I keep having these conversations with Dad.
I'm at my computer. He says, "What are you doing?"
I mutter something, because the screen has a lot of squiggles on it so he already knows what I'm doing.
"Have you started on it yet, Jake?"
"No," I say, probably more belligerently than I mean to. But we've had this conversation so often.
Dad sighs. "Jake, I know I'm nagging you. But it's important."
"So is the dictionary important!"
"It's not important to anyone but you if only you can read it," says Dad. I glare at him, because he knows that I know that he knows it is important. But that also it's an excuse.
"I don't know how to write it," I mutter. Like, just by the way, I do know how to write my dictionary. Which I don't either. In spite of the fancy graphics package.
"That doesn't matter. Just write it." He tries to make a joke. "Your spelling is pretty good."
"I don't know how - I can't make it a story!" I shout, or rather, I don't shout, I sort of hiss it through clenched teeth. I want to shout. "It's not . . . It doesn't have . . . There's no . . ." I can't think how to finish. I can't think how to begin.
"It doesn't have to be a story. It doesn't have to be anything. Just put down what happened. Don't call it anything."
Yeah, right. Make pizza without tomato sauce and mozzarella, just don't call it pizza and you'll be fine. What's the use of pizza without tomato sauce and mozzarella? Like Alice said before she saw the White Rabbit: "What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?" Although the pictures are covered really well elsewhere, and the new coffee-table, drop-it-on-your-foot-and-spend-the-rest-of-your-life-on-crutches art-book version is coming out soon. Text, I have to say, by some chucklehead sensitive type. Yuck. The thought of it is one of the things that's getting me going here finally. The sensitive version will probably be way too much like a story. A fairy tale.
But who lives a story, you know? With chapters and things. And as a fairy-tale hero if someone gave me a vorpal blade I'd probably stick it in my foot. Or get lost in the mimsy borogroves. Life is just one day after another, even when the days are really, really strange.
Dad looks at me. I look at him. We both know what we're both thinking. I prod a couple of keys and make the squiggles go squigglier. "Just do the best you can," Dad says, really gently. "You're the only one who can tell it at all."
Yes. That's the awful thundering can't-get-around-it thing. I'm the only one who can tell you about Lois. And the only way I can tell Lois' story is through me. I feel like starting by saying, I'm not a crazed egomaniac! Really I'm not! I am a crazed Lois-iac. Joke. Sort of. But it's not only the freaking hard work of trying to write it all out coherently that is stopping me now. I don't want to go back there. I've got used to . . . like being able to look out windows again and not worry about what I might see.
Also a lot of the stuff that's about me is stuff I don't want to tell anyone. It's also a lot about Dad and me, and I don't want to tell those parts either, down on paper and everything, where he can read them. Which he will.
I may not know how to write my dictionary, but at least it's not embarrassing.
There's another problem (I should make a list): I don't remember every day as every day, as different from the day before and the day after. Sure, I kept notes - I kept lots and lots of notes - but I seem to have left a lot of stuff out. All the connecting bits. All the conversations. All the sane bits, if there were any sane bits. I was just trying to stay alive, those days, keep Lois and me alive. And I wasn't thinking in terms of needing to make a story out of it later on.
And I sure don't remember every conversation I've had in the last four years. I remember a few of them - the ones that really got to me for one reason or another - but mostly, who remembers? Not me. And I bet not you either.
I don't mean the ordinary, everyday ones you have a lot, like "How are you?" and "What's for dinner?" (and "I thought it was your turn to cook"). Those are easy. I mean the one-off ones. The ones why you're trying to write something someone else is going to read at all. So that why-you're-writing stuff is a lot of stuff you can't remember well enough to write.
There weren't many conversations anyway. Not a lot of he-saids and she-saids, or at least not till the end, and then they're peculiar.
But I'm going to try to tell the truth. Except for the parts I'm leaving out, because there's still stuff I'm just not going to tell you. Get used to it.
And then, okay, I've got this far, I'm not staring out the window, my fingers are on the keyboard, the first finger is wiggling over the first key for the first letter of the first word (whatever that is) . . . and then I stop all over again, because how do I get your attention? Not your newspaper-headline attention - your real attention. How do I tell you the stuff you need to know if you're going to understand what happened? Because there's really no point if I'm not trying to make you understand a little.
And, just by the way, who are you?
Dad and Martha say that there are a lot of people - a lot of you (is it going to be easier to think of you as you? Or is that going to weird me out even more?) - who don't know anything and will only be picking this up because the headlines have made you curious about the whole show and if I want to rave on a little as background that's probably okay and maybe even a good idea. I guess they figure if they get me raving they've won. They're probably right. So blame them. Although they did say rave a little.
