Dragon Haven Page 4

  I learned to read so I could read Pete’s memoirs. Mom used to worry that I was growing up strange because I wasn’t interested in the usual kids’ books. Goodnight Moon, baaaaarf. I didn’t even like Where the Wild Things Are because none of them looked enough like dragons. But I still remember the first time Dad read me “Jabberwocky.” It’s probably my earliest memory; I think I was three. Mom—who was busy worrying that The Cat in the Hat didn’t move me—said, “Oh, Frank, you’ll only confuse him. It’s not even in English,” but Dad was having one of his manic fits. He’d done amateur theater when he was younger, and he could still turn that crazy public thing on when he wanted to. He doesn’t do it much any more—except for congressional subcommittees—but he still did it when I was little. I don’t know whether I was confused by “Jabberwocky” or not, but I was riveted by it, as my dad shouted and danced and snickersnacked across my bedroom. I’d’ve named Snark Jabberwock if it hadn’t been too hard to say (“Jabberwock, sit! Jabberwock, stay!”) so I settled for Snark.

  It was shortly after that Dad started reading parts of Pete’s memoirs to me—while Mom shook her head. But it made me want to learn the alphabet. Once I could read there was no stopping me. Dad said once, “Mad, do you really think any child of ours wouldn’t be spellbound by dragons?” It was always Dad’s little joke to call her Mad; her name was Madeline. Mom laughed a sort of grim nonlaugh and said, “I suppose it’s either that or he couldn’t stand them.” I couldn’t imagine what she meant.

  So I grew up on Lewis Carroll—and Old Pete—and Saint George, and Fafnir and Nidhogg, and Smaug and Yofune-Nushi, and all the others, famous, infamous, and totally obscure. Mom in particular has—had—well Dad and I still have it—this amazing collection of literary dragons and the myths pretending to be science about the evolutionary forebears of the Chinese dragon and the smelly dragon and all of the other fake dragons, trying to justify that Draco label.

  Because the real problem with Draco australiensis is that it raises its kids in a pouch, like a kangaroo or a koala. Things with pouches just aren’t romantic. Saint George or Siegfried slaying a critter with a pouch? No way. Even the Australians have never quite taken their Draco seriously as a real live dragon—even if it is the biggest of the land animals on this planet—and still manages to fly—and breathes fire—and, you know, looks like a dragon. It’s not like the pouch shows. Humans are perverse. You may have noticed. But here we’ve got thousands of years of pretty much every culture on the planet coming up with stories about big scaly things that breathe fire…and then, hey presto, we’ve got them. They freaking exist. You’d think we’ve have been dancing in the streets and slinging daisy chains across the borders from Ulan Bator to Minsk. But noooo.

  Maybe if dragons had eaten more people when they had the chance humans wouldn’t have been so offhand. (Although if they had they might have been made extinct before anybody thought to preserve them.) You’re looking to design the real, true, only dragon, and what more can you want than big and flying and breathing fire? No pouch nonsense is what you want. Hence the attraction of all the silly little lizards like russo and chinensis.

  Because, I hear you say, not only is there the pouch problem, but kangaroos and koalas are mammals. True. But nobody ever told reptiles they couldn’t evolve a pouch to carry their babies in, did they? You’ve heard the phrase “parallel evolution”? And mammals and reptiles are cousins anyway, if you go back far enough, like maybe 250 million years or so, which gives you a lot of room to mutate in. The biology of dragons—and from here on let’s get it straight that when I say dragon, I mean our one and only real dragon, Draco australiensis—is still pretty much one big blank space in the biology books.

  And dragon corpses disintegrate really fast—so there goes that standard research route—including the bones—which is something to do with the fire-stomach too, or the body chemistry that supports the fire-stomach, or maybe the bones are built out of something we don’t know about that weighs less than the rest of the planet’s bones, which is why dragons can fly. Hitch over one of those rows of the periodic table, there’s a missing dragon bone element to get in somewhere. One of the results is that no natural history museum in the world has a dragon skeleton on display, which in a weird way means that a lot of people assume they don’t really exist. And there are some unhappy paleontologists and animal osteologists who would like to specialize in dragons and can’t.

