Dragonhaven

Lois and I were sitting facing each other in one of the little sandpits in our meadow. I'd been trying to teach her to count. What we were really good at is what I called mirror-dancing, which was using Lois' fantastic mimic ability in three dimensions  -  and my idea for it had begun with the stick-fetching. But Lois was actually better at it than I was  -  she could remember a longer series of steps / hops / rolls forward and back and sideways and around trees and so on than I could  -  which was pretty embarrassing, and I was looking for a way to reestablish my superiority. Parents can be like that with uppity children. So I'd thought of counting  -  nice low numbers you can handle in pebbles, it's just another little easy three-dimensional sport, no big deal. At least that's how I was explaining it to myself. I have no idea what she thought we were doing, but she was always up for a game.

I had an especially big buzzy headache growing that morning too, but maybe that was just because I was proving to be such a useless teacher. Maybe my basic attitude toward arithmetic ("yecch") was breaking through. Lois was certainly trying to pay attention, but she kept wanting to rearrange the pebbles. I'm not sure that her heaps were more interesting than mine anyway. When things got discouraging we reverted to stick throwing. Since we'd had that big breakthrough about being-the-same-but-different over fetching sticks, it always seemed to cheer us up  -  and when I had a useless-teacher headache (this wasn't the first time) sometimes it eased off a little too.

Out here she'd learned to throw sticks for me by dragging one  -  her special favorite for this activity was one she was barely big enough to drag, but she insisted I carry it properly when I fetched it, but then once I wrestled the thing up I could put it over my shoulder, which wasn't an option for sloping, low-slung Lois  -  but mostly I threw and we both fetched. Usually she took off the moment it left my hand  -  and she never, ever got fooled by a fake throw the way Snark used to, but then she didn't love running just to run the way Snark did either. And I was a little tired that morning too  -  she'd kicked in her sleep more than usual the night before  -  so she was well ahead of me after I threw the first one. But we both noticed the sudden black shadow over the meadow. And the noise. And the smell.

Lois saved my life, although I don't think that was what was in her mind. She was terrified, and she spun around and hurtled back toward me, shrieking, and knocked me down, trying to get back into the sling I hadn't worn in more than a year, trying to hide in her mom's pouch from the gigantic greeny-black demon out of nowhere that had landed on the far side of the meadow . . .

. . . And shot a long musky-spicy-smelling stream of fire over us, where my head had been two seconds before, before Lois knocked me down. My skull felt like it was bursting, but that was probably just that I was terrified too, and it may have been the terror rather than having had the breath knocked out of me that was why my lungs felt paralyzed. The heat of the fire that had almost killed me seemed to sort of hang around and stick to my skin, like mist drops when you walk in heavy fog. It dripped off my hair. I shuddered. More like a convulsion. With that film on me I wasn't quite me; I belonged to the dragon.

You don't always react sensibly in an emergency, especially when it's an emergency there is no sensible reaction to. There was a fifty foot dragon sitting on its haunches on the far side of the meadow and I didn't have a grenade launcher at hand. I yanked my T-shirt up and stretched it down over as much of Lois as it could reach, crossed my legs, tucked her tail into the circle of my legs to the extent that it would go, wrapped my arms around her, and waited for the second blast.

It didn't come. Oh. The dragon probably didn't want to kill Lois too. I tried to peel my T-shirt back up over her again  -  if I was going to die I wanted it over soon, so I didn't have to keep thinking about it  -  but she shrieked again, and started trying to claw her way into my stomach,, which made me do some shrieking too, and then the dragon raised its head and let out another blast of fire, but straight up this time, and the roar that went with it really made my head want to burst, and I could feel the dragon's rage and confusion, as well as the throbbing scratches on my stomach.

Lois went strangely still when the dragon roared. Then it stopped, and there was a dreadful pause, and then Lois jerked herself out from under my shirt, scrambled over my legs, and set off toward the dragon. I just sat there. Stupidly, I suppose, but intelligently wasn't going to save me either. I'd never seen Lois like this. She stomped along, her tail trailing and her neck stuck stiffly out in front of her, and her spinal plates like straining with erectness . . . for a moment I half saw the dragon she was going to become.

She gave a gag or cough, stopped, opened her mouth, and produced a thin but unmistakable thread of fire. At the dragon.

The tumult in my head changed, like changing gear, like putting one book back on the shelf and taking another one down  -  or more like having one of the muggers stop kicking you and another one start. It's impossible to describe, but it was so definite a sensation that I rocked where I sat, as if I really was being kicked. I put my hands to my head as if literally trying to keep it from exploding. Sometimes if you squeeze in the right place it does help a headache. I squeezed.

The dragon dropped down to all fours. (Good thing it was a big meadow.) It stretched its own neck till its enormous snout was way too close to Lois, but Lois stood her ground. Indeed she danced up and down a few times  -  and while I'd never seen her have a tantrum, she somehow looked like someone getting ready to have a tantrum  -  then spread all four legs out like she was bracing herself, snapped her neck down and her head out, and . . . shot out some more fire.

This second go was pretty impressive for something that looked like a short-legged overweight wolfhound with really bizarre mange. The big dragon actually drew its head back a few feet to avoid getting burned? Maybe the nose is a sensitive area. I somehow hadn't thought to look if the dragon pulled its lips back carefully before it fired. I know there's supposed to be a gland that produces fireproof mucus that lines the throat, blah blah blah, which is why a dragon coughs before the fire comes out. There are stories from what the humans have the nerve to call the "dragon war" in Australia, about guys who survived by throwing themselves down immediately or diving to one side or something when they heard that dragon cough. But you need really good reflexes. I have to say I hadn't noticed the warning cough when the big dragon tried to kill me.

I didn't piss myself when the dragon raised its head and looked at me again, but I don't know why. Beyond fear, I suppose, but I couldn't have stood up or walked away if that had been what my life depended on, so it's a good thing it didn't. Lois, having made her point, turned her back on the big dragon and flounced back to me. The pressure in my head moved again, and this time it seemed to me there were two different pressures sort of emerging from a general background of thumping and whanging  -  like Nessie and one of her boyfriends rising out of the stormy water of the loch to swallow your boat, oh well at least you can stop bailing  -  the great big one that was trying to make my head explode, and the little one that was the tiny jerky knot thot had been there before. (I hadn't thought of it as tiny before thought. )

The great big one was ANGER ANGER ANGER but it was turning, changing, now more like a prism turning in bright light, but blinding bright light, so it hurt to look at it, and becoming SORROW SORROW SORROW The little one was more like, oh help eek eek eek oh help which I understood completely.

Uh-huh. I understood completely.

I'd never read anywhere that dragons are telepathic. Maybe anything the size of a dragon that has a good brain can put out big unmissable vibes, if you hang around one long enough, which most people don't. Old Pete's journals never mentioned headaches particularly though  -  I didn't think? If I got out of this alive I'd have to check. But Old Pete might not have mentioned it even if he had skull busters; mere human foibles didn't interest him.. . . And I knew Lois awfully well, in my clueless human way, even if it was good scientific practice not to make too many assumptions. Don't we read each other's human emotions all the time? Don't you often know what your dog is thinking? ("I wonder if I could pinch that chicken off the counter in the kitchen before he noticed?")

So I knew that Lois' flouncing was phony. She was still terrified  -  as was I  -  but she was making a much better show of it than I was. I tried to look back at the big dragon as it looked at me, but it wasn't only terror that made me prefer to look at Lois. Her last few steps were not flouncy at all, and she dragged herself over the ridge of my crossed legs as if they were a mountain, and collapsed exhausted in their circle. I didn't try to pull my shirt over her again (one of the seams had parted the last time, so it would have been easier), but I did put my arms around her, and then I did look back at the dragon. Hey, big dragon, yeah, we're a family. You can like it, or you can fry me. I wasn't sending the message in words. But I was putting out vibes as hard as I could.

The dragon looked at us for a while  -  with big shiny dragon eyes, only from where I was sitting, underneath the surface gleam these eyes were bottomless blackness. It felt like a very long while, but I don't think it was. And then, very slowly and carefully, it settled down, and farther down, butt end first, then front end, till its body was flat on the ground, curling its front legs under it rather like a cat, with its enormous snaky neck arched, and its nose (and fire-spouting mouth) still aimed at us. Finally it stretched its neck out on the ground too, but then at the very last minute it turned its head so the nose (and mouth) was aimed a little to one side of us, and tipped up slightly on the cheek. It rolled its only visible eye back toward us to check that we were paying proper attention (I at least was totally riveted), opened its mouth a crack, and gave a long, long, long sigh. There wasn't even any smoke. The vast gentle backdraft of its breath smelled rather like chili powder.

I had to name the big dragon too, because she kept coming back. Also because I was sure she was a she too, and you can't go on calling something that isn't an it, it. I had no better excuse for believing that she was a she than I did Lois, mind you. I never saw her pouch, any more than there were any findable slits, sacs, or bulges on Lois' rapidly expanding anatomy, which, since Lois went on liking having her tummy rubbed, I went on getting a good look at. (Every time I did this I thought of Martha.) But she just was a she, and the next step was that she had to have a name. So I named her Gulp, because that's how she made me feel, no matter how many times I saw her. Uh-oh. Big dragon's back. Gulp. The fact that I was stiff as a plank for most of a week after Lois knocked me down  -  I had not fallen well  -  didn't help my attitude any. Neither did the claw marks on my poor much-abused stomach.

A full-grown dragon can't sneak up on you gracefully but I think she was trying to be tactful. She landed at a distance  -  and no, the earth did not shake; pheasants make almost more of a thump, but the wind her wings made was pretty spectacular  -  and then sort of ambled toward us, and as soon as she got to the edge of our meadow  -  meadowy part of our meadow, I mean, as opposed to the boulder-field end  -  she went down on her belly, as small as she could make herself, which wasn't nearly small enough if you're asking me, but she gets points for trying. Rattly things, big dragons. Folding up her wings was a sort of loud rustle, clitterclatterclitter, even from the far end of the clearing, and folding her up made a soft slightly clanky thunking noise, although again she hit the ground with no more noise than a sheep lying down.

