Dragonhaven (15 page)

And I've said that everyone at Smokehill would sell their grandmothers to be invited for a meal that Grace cooked—she liked cooking for people, and now she couldn't do that either, or only for the few of us official secret Lois society members.
And
she lost her studio because Lois and I took over Jamie's room—she had to set up her drawing board in the kitchen. But the funny thing is that Lois learned not to whang into the drawing board first, when she was still really little and tottery. She was still crashing into the kitchen table occasionally when she was big enough to make a glass standing on it fall over, just from not paying attention. (Maybe she picked it up from me. I've made a few glasses fall over in my time.) But she never did that to the drawing board. And it wasn't that Grace was ever mean to her about that or about anything. Made you wonder just what she was learning by all that bumping.

But the stuff about the poacher and the dead dragon—Lois' mom…I mostly didn't know how bad it was till a lot later. Even at the time I knew that everybody was trying their damnedest to make sure I didn't know…but I was trying not to know too. I know how much of a jerk this makes me look. But I had really, really,
really
as much as I could handle with just Lois. And the dreams. And the headaches. And the no-way-out. I don't want to get all moany and whiny about this but even if it's a unique scientific opportunity giving up your life to keep someone else alive is kind of hard, and pain is tiring and headaches, you know, hurt, and while the burn marks weren't too bad, they were tender, so if they got clawed or gouged that hurt too.

And the dreams…sometimes, after a really vivid one, it was like I never quite woke out of it all day, like if I only went a little bit farther into this trance I was trying to hold off (or maybe I was trying to bring it on), I'd see big bus-wheel eyes shining at me from the trees around the house. I wasn't putting on the Space Cadet thing, I was
there.
And I'm sorry I was a jerk. But Lois pretty much blotted everything else out.

I don't know how everybody else stood it, everybody else who knew about Lois, even if it wasn't them she couldn't be more than three feet away from all the time. Being a Space Cadet was also kind of a help, for me, being so out of it.

Anyway. However boring—and painful—scrubbing up to go to the Institute was, I had to do it. I had to go on leaving Lois by herself so she
could
be left (of course I worried about stressing her till she had a heart attack or whatever dragons have, and died; from my perspective at the time we could have afforded to lose a few staff members, they were only human) and I had to start going to the Institute as soon as I could and keep going because it would have looked even weirder than it did—about my conversion to early Rangerhood I mean—if I never came. And if the “nightmares” hadn't cleared off pretty soon, they'd've had a psychologist in to test me for echoes, and I'd probably've resonated like a cave full of bats. Besides, there were the school testers and I really didn't want to get on their suspicious side. So I went up to the Institute every day and tried to be as conspicuous as possible so it seemed as if I was up there more.

My time at the zoo and the orphanage of course got cut down to almost nothing. Eric was really pissed off (surprise) and tried to make out that I didn't really want to be a Ranger, I was just looking for a way to get out of doing any work, i.e., at his zoo, because I'm a teenage boy and teenage boys are always lazy and dishonest. (Made you wonder what kind of a teenager
he'd
been.) But hindsight even makes Eric being his normal super-avoid-worthy self look different. Eric was the head of the zoo and the orphanage—if anyone would know about an orphan baby dragon, it would be him—and all he was doing was kvetching about that worthless lump Jake…like maybe he had a suspicion it would be a good idea to distract anyone from wondering if the worthless lump had a reason for disappearing, besides being a lazy and dishonest teenage boy?

I did start cleaning
odorata
's cage again. The smell was still awful but it wasn't as overwhelming as when I lived like a human being rather than an
australiensis
mom, and as another sign that I had lost my mind I began to notice how beautiful the damn critters are, no matter how they smelled: The parrot-green and crimson-and-yellow frills on the big male are really amazing, and if you can hold your breath long enough to appreciate it the way he flaps 'em around is almost choreography. And I was used to taking really violent showers these days so the prospect of another one after I took the last radioactive
odorata
barrowload to the pit where we buried the stuff was no big deal.

It's funny though—another thing that's funny—I got all kind of loosened up about all the things in the zoo. They were what they were and they were probably pretty interesting, even if they weren't dragons. I almost missed having some herpetologist around studying the Effect of the Tourist Gaze on
Draco somethingorotherensis.
Hey, you lizards, how's it going? Eaten any nice celery/rhubarb/beetles/snails lately? But the zoo was happening on another planet, which was almost like relaxing—I'm only a visitor and
boy
do I not belong here.

But not belonging here was an advantage, dealing with f.l.s. I'd smile at them and let what they said (because smiling only encourages them) roll over me. I found myself nodding calmly to a major f.l. one day from
sylvestris
' cage, saying
mmm hmm
as I kept on with my shovel. He was talking about how something or other, I don't remember which one he liked, is the
real
dragon, and most of that stuff at the tourist center about
australiensis
is just hooey to pull the tourists in, everyone knows
australiensis
is extinct, because when's the last time anyone's ever seen one, and it wasn't like that even when it was alive…but then his wife interrupted to say that
something
had killed that poor man and it was
criminal
the way the Institute was flogging the story about his death to draw media attention when any half intelligent person knew that there'd been some
human
screwup and they just didn't want to admit it and…

I was starting to straighten up over my wheelbarrow and reconnect with my surroundings and I don't know what might have happened next but Eric came along and snarled at me to stop standing around wasting time when I was supposed to be
cleaning
that cage and then the f.l. and his wife turned on
him
and said that that poor boy should be taken away from this den of scoundrels and liars and given to good honest folk who would try to reverse the effects of the warped and wicked Smokehill brainwashing…but I'd picked up the handles on my wheelbarrow and was trundling as fast as possible out of earshot, and I hope Eric had a good time. Those letters to congresspeople about cutting off our funding never mention Eric, so he must actually know how to weasel. More hidden depths in our Eric.