It would be easier to start now and go backwards, but then you'd never understand. I'm going to have to start all those years ago, and I don't know how to feel like I felt before Lois, or how to get back there to tell the story the way it happened, so maybe you'll understand. At all. A little.
Mom should be here, reading this, and saying things like, " 'Lois and I,' dear, not 'me and Lois.' " And telling me when it's "whom" and not "who." But she isn't. Mom is one of the reasons I don't want to write any of this. I keep wondering, would it have happened at all - would Lois have happened - if Mom was still here? If I hadn't been the right kind of nutcase? Was being a nutcase necessary?
Eventually I thought about Eleanor. She never worries about getting anybody's attention (and that "eventually" would really annoy her), or whether they're going to be interested, if she wants something. And there are always he-saids and she-saids when Eleanor is around. She-saids, anyway. Eleanor doesn't have the hugest sense of humor in the world about herself, but I think she'll get this one. That I'm going to start four and a half years ago, with her shouting at me. Also Eleanor shouting is very rememberable.
"JAKE!"
That's Eleanor. She has a great future as an alarm system. She's only seven, but she has precocious lungs.
"JAAA-AKE!"
I threw my window open. "I'm coming! Keep your hair on!"
She glared up at me. "You're late."
I looked at my watch. "I won't be late for another . . . two minutes."
"We'll be late by the time we get there!"
I closed my window, sighed, put my shoes on, and ran downstairs. Our apartment is at one end of the institute, but nothing is very far from anything else. I flew by a group of tourists gaping at the Draco family charts that stand at the way into the diorama and the tiny movie theater, past the ticket booth and the door to the gift shop and cafe, waved at Peggy in the ticket booth as she said, "Jake, don't run," and was standing beside Eleanor in forty-five seconds. She hadn't finished glaring yet, and stomped off down the path that led to the zoo, barreling through the thickets of tourists like a cavalry charge. I followed.
Offer to hold Eleanor's hand? Not if you don't want it bitten off. Of course there are no highways for her to run across without looking both ways inside the park gates. The only vehicles that come in and out through the gates are our Rangers' jeeps, which were bought more for endurance than for speed, and from age and the effects of the surfaces they run on, tend to kind of lurch along. Our park tour buses crawl even slower so everyone has a chance to take lots of photos and go "oooh." They're solar powered and can't go any faster. Tourist cars and coaches stay in the parking lot outside. Even the garage for the staff's private vehicles is outside the gates. (This is not a major issue. If you work here, you probably can't afford a private vehicle.) And the nearest highway, with like more than two lanes, is fifty miles away, on the far side of Wilsonville.
This was Eleanor's first week being allowed to help out at the zoo, and she was a little crazed. I was a little crazed, because the grown-ups had decided that Martha was too young to mentor her but I was old enough. I'm not sure the Incredible Hulk is old enough to mentor Eleanor, and Martha is actually pretty good at it. I'm not. It would be okay once we got there, and in another week or two Eleanor should have calmed down a little (I hoped) but meanwhile at 1:55 every afternoon there was a small two-legged elephant trumpeting under my window.
A normal seven-year-old would be happy helping feed baby raccoons at the orphanage. Not Eleanor. Nobody comes to Smokehill for the raccoons, and she wants to be where more of the action is.
I don't really mind Eleanor though. In some ways she's restful. She's too young to remember my mom very well, or Snark. If you think that sounds really sicko, you try being twelve years old when your mother dies and having everyone around you looking at you and thinking of her and feeling sorry for you. It doesn't help that I look like her. Right after she died - right after we knew she was dead - and people started looking at me like that, I started spending a lot of time in front of the mirror, rubbing my cheeks with my fingers. Well, maybe it was more like scratching my cheeks with my fingers, because I started leaving marks. Dad asked me why. I said I was hoping my beard would come in early. I didn't say, Because then people won't look at me like I'm my mother.
Dad was almost the only person who didn't look at me in that new way, but then he was the only other person who was missing her as much as I was. Dad said, "Oh." He didn't ask me why I wanted my beard to come in early. Maybe he guessed. Dad has a beard which he keeps short and tidy so he can make a good impression on the tourists, and the grant administrators. He scratched his own hairy cheeks for a minute and added, "You may not if it does." I stopped scratching my cheeks. And now it was two and a half years later and my beard still hadn't started coming in, but people didn't look at me so much like that any more so I could wait.