And for all I know the apparent attempt to be slow and gentle was as much for her benefit as ours  -  trying to relate to something like me, whose proportions are all wrong from a dragon perspective, maybe made her feel queasy, aside from what she might think of humans in general, which, at a guess, wasn't too positive either. And it made sense if you're something the size of a young hill hanging out with something the size of a fat wolfhound (skin problems, short bowlegs and peculiar skull development optional) you need to try and find some kind of compromise. Since her neck was half as long as the entire meadow (well nearly) she still had a lot of negotiating room.

And she was hot. Zowie, was she ever hot. But it's funny though, it wasn't as overwhelming as you might think. You know how the closer you get to a fire the hotter it gets and if you're cold and you're longing for the heat you're like always trying to decide how close you can get before your eyelashes singe and your cheeks flake off? She was more like an electric blanket turned on high. So grown-up dragons develop temperature control maybe  -  although I wasn't offering to rub her tummy. She was almost attractively hot, like a hot water bottle that never cooled off. Except that she was the size of 1,000,000,000,000 electric blankets and had teeth as long as my legs. Not to mention my graphic memory of her flamethrower.

The way she smelled was kind of the same. It was a monster smell to go with the monster critter but it wasn't a bad smell, exactly, even if you slightly felt that if you peeled it off the dragon somehow, and then it like fell on you, it would probably crush you just as thoroughly as if the dragon itself sat on you. It was intense. Of course the famous Smokehill dragon smell was always a lot stronger once you got into the park away from the Institute  -  but here was living fire-breathing proof that the famous Smokehill smell was definitely dragon.

I tried not to run to the other end of the meadow from wherever she was as soon as she arrived, but I somehow always found myself at the point farthest from her kind of soon after. It gave Lois lots of exercise galumphing between us. Ha. She didn't always come at the same time and she didn't always stay for very long, but she came every day after the first. Every day. Every day I got out of bed with a knot in my stomach and wondered if she'd be back. Gulp. And she always was. Gulp. We weren't always in the meadow when she arrived either but like being called into your dad's office to get yelled at  -  I mean when you know that's why you're going  -  I used to turn around from wherever we were and trudge back there, if we weren't there, to get it over with.

I never didn't see her flying in, although I never really got used to not feeling the ground shake when she landed or as she was walking around. I don't know if we  -  I  -  got points for going to meet her or not. First time we weren't there she was sitting up looking around when we arrived. (A sitting-up dragon looks a lot bigger than any two-hundred-foot cliff, just by the way. Dragons have a corner on the whole looming thing.) After that first time she was always lying down when we arrived. Like she knew we'd come and she might as well get comfortable. If lying flat is comfortable for a dragon, which actually I wonder. But she lay down like I came to the meadow, I think. We were both trying hard.

She never fired at us  -  well, me  -  again. Although some days when she showed up she smelled smokier than other days and I wondered if she'd been hunting and if so, what. Oh, Jake, stop it. Dragons don't cat people. They never have. As far as we know. They just could. What Lois' mom did to that guy was self-defense  -  she wasn't trying to eat him. And it didn't even work.

But Gulp's first act on seeing me and Lois had been to try and toast me. That was almost as hard to forget as what the dead poacher had looked like.

Lois and I went on with our games, or our lessons, or whatever they were, although my concentration was a tiny bit shot somehow. I was getting used to the pressure, that is pressures, now, in my head, having something more particular to do with Lois than I'd recognized back at the Institute, where I thought it was all just some kind of hangover from the shock of Lois' mom after my mom, plus my la-la dream sense that Lois' mom's ghost or spirit or something was hanging around giving me a hand with things. But now Gulp. There'd been nothing like Gulp at the Institute.

"Getting used to" is a joke though. There was no "getting used to" about it. I was so far out of control in this situation it wasn't worth even pretending anything else. If life with Lois the last two years had been sort of day-to-day, I was down to minute-to-minute now, with Gulp around. Maybe second to second. But, I don't know, it was also maybe like the dragon had fried my worry list instead of me. I was still here. New world. New Jake, maybe.

Telepathy in books is always sort of misty. All woo-woo and staring earnestly into the middle distance and delicate and sensitive and stuff. This was like having rocks in your head. Ha ha. A whole freaking boulder field, but two of them  -  one big, one little  -  were especially active. Having two of them like that was what finally made me begin to pay attention to them as, uh, communication, even if they didn't communicate much besides "ow"

I don't know how long it might have taken me if it was just Lois and me, but thinking about it, I was pretty sure the real rock feeling had only started after Kit left  -  when Lois and I were alone together. I'd had Lois-related headaches since I'd had Lois, bad headaches, some of them, and kind of self-motivated. But they were still all maybe understandable just  -  in terms of stress and worry and the boy lost his mother when he was twelve and was a little peculiar after that wasn't he? (Humans always want stuff to be understandable the way they already do understand it.) So why wouldn't I have visions of old Mom dragon? When I was still dreaming about my own mom, and sometimes I'd woken up from those dreams with headaches too.

It's kind of embarrassing now to remember me assuming that since I was the human I was the only one of us who had anything to teach the other one. But Lois was a baby . . . it wasn't only species arrogance. I hope. I came around pretty quickly after Gulp arrived. I want to believe it's not only because I was too scared to be arrogant.

When Gulp was there she moved her head around to be as near to Lois as she could be, according to some rule of her own (I guessed) about not getting too close. At first Lois ignored her, but I've already said that Lois was curious about everything, and Gulp was far too big and strange not to be interesting. And didn't it occur to Lois that there was something, you know familiar about Gulp? It had been her roar that had jolted Lois out of terror and into defiance. Maybe Lois had just decided that she was going to go down fighting (while her pathetic mom remained glued to the spot, draped in his ripped T-shirt). But she'd reacted to that roar almost as if it meant something to her.

I was really torn, watching Lois begin to pay attention to Gulp, and Gulp trying to respond  -  I was sure  -  in a way that would make Lois, well, like her. I was torn because this was what saving Lois was supposed to be about: raising her till she could go back and live with dragons and be a dragon. Not have to spend the rest of her life at Westcamp or some other human place. If we could figure out how to socialize her first so the dragons would take her. But I hadn't expected to have to think about it so soon (speaking of my reigning tendency to want not to think about things). It would be a huge, HUGE load off if Gulp was going to take Lois away from me . . . it should he the most WONDERFUL, thing, that ultimate miracle I desperately wanted for Lois. Why wasn't I leaping for joy? But . . . I would miss her. A lot. (Duh.) Like I'd maybe adapted too far or something, headache  -  blasted dragon  -  mom Jake. Could I remember how to be an undragoned human any more?

And even in the middle of worrying about losing Lois and/or being made into human-burger it occurred to me pretty strongly that Gulp was acting, well, weirdly. Isn't it this whole big thing when you try and return a human-reared animal to the wild? It doesn't know how to be what it is, and its real relatives won't have anything to do with it because it stinks of human and doesn't know how to behave. And here was Gulp trying hard to win Lois over  -  and letting me hang around. The first successful reentry of two half-grown Yukon wolf pups to a wild pack had involved the gruesome death of one of the human minders, and they'd given up trying to reintroduce griffins and Caspian walruses and brought them back to their nice cages before they died. Which has to have been really depressing for the humans. (Although less depressing than being eaten by your fosterling's relatives.) I could maybe guess how they felt. (I don't know what they'd've done if they ever found an orphan baby Nessie. Sat down and cried, probably.)

But that's supposed to be at least part of the excuse why saving a dragon's life is against the law. A great big fire-snorting flying thing that got a taste, even accidentally, for human was way too dangerous. We weren't going to hand them any ops. And a smelly hot palm-sized slimy grub that was going to grow into a great big fire-snorting flying thing that couldn't be sent back to live with its relatives was going to be even more dangerous. I couldn't bear to think about Lois growing up to be dangerous but. . . . Maybe the lawmakers weren't quite as stupid as I thought. They probably had in the backs of their tiny mean minds too that humans who do stuff like half kill themselves and/or get paid crap wages and/or live a hundred miles from a decent restaurant and/or have never seen a movie in a real theater, are crazy, or they wouldn't do it, but the reason they do it (besides being crazy) is that they get kind of fond of the animals they rescue. Which is maybe the most dangerous thing of all.

The first time I saw Lois climb up Gulp's shoulder and hang over her neck like a two-year-old dragon would do with its own real mom, there was a big lump in my throat that had nothing to do with the prospect of what might happen to me the next time Gulp lost her temper.

But Lois always came back to me  -  so far. And I didn't know whether I should be trying to persuade her to stay with Gulp, or whether that would just mess her up further. Who knew what she'd had to learn to survive her weird upbringing. I sometimes felt I was "overhearing" conversations between the big rock and the little rock, but if you're going to ask me, I'm going to say that they weren't speaking the same language. Like if a German parent was suddenly reunited with his kid who'd been being raised by a French family. They wouldn't talk to each other very well. And Gulp was always silent, and Lois, having spent her first two years hanging out with yacketing, non-telepathic humans, was always, well, chattering. I wonder if Gulp got this. I hope so.

I didn't talk to Lois anywhere near as much when Gulp was around as when she wasn't, but I still talked to her. For one thing, if Gulp was watching over our shoulders (brrrrr) while we played one of our learning games, I needed to hear myself talk about what we were doing to steady myself down. I just didn't chat. It also occurred to me, rather uncomfortably, that if I talked, Gulp might get the idea that Lois didn't talk because she was defective, but because I talked. This probably wouldn't make Gulp like me any better, but . . . well, like what if the Germanspeaking parent found out that the French family that had been raising his kid were all drug addicts or serial murderers or something? How do you balance the fact that your kid's alive at all because of them with the fact that they're really bad for her?