I might still have gone stir crazy, trapped in the cabin with increasingly hyperactive Lois and only brief nerve-twangling paroles up at the Institute and the zoo—the dragon dreams, for better or worse, did begin to tail off as Lois started climbing out of the sling more and I started going to the Institute regularly—but then for a while the more active she got the harder it was to leave her because she wouldn't stay buried in her nice smelly sheets any more. For a few days there this looked like it was going to be Jake's Last Straw and one day as I was trying to leave and I'd only just got her buried and (apparently) settled but she'd started to cry before I got to the
door
, and I don't remember what I said but it was in the “aaaaugh” category.

Grace said mildly, “Children are like that sometimes,” and I said, “But she's not a child, she's a
dragon
, and what if—” And Grace said, “Every mother says, ‘But
my
child….' That's how it works.”

“But I'm
not
her mother,” I wailed, hearing in my own voice that I sounded like a baby myself, crying for a toy or an ice cream. “That's the
point.
”

“You're the only mother she's got,” Grace said, smiling, “just like Eric was the only mother Julie had.” Julie was the first, and only, Yukon wolf cub any human had ever successfully raised and successfully released into the wild—without getting eaten in the process, that is. Even Yukon wolves thought twice about Eric, although Julie had left a few marks. “Go on, Jake,” said Grace. “I'm here. Lois will be fine.”

I wanted to say,
How do you know she'll be fine
, but I didn't. I went. And she was fine. Even if that was when I had to start really
working
at wearing her out so she'd actually sleep while I was gone.

So what is the point of living on the edge of five million acres of wilderness if you spend all your time inside four walls? But Billy took me out with him every chance he could invent, and while as Lois got bigger walking around carrying her got harder, Billy was really clever with his sling making and at the point I really wasn't going to be able to carry her in front any more she hoisted herself up another of those developmental stages, and agreed to ride on my back, and even more exciting,
over
the T-shirt. I think this must have been the moment when she would have started looking out of her mom's pouch sometimes, if her life had been normal, because she used to look over my shoulder (and snorkel around in my hair, making it stick together with smelly dragon spit) and (except for the spit) that was kind of fun, although it meant Billy had to be even more careful where he took me. Having a large bulgy restless stomach was bad enough, having an obviously exotic animal riding in your backpack is something else. Although I don't believe anyone could have recognized Lois as a dragon yet (she looked more like the Slug That Ate Schenectady, only lumpier), still, she was obviously something pretty strange, and anyone who caught us would have wanted to know what, and why whatever it was wasn't safely at the zoo in a cage being studied.

 

So anyway that was my life. Meanwhile…

The very very first instant thing that had happened after Billy gave the bad news over the two-way from Northcamp, is that our rules for anyone getting normal permission to enter the park to study something, any farther than the usual short, guided tourist treks, suddenly got impossible—even the zoo lizard note-takers got banned. You have a certificate signed by God that you can come in? Sorry. God's not good enough.

At first since as I've told you, I wasn't into the big picture about anything, I just thought “some good out of a whole cheezing lot of bad” that we weren't going to have nosy prying researcher types around at all. But we'd only ever had a few researcher types around at a time, and their nosying and prying was usually pretty focused—and actually some of them were pretty nice too—and instead we had all these
investigator
people hanging around wanting to, well, investigate, and there were a
lot
of them, and
none
of them were nice, and they wanted to investigate EVERYTHING, so we didn't finish ahead after all.

Almost everything. At least they didn't want to investigate the Chief Ranger's house and even the Institute director's nutcase son was mostly only interesting as a side issue, of how living in the wilderness was bad for children, I guess. Because I was a kid—and because of the nightmares and what the cadaver removal guys had said—and Billy had somehow managed to subtract the “solo” out of it so most people kind of thought he'd been there too—they didn't insist on interviewing me all over the place. Some nice-cop type took my statement once and then they left me alone. Maybe I put over “pathetic idiot” really well too and they decided they weren't going to get any more out of me. Although that meant they immediately wanted to take their high-tech magnifying glasses and deerstalker hats (ha ha ha) and stuff into the park where it happened, but they were going to do that anyway.

A long time later I asked Dad if they hadn't thought of pretending not to know anything about the poacher or the dead dragon—Pine Tor is twenty miles from Northcamp, and Billy had only officially scheduled us as far as Northcamp. Dad said that of course they had but had rejected it. In the first place, we don't
like
lying. You have to work too hard on keeping your story straight if you're lying. (We know.) But the big issue was, as always, PR.

Some of the other big predators bag the occasional human in some of the other wilderness parks, but that's okay or something (except to the bagged guy's friends and family), part of the natural order out in the wild, the risk you take by going there, yatta yatta. Dragons are different. Like those two speleologists who disappeared on their way to the Bonelands twenty years ago—you know about them, right?—are still getting brought up pretty much every time Smokehill gets mentioned in the national press, and the point is they
disappeared
. Nobody knows what happened to them. Quick—how many people have been taken out by grizzlies—are
known
to have been taken out by grizzlies—in the last twenty years? You don't know, do you? But it's more than two. Maybe it would be easier if more people did deny that our dragons exist.