Dragonhaven (24 page)

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

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

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

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

“Nope,” I always said.

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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