And the little rock in my head got all sort of warm and soft and glowy and gooey every time Lois left Gulp and came galumphing back toward me. I wasn't making it up. I wasn't.

So, this non-idyll had to end, one way or another, right? It ended a lot sooner and more dramatically than I might have guessed, although if I hadn't been so preoccupied with Gulp I would have picked up that something was going on back at the Institute. Among other things it should have occurred to me that there was no way I was keeping my own interesting new preoccupation to myself Anyone who had any spare brain for noticing anything except that I was still signing in like I should, should have noticed that I sounded funny. Distracted. Okay, more distracted. And they didn't.

I wasted some time trying to figure out some kind of code to get the idea of Gulp across to Martha, but I couldn't think of any. It wasn't anything we'd set up code for. "Hey, guess what, there's this big dragon who comes to visit Lois every day." We had a phrase ("good sunrise this morning") for having seen dragons, but I was afraid if I said that every day she'd get frightened, so I didn't. I didn't even say it once. It didn't occur to me to say it after Gulp's first visit, because there's a big difference between seeing a dragon or dragons flying gloriously silhouetted against the sky at a nice distance and having a close encounter of an almost fatal kind with a dragon.

I tried to remember if Billy had ever mentioned any close sightings of dragons on the ground  -  coming around an outcropping or out of a narrow pass or something "gee what's the funny smell, smells like dragon only stronger . . . oh"  -  and I couldn't remember any. I personally had never even seen one of the trees they used as scratching posts although Billy had  -  not till Gulp I mean: and watching her make a big pine tree shake like a sapling in a gale is another of those little awe-inspiring details of time spent in the company of a full-grown dragon. Mostly dragon sign like that is way far in (the scales blow in the wind, so you get them everywhere), farther than I've ever gone. Westcamp's on the edge. It wouldn't have been surprising if I'd, uh, had a good sunrise at Westcamp, but Gulp was cruising out of normal dragon range.

So I should have been worried when I didn't hear from Martha for three days. Martha checked in most days. But all I was, was disappointed  -  and a little worried that maybe she'd tried some time when my radio was pretending to be ornamental art. (Pretending badly. Our radios are not beautiful objects.) But since I hadn't figured out how to tell her about Gulp, I wasn't missing talking to her as much, if you follow me. I just wanted to hear her voice. Even radio-squeaky.

You can't really tell much from the voices over our two-ways; when they're clear they're clear enough but too clacky and mechanical to guess much about tone. One morning about twenty days after we saw Gulp for the first time, Dad said, "How are you doing for food?"

"Fine," I said, more or less truthfully. "Getting a little tired of beans, maybe."

"You need the meat for  -  " said Dad in one of those weird sentences that if anyone had been listening they should have thought suspicious. Maybe Dad just sounded like your usual nutty professor type, never finishing his sentences. Martha and I had a much better system.

"Well, I'm careful," I said, which was to say that Lois was getting the meat, and I was getting the beans. I didn't mind all that much because I was pretty tired of venison too and I didn't seem to have time to set rabbit snares any more. Not that I think they'd have caught anything. Everything cleared out once Gulp started visiting. We didn't even get as many noises at night.

Unfortunately during a slack moment (mine) Lois had made a dive for my plate and got a mouthful of ketchup and fallen instantly in love. So now she tried to climb in my lap and eat my beans once I put ketchup on them. Obviously I wasn't going to tell Dad this over the two-way. Or about what I was going to do if she got mad and squirted some fire at me the next time I pushed her away. (Do dragons have a Teenager from Hell phase? And if so, when? Before or after they get so big you can't push them away?) Or about wondering what ketchup would do to dragon physiology. I spent most of my life wondering what something or other was doing to dragon physiology. I hadn't realized till we got out here how much I'd left all the nutrition stuff up to Grace. But in theory I didn't let her eat anything with sugar in it, just like a good mom. Ketchup has sugar in it. (Do dragons get ADHD?)

"I'm okay," I said. "Really." Westcamp could hold six (humans) and was automatically kept provisioned for a siege. Weather around here can be pretty dramatic and it doesn't pay to take chances. Although Billy's deer was mostly gone by now, which is why I'd stopped eating it, even the way Lois ate we weren't going to get through all the rest in a hurry. And if we got desperate enough I suppose I'd get Billy's rifle down from the wall and put some shells in it. But with Gulp scaring the neighbors I'd have to go a long way to find anything to shoot (at). If Lois looked hungry, would Gulp bring her something?

There was silence on the two-way. A crackle-crackle-crackle silence, but Dad wasn't saying anything.

"Dad?"

"We have a . . . situation here," he said at last. "There appears to be some . . . question, in certain people's minds, whether we are . . . fulfilling . . . our trust."

Oh help. Has someone guessed about Lois???

"Not you. Exactly," Dad's voice continued, slowly, with its painful pauses. He sounded funny, even allowing for radio whimsy. If the pauses were to give me a chance to think about he was trying to tell me . . . they weren't working. They hadn't guessed about Lois but  -  ?

"They feel you might be in danger," said Dad. So they might try to come after me. Us.

"I'm not," I said, too quickly and for once not thinking about Gulp at all. "I call in twice a day like I'm supposed to and I'm always fine. You know that. The  -  er  -  dragon study is really interesting and I don't want to leave. And you're still short from the flu."

"I believe you," said Dad. "We all believe you. But there have been some . . . incongruities, which some . . . other . . . people have found . . . alarming."

Other people meant not Smokehill people. That was easy. Nothing else was easy. Did he mean more dragon sightings? Westcamp was well beyond visibility from the Institute; even if you had a telescope you'd have to be able to see through rock with it. So it can't have been Gulp herself that was making anyone (else) jumpy, and there wasn't anybody else in the park now. We were still turning everyone from outside away; and any stubborn investigators would have a Ranger on them. (Until this minute I'd forgotten all about my "study" since Gulp came, but what I said to Dad was, ahem, still true.) But I'd already worried about the fact that the reason Gulp found us was because she was flying where dragons didn't fly. If one dragon was going where they shouldn't . . . Was whatever it was so bad Dad couldn't even say the word "dragon"?

Lois and I were sitting facing each other in one of the little sandpits in our meadow. I'd been trying to teach her to count. What we were really good at is what I called mirror-dancing, which was using Lois' fantastic mimic ability in three dimensions  -  and my idea for it had begun with the stick-fetching. But Lois was actually better at it than I was  -  she could remember a longer series of steps / hops / rolls forward and back and sideways and around trees and so on than I could  -  which was pretty embarrassing, and I was looking for a way to reestablish my superiority. Parents can be like that with uppity children. So I'd thought of counting  -  nice low numbers you can handle in pebbles, it's just another little easy three-dimensional sport, no big deal. At least that's how I was explaining it to myself. I have no idea what she thought we were doing, but she was always up for a game.

I had an especially big buzzy headache growing that morning too, but maybe that was just because I was proving to be such a useless teacher. Maybe my basic attitude toward arithmetic ("yecch") was breaking through. Lois was certainly trying to pay attention, but she kept wanting to rearrange the pebbles. I'm not sure that her heaps were more interesting than mine anyway. When things got discouraging we reverted to stick throwing. Since we'd had that big breakthrough about being-the-same-but-different over fetching sticks, it always seemed to cheer us up  -  and when I had a useless-teacher headache (this wasn't the first time) sometimes it eased off a little too.

Out here she'd learned to throw sticks for me by dragging one  -  her special favorite for this activity was one she was barely big enough to drag, but she insisted I carry it properly when I fetched it, but then once I wrestled the thing up I could put it over my shoulder, which wasn't an option for sloping, low-slung Lois  -  but mostly I threw and we both fetched. Usually she took off the moment it left my hand  -  and she never, ever got fooled by a fake throw the way Snark used to, but then she didn't love running just to run the way Snark did either. And I was a little tired that morning too  -  she'd kicked in her sleep more than usual the night before  -  so she was well ahead of me after I threw the first one. But we both noticed the sudden black shadow over the meadow. And the noise. And the smell.

Lois saved my life, although I don't think that was what was in her mind. She was terrified, and she spun around and hurtled back toward me, shrieking, and knocked me down, trying to get back into the sling I hadn't worn in more than a year, trying to hide in her mom's pouch from the gigantic greeny-black demon out of nowhere that had landed on the far side of the meadow . . .

. . . And shot a long musky-spicy-smelling stream of fire over us, where my head had been two seconds before, before Lois knocked me down. My skull felt like it was bursting, but that was probably just that I was terrified too, and it may have been the terror rather than having had the breath knocked out of me that was why my lungs felt paralyzed. The heat of the fire that had almost killed me seemed to sort of hang around and stick to my skin, like mist drops when you walk in heavy fog. It dripped off my hair. I shuddered. More like a convulsion. With that film on me I wasn't quite me; I belonged to the dragon.

You don't always react sensibly in an emergency, especially when it's an emergency there is no sensible reaction to. There was a fifty foot dragon sitting on its haunches on the far side of the meadow and I didn't have a grenade launcher at hand. I yanked my T-shirt up and stretched it down over as much of Lois as it could reach, crossed my legs, tucked her tail into the circle of my legs to the extent that it would go, wrapped my arms around her, and waited for the second blast.

It didn't come. Oh. The dragon probably didn't want to kill Lois too. I tried to peel my T-shirt back up over her again  -  if I was going to die I wanted it over soon, so I didn't have to keep thinking about it  -  but she shrieked again, and started trying to claw her way into my stomach,, which made me do some shrieking too, and then the dragon raised its head and let out another blast of fire, but straight up this time, and the roar that went with it really made my head want to burst, and I could feel the dragon's rage and confusion, as well as the throbbing scratches on my stomach.

