about that. I mean, it was already learning the system. It was a dragon for pity's sake. But at two days old it was already learning what to do, and I was pretty sure a finger and a camping spoon wasn't the system it was born to expect. I'd tried using a piece of shirt (more shirt gone) as a nipple, but that didn't work so well, or it couldn't suck the broth out of the cloth, or something; the cloth .just got soggier and soggier and it kept letting go to try and grab one of my fingers again. So we went back to the old system. My finger was getting almost as sore as my stomach.
But when I thought about how much worse tomorrow was going to be, it never crossed my mind to hope the thing would die and let me off.