  They think that baby dragons are born with some kind of embery gum or mucilage in their tiny fetal fire-stomachs—their igniventatores. They think that Mom somehow shoves ’em out—she usually has several at a go—and lights ’em up, that that’s when they’re born, that maybe the fire-lighting business is where the marsupial business started, that you have to get the fire lit while the baby is still kind of an embryo, for some reason or other, so maybe it makes sense to transfer them to a different holding container while you’re at it. So she gets ’em lit and into her pouch where they stay for the next year or so.

  So a long time ago the species must have figured out it couldn’t go the several-hundred-eggs tortoise route if it wanted to work on this great new fire-breathing racket, so it went for pouch incubators instead. But the lab coats still haven’t really decided whether dragons are reptiles. Maybe they’re mammals. Or something else. I like the something else idea myself, what else has an igniventator? But apparently having some big new thing as high up in the hierarchy as the division between reptiles and mammals upsets everybody too much. Science under Threat by Unclassifiable Critter: film at eleven. I keep telling you lab coats are drones. Although I sometimes think the label guys went for reptiles only because Draco was already stuck on a lot of lizards, and it would be just too stupid to have something that finally obviously is a dragon called Thingamajiggium. Which maybe means lab coats have some imagination after all.

  There’s other weird stuff, like their scales are made out of something that is a lot more like mutant hair than like adapted skin. (They seem to shed more here at Smokehill than anywhere else. Something to do with the weather, presumably. But we sell shed dragon scales in the gift shop—as many as the Rangers can pack in—and they go really well. Have I mentioned recently that we’re always desperate for money?) And they fly, which makes them the only nonbird that can take off and land and flap and soar like a bird, with none of that cheating stuff that “flying” squirrels or “flying” fish do. So maybe they’re birds. Although the third pair of limbs is still problematic.

  All of this bothers a lot of the fruit loops too. Dragons are supposed to be reptiles. Everybody knows that. All the fake dragons are real reptiles. They also behave in nice lower-order ways that scientists who want to study them like. They don’t disappear. You can watch ’em having and raising their babies. Their corpses rot the way corpses are supposed to rot, and natural history museums can have as many skeletons as they like. That kind of thing. It’s funny what everybody knows.

  But the trouble with dragon public relations is pretty well permanent. First, they’re too marsupialy and not lizardy enough, and then they’re hard to find, to gawk at or to study (which is only a snobby form of gawking really), and then they might even be (do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do) intelligent. Why didn’t we know about them till about two hundred and fifty years ago? Something that size? Even if they did hang out in the middle of a big empty continent? It’s not like no one ever went there. The Europeans thought it was just another quaint aboriginal myth for a long time. I guess sheep are like chocolate or heroin to dragons, they just couldn’t help themselves when the ranchers moved in. But they lost the war with the sheep ranchers because they never really fought it. The ranchers and the mercenaries and big game hunters they hired or pitched in with—and the poachers—killed a lot of dragons, and the rest of them pretty much disappeared. Again.

  But there was about half a century of the australiensis golden age when everybody was fascinated by them, and you could study them all right, so long as the poachers didn’t get t
here first. Well, you still didn’t see them get born. But you could see them flying, for example. Something the size of a dragon is pretty damn visible, flying. And there are lots and lots of records of all those sober scientists streaming out to Australia to see for themselves. I was really jealous of the guys who could write about seeing dragons flying nearby, the hot smell of them—like fire but not like fire—the way their underparts tend to be paler and mottled—but you can’t see a lot of their bellies because of the way they tuck their tails back under their bodies, like a dog tucking its tail between its legs. Birds use their tails as rudders. Dragons have some other system…but that’s only one of a thousand things we don’t know about dragons. We started killing them too soon.