Lois went strangely still when the dragon roared. Then it stopped, and there was a dreadful pause, and then Lois jerked herself out from under my shirt, scrambled over my legs, and set off toward the dragon. I just sat there. Stupidly, I suppose, but intelligently wasn't going to save me either. I'd never seen Lois like this. She stomped along, her tail trailing and her neck stuck stiffly out in front of her, and her spinal plates like straining with erectness . . . for a moment I half saw the dragon she was going to become.

She gave a gag or cough, stopped, opened her mouth, and produced a thin but unmistakable thread of fire. At the dragon.

The tumult in my head changed, like changing gear, like putting one book back on the shelf and taking another one down  -  or more like having one of the muggers stop kicking you and another one start. It's impossible to describe, but it was so definite a sensation that I rocked where I sat, as if I really was being kicked. I put my hands to my head as if literally trying to keep it from exploding. Sometimes if you squeeze in the right place it does help a headache. I squeezed.

The dragon dropped down to all fours. (Good thing it was a big meadow.) It stretched its own neck till its enormous snout was way too close to Lois, but Lois stood her ground. Indeed she danced up and down a few times  -  and while I'd never seen her have a tantrum, she somehow looked like someone getting ready to have a tantrum  -  then spread all four legs out like she was bracing herself, snapped her neck down and her head out, and . . . shot out some more fire.

This second go was pretty impressive for something that looked like a short-legged overweight wolfhound with really bizarre mange. The big dragon actually drew its head back a few feet to avoid getting burned? Maybe the nose is a sensitive area. I somehow hadn't thought to look if the dragon pulled its lips back carefully before it fired. I know there's supposed to be a gland that produces fireproof mucus that lines the throat, blah blah blah, which is why a dragon coughs before the fire comes out. There are stories from what the humans have the nerve to call the "dragon war" in Australia, about guys who survived by throwing themselves down immediately or diving to one side or something when they heard that dragon cough. But you need really good reflexes. I have to say I hadn't noticed the warning cough when the big dragon tried to kill me.

I didn't piss myself when the dragon raised its head and looked at me again, but I don't know why. Beyond fear, I suppose, but I couldn't have stood up or walked away if that had been what my life depended on, so it's a good thing it didn't. Lois, having made her point, turned her back on the big dragon and flounced back to me. The pressure in my head moved again, and this time it seemed to me there were two different pressures sort of emerging from a general background of thumping and whanging  -  like Nessie and one of her boyfriends rising out of the stormy water of the loch to swallow your boat, oh well at least you can stop bailing  -  the great big one that was trying to make my head explode, and the little one that was the tiny jerky knot thot had been there before. (I hadn't thought of it as tiny before thought. )

The great big one was ANGER ANGER ANGER but it was turning, changing, now more like a prism turning in bright light, but blinding bright light, so it hurt to look at it, and becoming SORROW SORROW SORROW The little one was more like, oh help eek eek eek oh help which I understood completely.

Uh-huh. I understood completely.

I'd never read anywhere that dragons are telepathic. Maybe anything the size of a dragon that has a good brain can put out big unmissable vibes, if you hang around one long enough, which most people don't. Old Pete's journals never mentioned headaches particularly though  -  I didn't think? If I got out of this alive I'd have to check. But Old Pete might not have mentioned it even if he had skull busters; mere human foibles didn't interest him.. . . And I knew Lois awfully well, in my clueless human way, even if it was good scientific practice not to make too many assumptions. Don't we read each other's human emotions all the time? Don't you often know what your dog is thinking? ("I wonder if I could pinch that chicken off the counter in the kitchen before he noticed?")

So I knew that Lois' flouncing was phony. She was still terrified  -  as was I  -  but she was making a much better show of it than I was. I tried to look back at the big dragon as it looked at me, but it wasn't only terror that made me prefer to look at Lois. Her last few steps were not flouncy at all, and she dragged herself over the ridge of my crossed legs as if they were a mountain, and collapsed exhausted in their circle. I didn't try to pull my shirt over her again (one of the seams had parted the last time, so it would have been easier), but I did put my arms around her, and then I did look back at the dragon. Hey, big dragon, yeah, we're a family. You can like it, or you can fry me. I wasn't sending the message in words. But I was putting out vibes as hard as I could.

The dragon looked at us for a while  -  with big shiny dragon eyes, only from where I was sitting, underneath the surface gleam these eyes were bottomless blackness. It felt like a very long while, but I don't think it was. And then, very slowly and carefully, it settled down, and farther down, butt end first, then front end, till its body was flat on the ground, curling its front legs under it rather like a cat, with its enormous snaky neck arched, and its nose (and fire-spouting mouth) still aimed at us. Finally it stretched its neck out on the ground too, but then at the very last minute it turned its head so the nose (and mouth) was aimed a little to one side of us, and tipped up slightly on the cheek. It rolled its only visible eye back toward us to check that we were paying proper attention (I at least was totally riveted), opened its mouth a crack, and gave a long, long, long sigh. There wasn't even any smoke. The vast gentle backdraft of its breath smelled rather like chili powder.

I had to name the big dragon too, because she kept coming back. Also because I was sure she was a she too, and you can't go on calling something that isn't an it, it. I had no better excuse for believing that she was a she than I did Lois, mind you. I never saw her pouch, any more than there were any findable slits, sacs, or bulges on Lois' rapidly expanding anatomy, which, since Lois went on liking having her tummy rubbed, I went on getting a good look at. (Every time I did this I thought of Martha.) But she just was a she, and the next step was that she had to have a name. So I named her Gulp, because that's how she made me feel, no matter how many times I saw her. Uh-oh. Big dragon's back. Gulp. The fact that I was stiff as a plank for most of a week after Lois knocked me down  -  I had not fallen well  -  didn't help my attitude any. Neither did the claw marks on my poor much-abused stomach.

A full-grown dragon can't sneak up on you gracefully but I think she was trying to be tactful. She landed at a distance  -  and no, the earth did not shake; pheasants make almost more of a thump, but the wind her wings made was pretty spectacular  -  and then sort of ambled toward us, and as soon as she got to the edge of our meadow  -  meadowy part of our meadow, I mean, as opposed to the boulder-field end  -  she went down on her belly, as small as she could make herself, which wasn't nearly small enough if you're asking me, but she gets points for trying. Rattly things, big dragons. Folding up her wings was a sort of loud rustle, clitterclatterclitter, even from the far end of the clearing, and folding her up made a soft slightly clanky thunking noise, although again she hit the ground with no more noise than a sheep lying down.

And for all I know the apparent attempt to be slow and gentle was as much for her benefit as ours  -  trying to relate to something like me, whose proportions are all wrong from a dragon perspective, maybe made her feel queasy, aside from what she might think of humans in general, which, at a guess, wasn't too positive either. And it made sense if you're something the size of a young hill hanging out with something the size of a fat wolfhound (skin problems, short bowlegs and peculiar skull development optional) you need to try and find some kind of compromise. Since her neck was half as long as the entire meadow (well nearly) she still had a lot of negotiating room.

And she was hot. Zowie, was she ever hot. But it's funny though, it wasn't as overwhelming as you might think. You know how the closer you get to a fire the hotter it gets and if you're cold and you're longing for the heat you're like always trying to decide how close you can get before your eyelashes singe and your cheeks flake off? She was more like an electric blanket turned on high. So grown-up dragons develop temperature control maybe  -  although I wasn't offering to rub her tummy. She was almost attractively hot, like a hot water bottle that never cooled off. Except that she was the size of 1,000,000,000,000 electric blankets and had teeth as long as my legs. Not to mention my graphic memory of her flamethrower.

The way she smelled was kind of the same. It was a monster smell to go with the monster critter but it wasn't a bad smell, exactly, even if you slightly felt that if you peeled it off the dragon somehow, and then it like fell on you, it would probably crush you just as thoroughly as if the dragon itself sat on you. It was intense. Of course the famous Smokehill dragon smell was always a lot stronger once you got into the park away from the Institute  -  but here was living fire-breathing proof that the famous Smokehill smell was definitely dragon.

I tried not to run to the other end of the meadow from wherever she was as soon as she arrived, but I somehow always found myself at the point farthest from her kind of soon after. It gave Lois lots of exercise galumphing between us. Ha. She didn't always come at the same time and she didn't always stay for very long, but she came every day after the first. Every day. Every day I got out of bed with a knot in my stomach and wondered if she'd be back. Gulp. And she always was. Gulp. We weren't always in the meadow when she arrived either but like being called into your dad's office to get yelled at  -  I mean when you know that's why you're going  -  I used to turn around from wherever we were and trudge back there, if we weren't there, to get it over with.

I never didn't see her flying in, although I never really got used to not feeling the ground shake when she landed or as she was walking around. I don't know if we  -  I  -  got points for going to meet her or not. First time we weren't there she was sitting up looking around when we arrived. (A sitting-up dragon looks a lot bigger than any two-hundred-foot cliff, just by the way. Dragons have a corner on the whole looming thing.) After that first time she was always lying down when we arrived. Like she knew we'd come and she might as well get comfortable. If lying flat is comfortable for a dragon, which actually I wonder. But she lay down like I came to the meadow, I think. We were both trying hard.

She never fired at us  -  well, me  -  again. Although some days when she showed up she smelled smokier than other days and I wondered if she'd been hunting and if so, what. Oh, Jake, stop it. Dragons don't cat people. They never have. As far as we know. They just could. What Lois' mom did to that guy was self-defense  -  she wasn't trying to eat him. And it didn't even work.

But Gulp's first act on seeing me and Lois had been to try and toast me. That was almost as hard to forget as what the dead poacher had looked like.