Okay, Eleanor and I usually were about a minute late, and Martha was usually there first, lining out the buckets and checking that the labels were all still legible. If anybody got the wrong grub there'd be trouble, from Eric if nothing else. Trouble from Eric is way more than enough however.
"Hiya," she'd say.
"Huh," Eleanor'd say, really offhand and casual. "What've we got?" It's quieter inside the big shed where the food lives - no tourists. That's another of the big draws for Eleanor, of course, being seen by a lot of grown-ups to be going somewhere they can't. I no longer cared about that aspect of it (but if nagged I would admit that I remembered when I did) but just getting away from them - the tourists - was always good. It's a weird life, living at Smokehill, where there's all that gorgeous, amazing, wonderful empty (I mean human empty) space just behind you, so to speak, but you live in like this tiny permanently besieged encampment where you have to kind of take a deep breath and bolt for it when you go from one cranny of no-tourists to the next.
I don't particularly want to because it makes me feel more of a mutant than ever but I suppose I should emphasize that life at Smokehill is kind of bizarre. Certainly us kids were always being told (or asked) that wasn't the way we lived peculiar. Uh, pardon me, but I was born here. So I didn't like being asked (or told). Other kids were the worst. They said things like, No pizza? Like you might say, No oxygen? Of course we have pizza. But no, we couldn't call up the local Super Pizza to deliver, that's true.
Eleanor wouldn't touch the bugs and beetles, and the bigger live (or soon-to-be-knocked-on-the-head) stuff Eric or Katie would deal with, but she'd put the vegetables and fruit in the buckets after Martha or I cut it up if it needed cutting. (Madagascariensis is such a lazy slob it won't eat its carrots unless they are chopped up first.) She wasn't really that much help since we had to keep a sharp eye on her; she felt that fairness meant that everybody got the same thing, but most of the fun food is whatever the Wilsonville and Cheyenne supermarkets feel like sending us of the stuff that's still around after its sell-by date and, for example, citrus gives russo diarrhea. But Eleanor will get older, and living at Smokehill is weird enough (okay, okay, I admit it) so it's good if you feel involved. But how many kids get to help out at a zoo? Who needs normal?
Although Martha and I both put our hours in at the orphanage. But then the orphanage is pretty good too. I like little furry baby things, which there aren't any of at the zoo. Maybe I'm more normal than Eleanor. After the lot at the zoo, something warm and furry or feathery is a nice change too, even if it may throw up all over you. And then there's warm and furry like a Yukon wolf cub. If Eleanor's lucky some day she'll get to hold the broom for it to tear the throat out of while the guy with the sedative gun gets into position.
We'd only just started by the time Katie arrived. Katie makes everyone feel nicer and calmer just by being there, even her daughters. I mean, even Eleanor. Martha is a lot like Katie herself. But after Katie got there Eleanor stopped arguing that since she didn't like celery nobody else was going to like celery either. (Madagascariensis, I swear, likes celery because the sound it makes slowly crunching it up reminds it of the crack of small bones, without any of the effort of hunting something. You'd think carrots would be even better, but no. Maybe it only hunts things with osteoporosis.)
Then Eric showed up and things went into a decline again - even Katie can't do much with Eric - but Dad says he's a good keeper and not everyone wants to live a hundred miles from the nearest real restaurant, work twelve or fourteen hours a day, sometimes seven days a week, and get paid badly, and we're lucky to have him. That's Dad's way of saying "shut up." It's a lot better than saying "shut up" but nothing is ever going to make me like Eric.
We got the buckets sorted and started carrying them out. Eleanor is not only only seven and the youngest but she's not exactly large even for seven (Martha's small for her age too but she's twelve) and only an Eleanor-type seven-year-old would insist on carrying a bucket too big and heavy for her, but of course she does. "I'll take russo," she says every day. Russo's her favorite. Russo is also at the far end of the row of cages and Martha and I have to dawdle getting the others set out to give her time, and then she and Martha have this little ritual of Eleanor pretending not to notice that Martha has to lift and dump the food through the chute, because Eleanor can't.
"She's going to wear that bucket out, dragging it like that," snapped Eric.
"You tell her," I said. Eric glared at me, but I was doing him a favor, giving him an excuse for a good glare.