  When it was too late some of the politer scientists went round to the aborigines and said, Hey, can we talk to you about your dragon stories? It was those stories that first told the rest of us that australiensis had pouches. Maybe by then we were looking for a reason not to like them, since we were busy making them extinct. The really interesting thing about all the old aboriginal tales though is that there isn’t a single one about a dragon eating a human. Oh well those are just tales, said the guys with the guns. And it’s true that a few ranchers got fried in the nonwar, but a rattlesnake won’t bite you unless you worry it, and the ranchers were going after the dragons—there was no live-and-let-live policy or acceptable sheep loss rate.

  I’d never seen a dragon flying—not up close. And I live here. And five million acres isn’t big enough to hide (maybe) two hundred flying dragons. So, I hear you say, maybe our figures are wrong? Maybe we don’t have two hundred dragons? Then what’s eating the deer, the sheep, and the bison? We can count our bears and our cougars and our bobcats and our coyotes and our wolves well enough, and they aren’t doing it by themselves. And our Rangers really do cover most of the park slowly, over a period of years. They said there were quite a few dragons out there, and Dad and I believed them.

  Billy knows what goes on in this park better than any other human alive, and he’d only seen flying dragons a few times. There’s a big valley sort of northwest of the center of Smokehill, one of the friendlier edges of the Bonelands, where he’d seen most of ’em, and he’d say he’d take me there when I was older—which was to say when Dad would let me. I didn’t know when that was going to happen, because he’d been a little crazy about keeping me safe since Mom died. He’d barely let me out of the Institute, and the summer before the one I’m talking about we never did take our summer hike, which is three or four weeks backpacking through the park, having left Billy in charge of dealing with the f.l.s. It’s true that it wouldn’t have been the same without Mom and Snark, but I still wanted to go. The summer before that—no. But that summer—yes. I wanted to go. I wanted to find out what it would be like. Like after a major accident and months in the hospital and six operations and all that physical therapy—so, does the leg work again, or doesn’t it? But Dad wouldn’t even discuss it, so we didn’t go.

  That’s not to say I’d never seen any dragons at all. I did, lots of times, maybe as often as twice a year—or I did in the few years I was old enough to do a lot of walking before Mom died—but only at a distance, like across one of Smokehill’s rock plains, when one of the rocks is flying. They don’t come near the Institute (another sign of their intelligence, I say), so you only are going to see them if you’re one of the lucky ones who ever gets farther into the park. And I’ve smelled ’em more often than that—smelled ’em close, I mean. There’s a dragon smell that isn’t like anything else. It’s a fire smell, and a wild-animal smell—pungent but not rotten or foul like some kinds of musk or a sloppy carnivore’s leftovers that can turn your stomach—but it’s something else too. Billy says it’s because their fire isn’t like the fire you make with wood; they burn some sort of weird resinous stuff they secrete for the purpose. Organic fire. And even way damped down, that fire gives off a little invisible smoke, and we can smell it.

  The Institute smells of dragon. The tourists here pick it up immediately, as soon as they come through the gate. (I suppose the wall kind of keeps it in too.) You can see them sort of straighten up and get all sparkly-eyed. And it makes them feel that the dragons are close—it makes them feel better about not actually seeing any. And of course they are close, comparatively speaking. I don’t notice the smell much at the Institute—I don’t really notice it till I get out into the park.

  Oh, and every human who walks in the park either carries a squirtgun or has a Ranger with them carrying a squirtgun. This is supposed to be the dragon equivalent of what most animals think about skunks, but I don’t know how they think they know. None of our Rangers has ever shot theirs at anything. But the checker-uppers for the squirtguns come round every six months like the other checker-uppers come round to test your fire extinguishers. But even if you happened to have a handy backup antitank gun you’re sunk if your squirtgun didn’t work, since it’s a federal offense to harm a dragon. This is pretty funny when it’s also a HUGE messy spectacular federal crime to aid in the preservation of the life of a dragon—in fact one of the hugest and messiest—but that’s another story, and I’m getting to it, just shut up and listen.

  CHAPTER TWO

  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 wol
ves, 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.