Lois and I went on with our games, or our lessons, or whatever they were, although my concentration was a tiny bit shot somehow. I was getting used to the pressure, that is pressures, now, in my head, having something more particular to do with Lois than I'd recognized back at the Institute, where I thought it was all just some kind of hangover from the shock of Lois' mom after my mom, plus my la-la dream sense that Lois' mom's ghost or spirit or something was hanging around giving me a hand with things. But now Gulp. There'd been nothing like Gulp at the Institute.

"Getting used to" is a joke though. There was no "getting used to" about it. I was so far out of control in this situation it wasn't worth even pretending anything else. If life with Lois the last two years had been sort of day-to-day, I was down to minute-to-minute now, with Gulp around. Maybe second to second. But, I don't know, it was also maybe like the dragon had fried my worry list instead of me. I was still here. New world. New Jake, maybe.

Telepathy in books is always sort of misty. All woo-woo and staring earnestly into the middle distance and delicate and sensitive and stuff. This was like having rocks in your head. Ha ha. A whole freaking boulder field, but two of them  -  one big, one little  -  were especially active. Having two of them like that was what finally made me begin to pay attention to them as, uh, communication, even if they didn't communicate much besides "ow"

I don't know how long it might have taken me if it was just Lois and me, but thinking about it, I was pretty sure the real rock feeling had only started after Kit left  -  when Lois and I were alone together. I'd had Lois-related headaches since I'd had Lois, bad headaches, some of them, and kind of self-motivated. But they were still all maybe understandable just  -  in terms of stress and worry and the boy lost his mother when he was twelve and was a little peculiar after that wasn't he? (Humans always want stuff to be understandable the way they already do understand it.) So why wouldn't I have visions of old Mom dragon? When I was still dreaming about my own mom, and sometimes I'd woken up from those dreams with headaches too.

It's kind of embarrassing now to remember me assuming that since I was the human I was the only one of us who had anything to teach the other one. But Lois was a baby . . . it wasn't only species arrogance. I hope. I came around pretty quickly after Gulp arrived. I want to believe it's not only because I was too scared to be arrogant.

When Gulp was there she moved her head around to be as near to Lois as she could be, according to some rule of her own (I guessed) about not getting too close. At first Lois ignored her, but I've already said that Lois was curious about everything, and Gulp was far too big and strange not to be interesting. And didn't it occur to Lois that there was something, you know familiar about Gulp? It had been her roar that had jolted Lois out of terror and into defiance. Maybe Lois had just decided that she was going to go down fighting (while her pathetic mom remained glued to the spot, draped in his ripped T-shirt). But she'd reacted to that roar almost as if it meant something to her.

I was really torn, watching Lois begin to pay attention to Gulp, and Gulp trying to respond  -  I was sure  -  in a way that would make Lois, well, like her. I was torn because this was what saving Lois was supposed to be about: raising her till she could go back and live with dragons and be a dragon. Not have to spend the rest of her life at Westcamp or some other human place. If we could figure out how to socialize her first so the dragons would take her. But I hadn't expected to have to think about it so soon (speaking of my reigning tendency to want not to think about things). It would be a huge, HUGE load off if Gulp was going to take Lois away from me . . . it should he the most WONDERFUL, thing, that ultimate miracle I desperately wanted for Lois. Why wasn't I leaping for joy? But . . . I would miss her. A lot. (Duh.) Like I'd maybe adapted too far or something, headache  -  blasted dragon  -  mom Jake. Could I remember how to be an undragoned human any more?

And even in the middle of worrying about losing Lois and/or being made into human-burger it occurred to me pretty strongly that Gulp was acting, well, weirdly. Isn't it this whole big thing when you try and return a human-reared animal to the wild? It doesn't know how to be what it is, and its real relatives won't have anything to do with it because it stinks of human and doesn't know how to behave. And here was Gulp trying hard to win Lois over  -  and letting me hang around. The first successful reentry of two half-grown Yukon wolf pups to a wild pack had involved the gruesome death of one of the human minders, and they'd given up trying to reintroduce griffins and Caspian walruses and brought them back to their nice cages before they died. Which has to have been really depressing for the humans. (Although less depressing than being eaten by your fosterling's relatives.) I could maybe guess how they felt. (I don't know what they'd've done if they ever found an orphan baby Nessie. Sat down and cried, probably.)

But that's supposed to be at least part of the excuse why saving a dragon's life is against the law. A great big fire-snorting flying thing that got a taste, even accidentally, for human was way too dangerous. We weren't going to hand them any ops. And a smelly hot palm-sized slimy grub that was going to grow into a great big fire-snorting flying thing that couldn't be sent back to live with its relatives was going to be even more dangerous. I couldn't bear to think about Lois growing up to be dangerous but. . . . Maybe the lawmakers weren't quite as stupid as I thought. They probably had in the backs of their tiny mean minds too that humans who do stuff like half kill themselves and/or get paid crap wages and/or live a hundred miles from a decent restaurant and/or have never seen a movie in a real theater, are crazy, or they wouldn't do it, but the reason they do it (besides being crazy) is that they get kind of fond of the animals they rescue. Which is maybe the most dangerous thing of all.

The first time I saw Lois climb up Gulp's shoulder and hang over her neck like a two-year-old dragon would do with its own real mom, there was a big lump in my throat that had nothing to do with the prospect of what might happen to me the next time Gulp lost her temper.

But Lois always came back to me  -  so far. And I didn't know whether I should be trying to persuade her to stay with Gulp, or whether that would just mess her up further. Who knew what she'd had to learn to survive her weird upbringing. I sometimes felt I was "overhearing" conversations between the big rock and the little rock, but if you're going to ask me, I'm going to say that they weren't speaking the same language. Like if a German parent was suddenly reunited with his kid who'd been being raised by a French family. They wouldn't talk to each other very well. And Gulp was always silent, and Lois, having spent her first two years hanging out with yacketing, non-telepathic humans, was always, well, chattering. I wonder if Gulp got this. I hope so.

I didn't talk to Lois anywhere near as much when Gulp was around as when she wasn't, but I still talked to her. For one thing, if Gulp was watching over our shoulders (brrrrr) while we played one of our learning games, I needed to hear myself talk about what we were doing to steady myself down. I just didn't chat. It also occurred to me, rather uncomfortably, that if I talked, Gulp might get the idea that Lois didn't talk because she was defective, but because I talked. This probably wouldn't make Gulp like me any better, but . . . well, like what if the Germanspeaking parent found out that the French family that had been raising his kid were all drug addicts or serial murderers or something? How do you balance the fact that your kid's alive at all because of them with the fact that they're really bad for her?

And the little rock in my head got all sort of warm and soft and glowy and gooey every time Lois left Gulp and came galumphing back toward me. I wasn't making it up. I wasn't.

So, this non-idyll had to end, one way or another, right? It ended a lot sooner and more dramatically than I might have guessed, although if I hadn't been so preoccupied with Gulp I would have picked up that something was going on back at the Institute. Among other things it should have occurred to me that there was no way I was keeping my own interesting new preoccupation to myself Anyone who had any spare brain for noticing anything except that I was still signing in like I should, should have noticed that I sounded funny. Distracted. Okay, more distracted. And they didn't.

I wasted some time trying to figure out some kind of code to get the idea of Gulp across to Martha, but I couldn't think of any. It wasn't anything we'd set up code for. "Hey, guess what, there's this big dragon who comes to visit Lois every day." We had a phrase ("good sunrise this morning") for having seen dragons, but I was afraid if I said that every day she'd get frightened, so I didn't. I didn't even say it once. It didn't occur to me to say it after Gulp's first visit, because there's a big difference between seeing a dragon or dragons flying gloriously silhouetted against the sky at a nice distance and having a close encounter of an almost fatal kind with a dragon.

I tried to remember if Billy had ever mentioned any close sightings of dragons on the ground  -  coming around an outcropping or out of a narrow pass or something "gee what's the funny smell, smells like dragon only stronger . . . oh"  -  and I couldn't remember any. I personally had never even seen one of the trees they used as scratching posts although Billy had  -  not till Gulp I mean: and watching her make a big pine tree shake like a sapling in a gale is another of those little awe-inspiring details of time spent in the company of a full-grown dragon. Mostly dragon sign like that is way far in (the scales blow in the wind, so you get them everywhere), farther than I've ever gone. Westcamp's on the edge. It wouldn't have been surprising if I'd, uh, had a good sunrise at Westcamp, but Gulp was cruising out of normal dragon range.

So I should have been worried when I didn't hear from Martha for three days. Martha checked in most days. But all I was, was disappointed  -  and a little worried that maybe she'd tried some time when my radio was pretending to be ornamental art. (Pretending badly. Our radios are not beautiful objects.) But since I hadn't figured out how to tell her about Gulp, I wasn't missing talking to her as much, if you follow me. I just wanted to hear her voice. Even radio-squeaky.

You can't really tell much from the voices over our two-ways; when they're clear they're clear enough but too clacky and mechanical to guess much about tone. One morning about twenty days after we saw Gulp for the first time, Dad said, "How are you doing for food?"

"Fine," I said, more or less truthfully. "Getting a little tired of beans, maybe."

"You need the meat for  -  " said Dad in one of those weird sentences that if anyone had been listening they should have thought suspicious. Maybe Dad just sounded like your usual nutty professor type, never finishing his sentences. Martha and I had a much better system.

"Well, I'm careful," I said, which was to say that Lois was getting the meat, and I was getting the beans. I didn't mind all that much because I was pretty tired of venison too and I didn't seem to have time to set rabbit snares any more. Not that I think they'd have caught anything. Everything cleared out once Gulp started visiting. We didn't even get as many noises at night.

Unfortunately during a slack moment (mine) Lois had made a dive for my plate and got a mouthful of ketchup and fallen instantly in love. So now she tried to climb in my lap and eat my beans once I put ketchup on them. Obviously I wasn't going to tell Dad this over the two-way. Or about what I was going to do if she got mad and squirted some fire at me the next time I pushed her away. (Do dragons have a Teenager from Hell phase? And if so, when? Before or after they get so big you can't push them away?) Or about wondering what ketchup would do to dragon physiology. I spent most of my life wondering what something or other was doing to dragon physiology. I hadn't realized till we got out here how much I'd left all the nutrition stuff up to Grace. But in theory I didn't let her eat anything with sugar in it, just like a good mom. Ketchup has sugar in it. (Do dragons get ADHD?)

"I'm okay," I said. "Really." Westcamp could hold six (humans) and was automatically kept provisioned for a siege. Weather around here can be pretty dramatic and it doesn't pay to take chances. Although Billy's deer was mostly gone by now, which is why I'd stopped eating it, even the way Lois ate we weren't going to get through all the rest in a hurry. And if we got desperate enough I suppose I'd get Billy's rifle down from the wall and put some shells in it. But with Gulp scaring the neighbors I'd have to go a long way to find anything to shoot (at). If Lois looked hungry, would Gulp bring her something?

There was silence on the two-way. A crackle-crackle-crackle silence, but Dad wasn't saying anything.

"Dad?"

"We have a . . . situation here," he said at last. "There appears to be some . . . question, in certain people's minds, whether we are . . . fulfilling . . . our trust."

Oh help. Has someone guessed about Lois???

"Not you. Exactly," Dad's voice continued, slowly, with its painful pauses. He sounded funny, even allowing for radio whimsy. If the pauses were to give me a chance to think about he was trying to tell me . . . they weren't working. They hadn't guessed about Lois but  -  ?

"They feel you might be in danger," said Dad. So they might try to come after me. Us.

"I'm not," I said, too quickly and for once not thinking about Gulp at all. "I call in twice a day like I'm supposed to and I'm always fine. You know that. The  -  er  -  dragon study is really interesting and I don't want to leave. And you're still short from the flu."

"I believe you," said Dad. "We all believe you. But there have been some . . . incongruities, which some . . . other . . . people have found . . . alarming."

Other people meant not Smokehill people. That was easy. Nothing else was easy. Did he mean more dragon sightings? Westcamp was well beyond visibility from the Institute; even if you had a telescope you'd have to be able to see through rock with it. So it can't have been Gulp herself that was making anyone (else) jumpy, and there wasn't anybody else in the park now. We were still turning everyone from outside away; and any stubborn investigators would have a Ranger on them. (Until this minute I'd forgotten all about my "study" since Gulp came, but what I said to Dad was, ahem, still true.) But I'd already worried about the fact that the reason Gulp found us was because she was flying where dragons didn't fly. If one dragon was going where they shouldn't . . . Was whatever it was so bad Dad couldn't even say the word "dragon"?

"They"  -  and furthermore who the hell was they?  -  "feel that we who . . . live here, or who have been at Smokehill a long time, may have grown negligent through familiarity."

I didn't dare say what I was thinking: Do they think I might need rescuing? Because it had occurred to me that Dad didn't merely sound like he was assuming there might be someone monitoring our two-ways. He sounded like there was someone in the room with him, listening intently to every word.

"Your . . . youth has also been a source of concern."

"Oh," I said. It probably wasn't the moment to remind him that I had turned seventeen, which probably wasn't that much protection anyway.

After another pause Dad said, "Jake. Be careful. Be as careful as you possibly can."

I almost laughed but I was too scared. Be careful about what. "I will."

"I'll talk to you tonight," said Dad, and the two-way went dead.

I'd spent the last two years so paranoid that my brain went into killer overdrive like Dr. Frankenstein closing the circuit when the lightning storm struck his tower. And I was probably moving like Boris Karloff when I walked away from the table where the two-way sat. And that was exactly the problem: I was freaked, all right, but I couldn't think of anything intelligent to do about it. Sure, I could round Lois up and make a dash for it, but a dash where?

Even in the middle of summer you don't want to pack into Smokehill without knowing where you're going and what you're going to do when you get there. Even supposing I took the rifle with me on the assumption I could use it to feed us. You can get sudden, savage, dangerous storms any time of year in Smokehill, including midsummer  -  we'd had a Ranger concussed by a fist-sized hailstone once when I was a kid, and another one nearly drowned in a flash flood only a few years ago, and as I keep saying our Rangers are good  -  and Westcamp was the last, the farthest into nowhere, of the human-built-and-maintained full-service generator-op shelters in Smokehill. Although the cave network all over Smokehill would probably make any number of Neanderthal tribes delirious with joy I was a spoiled modern human and while a cave was better than nothing  -  especially, say, with lightning stabbing around looking for Boris Karloff I liked the four walls, roof, and closing door system. Cougars and bears lived in caves, and I didn't want to disturb any tenants either.

And what happened if Gulp followed us? Or if she decided I was running away from her? Trying to take Lois away from her?

Also I didn't think there was any way to wipe out the signs that I had been here at Westcamp with some, um, large animal. Even if it took them a while to figure out that if it was this big hairy secret it just had to be a baby dragon  -  and they'd have to be great creative thinkers to get that far, and I don't think they'd have been helped much by what there was to look at. Lois wasn't shedding yet and baby dragon dung doesn't look like anything we're trained to look for when we're trying (or pretending) to track dragon movements (especially a baby dragon fed on canned hash, rabbit soup, and venison stew). Still, whatever it was, was pretty good-sized and strange, and if they came looking for mc and I wasn't there, and there were signs of a large strange animal having been here with me. . .

No. It was worse than that. A lot worse. Because there were clear signs of Gulp's having visited the meadow  -  repeatedly, if they had any idea how to read signs  -  and while she was actually amazingly discreet about bodily functions there's no way to disguise that something the size of a dragon has been around a lot over a short space of time and in a constricted area  -  for example sure dragon dung disintegrates fast, but the ash sticks around a while longer, and dragon-dung ash is identifiable from other kinds. Dragons also scrape their big selves across the ground in open areas and scratch themselves on boulders as well as trees and take the occasional munch of leaves very high up too. (Do top leaves taste better? Or do dragons do it because they can?) Not to mention standard scale-shedding. Gulp did all these things. It was pretty amazing actually watching, instead of reading about it in a book, like checking off stuff on a list or something. I kept wanting someone to talk to about it. (And I had some imaginary conversations with Old Pete. And Mom of course. And Martha.) And Gulp spent probably more than the usual amount of time scraping along on her belly, to make herself small for us.

The only thing I could think of to do that might work had the drawback of being deranged and impossible. I had to convince Gulp to take Lois away with her  -  and convince Lois to go. I felt my heart break  -  crack! snap!  -  but I was now so preoccupied with Lois' safety I barely noticed. Or maybe if my plan had seemed more plausible I would have been more miserable about it.

The small rock in my head was rolling around thudding into things, which is to say that Lois was worried because she knew I was worried. I looked down at her. The rock stopped, got hollow on top, and began to teeter back and forth, which meant that she was suggesting that I sit down and let her get in my lap (oof ) for a while, for mutual comfort and support. I sat down, on the floor beside the table where the two-way stood (suddenly it looked like some malign alien thing glaring at us), with the door still open from where we'd been playing outside while I waited for morning check-in time. It was a beautiful day, with the sky going on forever in all directions but in a friendly way, and the trees with Smokehill's signature spires and accordions of stone sticking up through them, stretching almost as far as the sky.

I put my arms around Lois (this was getting harder and harder) and she started to hum one of her soothing hums. It sounded like a lullaby. To be more precise it sounded a lot like one of the Arkhola lullabies I sang to her when I first noticed that she was trying to mimic human speech. I sang that one because the melody only had about four notes in it which is about the limit of my capability. Or Lois', although she was probably mimicking my singing ability too.

I sat there listening to her and thinking how Gulp had been almost completely silent around us, after that more-than-terrifying initial roar, and I wondered all over again if that's because dragons, or grown-up dragons, usually are silent, or whether she was still trying not to scare us (after that more-than-terrifying roar). Even at a whisper, the voice out of something that size was probably pretty extreme. Or was it that living with humans had taught Lois to make mouth noise which was now so totally ingrained a habit that like all the other ways she was growing up wrong, it was going to be one of the reasons Lois never fit in with other dragons, despite Gulp's best efforts (maybe Gulp was as dragons go soppy and sentimental and any other dragon would know better than to try) and maybe dragon culture or dragon safety or something required silence and . . .

It took several minutes for it to occur to me that Lois had asked me to sit down and let her get in my lap, and that I'd done it and hadn't thought twice about it. Or that she was humming a recognizable human melody (in fact she carried the tune a lot better than I did)  -  and I had recognized it.

A lot had happened in the last month.

So maybe my plan wasn't totally impossible and deranged.

Gently I dumped Lois back out of my lap again, and for some reason picked up the two-way too and clipped it on my belt. Usually I left it at the cabin, but it was some kind of token that morning  -  or my only source of breaking news. Then I led her to the meadow. Dad hadn't said that anyone was coming to rescue me. Would he know? Would they tell him? Would they let him tell  -  warn  -  me? What kind of warning would he have? How would they come? If they hiked in and they started now and they were in a hurry, I had maybe six days. But if they thought I needed rescuing, they might choose something else. The meadow would serve perfectly well as an emergency set-down for a helicopter.

Smokehill was supposed to have dragons. And I checked in every day! Leave me alone!

That morning, while we waited for Gulp to show up (I'd never waited for Gulp before, merely steeled myself for her arrival), I tried to teach Lois the idea of stay or go with or go that way. She already knew a kind of stay because we used it to make our races after the stick more interesting. She found my jogging along beside or behind her kind of a snore, if we started even, and I'm sure she knew I was faster than she was. So she'd learned to wait �C stay somewhere while I went a little distance from her and threw so that the stick was nearer her than me, and then we could both tear after it. It was more fun for me too. It only occurred to me that morning that maybe the reason it was more fun was because I was putting out more, fun vibes as I hurtled after her trying to catch up.

I wasn't putting out any kind of fun vibes that morning, which is probably why my attempt to teach her something new was a total disaster. It was a great big drooling object lesson in "I'm not going to do what you say when what you're doing is way big-time something else." Also to the extent that anything I taught her  -  or she taught me  -  was based on vibes, it was doomed. Any kind of teaching, you have to keep your mind on business, and maybe she could even pick it up that I was worrying about her safety, and her safety had always and only ever meant one thing to her: me. She wouldn't stay in one place at all but glued herself to my leg and wouldn't listen to anything I was saying and that began to make me angry, except it wasn't her fault.

When Gulp showed up I was lying on the ground with Lois draped over my legs, humming. This time it was one of her own hums. (Very Winnie-the-Pooh-ish. Similar waistlines too, although Lois was built that way. She was also growing too fast to have any slack to get fat.) Lois would have been sitting on my chest while she hummed only I couldn't breathe if she sat on my chest for more than a minute any more, so I'd shoved her farther down.

I had an arm flung over my eyes so I didn't see Gulp land but I felt her. I felt  -  and smelled  -  the wind of her coming, and the faint  -  tinily faint  -  tremor of her landing. Maybe it was because I was lying down that I felt it this time. And I felt the shadow  -  and the wash of heat  -  when she . . .

My eyes shot open and I moved my arm. She was standing right over us. She'd never done that before. An adult dragon is big enough that when you're lying down you might as well be a beetle. My first instinct was to get up and run like hell . . . but if she'd been going to eat me, she'd've done it weeks ago. I didn't think my lying down was likely to be some kind of irresistible come-on. Dragons aren't carrion eaters if they have a choice.

And then she lay down beside us, like she had that first day, when she was apologizing, if that was what she was doing, and seeming to make an even greater effort to make herself as small (yowzah) as she could. She'd never put all of herself down next to us before, if you follow me, she'd like tried to leave most of herself at the other end of the meadow. But then we'd never been lying down when she landed either.

She curved her ridiculously long neck in an arc, so that while her body was already really close to us (really close), her head was too. (Well, comparatively. There was still fifty-feet-plus of her relative to six-feet plus of me.) Once she got herself settled, Lois and I were the center of a spiral, and the spiral was all dragon. Maybe it was just as well I was preoccupied with Dad's check-in because if I'd panicked and tried to run, there wasn't anywhere to run to, except into the dragon. The hump of her body, especially with the spinal ridge plates, pretty well shut out the sun. It had started to get chilly lying on the ground (except where Lois was on my legs), but being that close to her body heat was something else  -  although adrenaline surges kind of warm you up too. I had noticed her being hot before, of course, but this was another something or other. Degree. Dimension. I noticed Lois' body heat because she was usually pressed up against me. I know, why would dragons waste their fire heating their surroundings? But Gulp was close. I could hear her breathing. It sounded like wind in a cave, and one in-and-out breath took several minutes.

On a whim  -  a whim I didn't dare even recognize as a whim  -  I stretched out an arm. I did it quickly so I wouldn't lose my nerve, which is never a good idea with a wild animal  -  doing something quickly I mean  -  but I did it anyway. Besides, what was she going to be afraid of? It would be like having a toothpick attack you. I wasn't quite close enough, so I hitched myself over a little closer to her, trying not to dislodge Lois (still humming). I put my hand on Gulp's jaw. I could touch my baby dragon without gloves (except on her belly), as long as I was careful that only the palm stayed in contact. I assumed I could keep my hand against Gulp's greater heat  -  and probably her thicker skin helped.

The hot part went okay. The hot part and the Gulp not moving her head with a dragon equivalent of "ugh" part. It was still a sensationally stupid thing to do. Like maybe telepathy works better with a conductor, like those tin-can telephones you maybe made (if you were poor, or lived out in the middle of nowhere, or both) when you were a kid. They don't really work very well, but that they work at all is weirdly exciting (if you're pathetic enough to have made them, then you'll probably find them exciting, okay?). I started thinking at her. I guess I started out thinking words, as if I was talking to her, but words aren't really all that good, you know, one picture is worth a thousand, etc., and especially if you don't speak the same language, and while maybe dragons had been keeping up their English since they spent all that time with Old Pete (and he says in his journals he used to talk to his dragons, although his never talked back), there's a limit, I guess, to what an insane whim will stretch to.

And there are so many times when words are nowhere near enough even when you're talking to an ordinary human person who speaks the same language. And that's even when you're talking to someone who knows you well and knows almost everything about you, like Dad or Billy or Kit or Katie or Martha knows me. I didn't deliberately shift over to pictures, talking (or whatever) to Gulp, but I did, since I was in my head anyway and could do what I liked and it was all either crazy or imaginary so who cared.

And then it really started getting weird. The pictures started like going through my head faster than I was thinking them, like they were getting sucked out of me; but as they went they were getting all distorted. Not like Dad suddenly had six legs or Billy was eight feet tall and green, just . . . I don't know. But you know how sometimes when two of you who were there start to tell a story to a third person who wasn't, and you keep laughing because it's like you're telling two different stories and one of you is crazy? It was a little like that. And if I wasn't imagining it, well, a dragon's point of view and attitude would be a lot different from a human's, wouldn't it?

But what was the dragon perspective doing to my story?

By the time I got to the guys in black with the machine guns and the helicopter  -  and why I was imagining guys in black with machine guns I don't know, too many TV shows at too young an age I suppose  -  I had a headache so bad I could hardly bear to keep thinking at all, and the pictures I was making seemed to rip at me as they were pulled away  -  a little like skinning a sunburned arm, only worse  -  and with every picture the Headache got even worse and worse and worse. I suppose that's why I didn't hear the two-way immediately. I might not have heard it at all except that I noticed that Lois had stopped humming. My brain (or my Headache) was thundering in my ears so hard I couldn't hear her either, but my legs had stopped vibrating  -  and my hip had started (vibrating). Even Gulp shifted her head very slightly  -  not enough to shake my tentative hand though. And there was the hiccupping brrrr that was the two-way asking for me to answer it.

I seemed to be paralyzed. My brain was doing or having done to it things it didn't understand, and it didn't have any neurons left over for telling my not-on-Gulp's-nose hand to reach down and flip the switch. There's an emergency override for talking when the other person doesn't pick up, if the two-way is at least turned on. I'd left mine turned on. But you'll never believe the voice that screamed out of it though. Eric.

"Jake, can you hear me? Your dad's been pretty well taken hostage, and I'm pretty sure they're monitoring unscheduled use of any two-way which means they'll he coming for me in a minute. They're on their way, and they know you're at Westcamp. I don't know when they left, so you may not have much time. Hell. I didn't expect them . . . I've still got to . . . Do what you have to do, Jake. Can you  -  " And there was a clatter and thump and that was all.

But there was something else too, which I could hear more clearly now that the two-way had gone silent  -  and after what it had said had sharpened my ears for anything that wasn't wind or dragons. Another sort of buzz or brrrrrr. Distant but coming closer. A sort of heavy, rapid whompwhompwhomp. Unless I was imagining that.

And I would have thought I was imagining it, if it wasn't for Eric. I would have thought I was just being paranoid. I was so used to being paranoid it wasn't even doing its job any more.

No. I wasn't imagining it.

The paralysis splintered like stomped ice and fell away. I shot to my feet, tumbling poor Lois off very roughly. I heard the two-way lose its grip on my belt and clunk to the ground. (The second two-way I'd killed in the business of saving Lois.) I stooped down and picked her up  -  heaved her up  -  I could only barely lift her any more, let alone hold her. She gave an anxious, protesting little grunt, but she didn't struggle. Gulp was sitting up by then too, her head stretched up at the end of her long neck  -  she'd rolled up away from us, so she was now like far away by being the distance of the length of her body, although she'd left most of her tail behind  -  looking as tall as the Devil's Tower, as if the hard blue of the Smokehill sky was something you could touch, and she was touching it. She was looking  -  or listening  -  hard.

When she looked down at me again, from twenty or so feet of neck, I took a step forward, and tried to hold Lois out to her, although my arms were shaking  -  maybe not only with Lois' weight.

Gulp didn't take Lois away from me though. She took us both.

This is pretty embarrassing, but the first thing I remember about that journey is throwing up. I guess Gulp didn't want to hang around for explanations  -  or maybe she'd seen helicopters before. We do have the occasional dramatic air rescue at Smokehill, and dragons live a long time. Or maybe my panic vibes were impressive. She scooped us up in her front claws, spread her wings, and left. Dragons are not graceful takers-off  -  or maybe that was just our weight. And my not being used to flying. Mostly a dragon carrying something as big as us would be carrying a kill, and kills don't care. Also since she didn't have her front feet she kind of bounced along on her hind ones till her wings took over, and her wings took over by going WHAM, WHAM, WHAM, which meant the dragon and any passengers were going JOLT, JOLT, JOLT, with her entire body doing a massive recoil jerk with every wing-beat. Riding in the backseat of a Smokehill jeep has nothing on flying with a dragon. And by the time we were thirty feet in the air I lost it. Breakfast all over the meadow. I wonder what the guys looking for us made of that, if they were doing the on-your-knees forensic-shuffle-for-evidence thing. They were probably looking for blood.

Between my head  -  which was still throbbing, make that THROBBING  -  and my stomach I was pretty miserable, but I closed my eyes for a while and the cold air began to help. Like her flying style wasn't ghastly enough, Gulp was corkscrewing around through the landscape  -  we, I mean us at the Institute, had always assumed that dragons must fly as low as possible sometimes or we'd have had sightings more often. Or more evidence of them walking. But guesses varied about whether this was about energy expenditure or desire to be as inconspicuous as possible for something that runs thirty to eighty feet long, and at the moment it sure felt like she was trying not to be seen. Also her twisting and jinking felt pretty high octane to me and the bigger the predator usually the more energy-conscious it is. (Bleeeeeaaauugh. It was a good thing I didn't have anything left to throw up after the first time or I'd've been leaving a trail.)

She ducked behind stone pillars and outcroppings and took side slips down little canyons and valley, (often where her wingspan was I swear unquestionably too wide for clearance) even when they weren't going in what seemed to be her direction, like she knew there were bad guys following her. And where did she get that idea? There'd never been bad guys at Smokehill, till the poacher. And he didn't fly, or go vvhompvvhompwhomp.

She didn't hold us painfully or anything but I was pretty horribly uncomfortable all the same, and scared that somehow Lois would slip out of either my hands or Gulp's. This didn't seem to be bothering Lois at all. Lois was like a kid having her first roller coaster ride. I kept expecting her to say Wheeeeee, although with the wind of Gulp's wings I couldn't've heard her. I hadn't trained her what to say for her first roller coaster ride anyway. Joke.

We stopped once, by a stream at the bottom of one of the little canyons. Gulp came down almost as awkwardly as she'd taken off  -  holding her, well, her hands stiffly and as if anxiously out in front of her, like someone carrying a birthday cake while walking downstairs in the dark. Phew. I was glad for a drink. We all had a drink. I had a drink and a wash.

Even that was peculiar  -  doing something with Gulp for the first time. Like we had something in common. Besides Lois. But Gulp got down on her belly again afterward. Lois knew exactly what was wanted  -  this was a game they'd played back in the meadow (although I'd never think of the concept of "game" in quite the same way again) and she climbed up to the top of Gulp's neck and settled down what looked like pretty contentedly, while I watched and reminded myself about how I should want to lose Lois . . . but not necessarily get stranded who the hell knew where in the middle of Smokehill alone with no survival gear. . ..

Gulp raised her head just enough to give me a very pointed stare and then laid it down again. So I could step on it, I suppose. That's how Lois climbed up there. I didn't want to, but what are you going to do when a dragon stares at you? And I was lost.

I hope I didn't hurt her. I was only wearing sneakers, but I'm not a baby dragon and all my weight's in two feet not four and you don't step on people. And I didn't step on her head. I found a way to crawl up her shoulder and then up that infinity of neck. Dragon scales are slippier than you think and the jagged bits aren't nearly as jagged as they look, nor do they give you much purchase. I settled down pretty gingerly with a leg on either side of the top of her spine, Lois right in front of me, where there's a little hollow where the skull meets the neck. But maybe it's the thickness of dragon skin there, she was never more than hot. In fact pleasantly hot, when you're flying in an open cockpit.

I didn't fall off. Neither did Lois. Even without the cage of Gulp's claws. Among other things the head and neck don't kick in the wingbeat-recoil the way the body does, so you can afford to kind of relax. Kind of. The dragon still looks around and you may not be looking at/for what the dragon is looking at/for, so you will find yourself very unnervingly looking one way while the head you're on suddenly swivels around some other way while you're still flying some other way yet. This is worse when your dragon is actually changing direction, when head and neck become part of the banking and balancing tackle. I also don't recommend looking down, however good you are about heights.

Lois was having the most fun she'd ever had in her life, if the blasting-bright-hot little sun in my skull was anything to go by. Maybe it was the comparison with the little sun, plus my own fears, that made the big rock in my head seem even bigger and knobbier and heavier and more headachy than usual and the boulder field squallier. At least up on top here the Headache eased a little but that internal storm-mauled feeling kept me dizzy and nauseated. I spent most of that flight with my check pressed against the base of Gulp's skull, because it was like I didn't have the strength to hold my head up. (Also that meant more of me stayed warm. And flying was a lot less confusing when my eyes were shut.) Lois had managed to wedge herself between these sort of horny places a little higher up and farther forward, and every now and then I got hit in the head by her wildly flailing tail  -  which was now long and heavy enough for some pretty impressive wild flailing. Ow. Not among my best moments however you look at it.

We stopped several times, but that could have been because Gulp needed a breather, carrying passengers, or a chance to get her normal balance back. And yes, she did stretch and shake her neck every time we got off. I know that horses can carry something like ten percent of their own weight in tack and rider over big jumps, but Gulp was flying. And flying and flying. Very energy intensive, flying, and worse when you've got like a very heavy hat tipping you forward all the time. But there wasn't any place else we could have stayed on, not bareback anyway.

I'm pretty sure Gulp went the long way around. The angle of the daylight kept changing direction from more than the sun rising and going back down again. (At one point I wondered faintly and queasily if even Billy could keep his sense of direction, flying dragonback.) Was she deliberately confusing our trail, or did dragons always leave a confusing trail? Something as big as a dragon you wouldn't think they'd've learned to bother  -  that they'd think they needed to. Unless, of course, this was all part of the Smokehill dragons trying not to be watched or studied. Or maybe they never had the faith in our fence that us stupid humans had had, before the poacher.

We arrived where we were going a little after sunset, although I think that was deliberate too. We'd had kind of a long pause, the last time Gulp came down, and the last flight was more of a hop. The Lois-sun in my head began to fade and it wasn't round any more. As the bright light died the shape of the thing began to soften like the light did, and by the time it was no more than a faint glow it was also a sort of collapsed blob, like jam let out of its jar. Lois was tired. So was I. The big Gulp-rock had sunk down so it was lower than it was high too, but it hadn't got softer, it had got harder. Just having it in my head hurt. It wasn't so much a headachy feeling any more though, it was more like by sheer literal weight it was grinding its way down through the bottom of my skull. If I'd had to give it a definition I'd've called it stubbornness. I didn't want to think about what Gulp might have to feel stubborn about but I couldn't help being pretty sure I could guess.

After we climbed back up her neck the last time and settled in, she shook herself a couple of times, sharply, and the big rock in my head developed spikes and sank them into my brain. Ow. I felt like a mountainside with pitons being banged into it. Lois gave a little squeak or mew, so I put my arm around her and tried to brace my feet and hands. I was tired and starving, and it wasn't easy  -  the waning daylight felt like the waning me and nothing to do with the sun setting like it does every evening  -  but Gulp was obviously saying "hang on."

Because my head was so sore and heavy anyway and the wind made my eyes water  -  and yeah, I was scared, but try and tell me you wouldn't be  -  I put my face down against one of the thick plates on Gulp's neck again, although I could peer a little. Lois, who'd been pretty much playing Gallant Figurehead Breasting the Airy Ocean all day like something out of a blue-yonder version of Hornblower, was subdued enough now to let me pull her down too. Also as soon as the sun disappeared it started getting cold and plastering myself along Gulp's hot neck felt good.

We were at the bottom of another, bigger canyon with a lot of tumbled rock and scree everywhere and a few little patches of dull greenery. The remains of daylight couldn't show much down here though. The shadows got pretty spooky pretty fast but I was on the scariest shadow of them all . . . and my sense that she was nerving herself for what happened next was scarier yet. Gulp went round a pillar and between two boulder falls with this amazing snakelike (passenger-cracking) writhe she could do . . . and suddenly went down and it was suddenly very dark, and then it wasn't dark any more but the light was red and flickery, like firelight, only not like normal firelight either. The light kind of made me remember something, it was way too familiar. . . .

. . . And then there was an incredible roaring in my head and my ears, and Gulp was standing up on her hind legs and roaring back �C the vibration felt like sitting on the biggest engine in the world at the moment when the biggest engine in the world is about to fly into smithereens  -  and twice she turned herself sharply one way or another and the arrow of fire that had no doubt been meant to wipe me off her back went wide, and I only barely stayed on, still hanging on to Lois, who was howling with terror and trying to look for her mom's pouch again which wasn't making my life any easier.

After the first two flame-spears there weren't any more, maybe because whoever was doing it had noticed that there was a little dragon up there with me. (are all dragons this trigger happy?), but the roaring still seemed to go on for a very long time. . . . I have to be imagining this, but at the time I would have sworn that Gulp's spinal plates rattled like castanets from the reverb of her roaring . . . although maybe not as long as it seemed because even after I stopped hearing it in my ears I was still hearing it my head. It felt like an avalanche of boulders and I couldn't see or hear through it. I wasn't sure I wasn't in a real avalanche of boulders, and if I was, presumably I was about to die.

Gulp may have tried to let us climb down the way we'd been doing all day and I didn't notice or couldn't do it. Which is how I found out that she could reach around to the back of her neck with her forelegs when one of her front claws closed  -  gently  -  around me. I think I may have yelled  -  okay, screamed  -  but then I recognized what she was doing, and tried to let go of the way I had myself wedged in but I was so stiff with terror and confusion that it was pretty impossible, it was like I'd lost track of my own legs and arms, and I couldn't let go of Lois who was petrified and clinging to me. Mom instinct had kicked in again: I was off my head, but I was holding on to my daughter. Even Gulp had some trouble peeling us out of there and we had a very jerky and stomach-turning ride down to ground level.

My legs just folded up like wet string, although I was also carrying the hysterical Lois. We collapsed together, and then had the insane-making sensation of Gulp coming down to four legs over us, with us directly under her belly, and her heat poured over us like one of Yellowstone's boiling geysers. A tiny little portion of my mind, still trying to make rational thoughts against stupendous odds, which was pretty heroic of it in the circumstances, was saying, She's protecting you! I could hear it, and it made sense and everything, to the extent that anything was making sense, but I was way beyond my deal-with-it boundary. Also the Headache was doing what felt like the cranial version of the John Hurt scene in Alien. I'm afraid I passed out.