Once Eric was there to deal with the serious food Katie and I could get started on the cages. Here's a good example of what passes in Eric's case for a sense of humor. When I turned thirteen the grown-ups decided it was time I had some real chores, not just fun-food detail at the zoo or helping unpack and stack stuff for the gift shop. Especially given my talent for leaving drifts of Styrofoam munchies and stomp-popped bubblewrap in my wake. It had kind of seemed to me that my time at the orphanage should have counted, but maybe it didn't because I never had night duty (a growing boy needs his sleep, etc.) and because there was always an adult there with me. Or maybe because I'd been getting underfoot at the orphanage since I was a baby and Mom used to bring me along while she put in her time, and it was like I was too regular and nobody noticed.
Anyway I volunteered for cage cleaning because I knew odoratus doesn't make me sick the way it does a lot of people, and by doing it I knew I'd get extra slack for when I screwed up elsewhere, which was definitely an issue. Eric accepted my offer fast enough, but he couldn't let it go without telling everyone that the reason I didn't mind odoratus was because I was a teenage boy. Very funny, Eric. That doesn't explain Katie, who also volunteered for odoratus, who is not only a girl - I mean a woman - herself but has two daughters. And her slob of a husband isn't around any more if the idea is you have to live with slobbishness to be able to deal. Katie's husband isn't dead but he might as well be since nobody ever sees him, including his daughters. That may be another reason I kind of like Eleanor really. I don't think feeling sorry for people is ever going to come easily to Eleanor, but it wouldn't occur to her - to feel sorry for me because my mom's dead. As far as she's concerned we're even, because her dad's dead. Eleanor has a very black-and-white view of the world. That's restful too sometimes, except when you're on her hit list.
She didn't get it from Katie. Katie has no hit list. Katie volunteered for odoratus so no one else had to do it. That's what she's like. (And between her, me, and Eric, no one else does have to do it. Aren't we just the three stooges of wonderfulness.) And she tried really hard to be careful after my mom died and not look at me funny or anything but it's like she got it too well instead so when other people started forgetting she didn't. I mean . . . well, I'll give you an example. This happened only a few weeks before Eleanor got the okay to start "helping" at the zoo.
You clean any of the Draco cages by halves, with you in one half and the Draco safely imprisoned in the other half, but odoratus is unique in that he and his harem and the juvvie males are not only behind bars but behind a glass partition as well: We say it's for the tourists, but even us tough guys can only take so much. We also usually do odoratus in pairs to get it over faster. But we were doing it really macho that day, no masks and helmets (nice cool day with no breeze, you can just about get away with it with the overhead vent open, and you're going to need a shower afterward anyway), so when this school group led by this thumping big assho - I mean nincompoop stopped to look at our big male odoratus who was busy flapping his ears (odoratus ears are huge and frilly, you know, the better to wave odoratus odor around, except, of course, when there's a glass wall in the way) and showing off, right next door, we could hear exactly what he was saying to his students.
He had one of those bellowing voices, like he was used to lecturing to thousands, so I mean we could hear exactly. The kids looked a little older than me, and that made it worse somehow. It should have been funny, the nincompoop baying and posturing and odoratus flapping and posturing back, but it wasn't. I probably started to get sort of maroon, which could have just been the smell, but Katie knows me pretty well. "Steady, Jake," she said.
"It's all crap," I muttered, so he couldn't possibly overhear me: it doesn't matter how pissed off any of us Smokehill lifers get, we always think of how something's going to look to the tourists. "And he's pretending to teach those kids - "
Katie's usually brighter than this. Maybe the smell was getting to her. She got sympathetic. "Jake," she said gently. "There's a lot of crap out there. It's not worth getting mad all the time, okay? You've got better things to do. Think about the gate money this group brought us, and forget the rest."
I stared at her, feeling as if my whole head was getting redder and redder, like if they turned the lights off you could have seen in the dark by the glow of my head. Why was she saying this to me? Why was it upsetting me so much that she was saying this to me? She was only telling the truth. Crap was crap and there's a lot of it around. But it was probably crap that killed my mother - nobody will admit this but what probably happened is that the guide she'd been promised didn't show and didn't show, and she had to sit there watching her six-month sabbatical from Smokehill going for nothing (that much we knew for sure), and she found somebody else to take her and the somebody wasn't good enough and either got her into trouble or let her get herself into trouble and then fled. But we'll never know, okay?
After Mom died, and then Snark, my dog, only seven months and twelve days later, everything started getting to me a lot worse than it used to. All the time I'd been growing up we were both the biggest and acre for acre the poorest national park in the country. Because of the Institute we're sitting ducks for all the dragon nuts out there, and lots and lots of them come, and while most of them are happy with the diorama and the film clips and the bus tour, and are perfectly normal okay humans with like manners, way too many of them want to bother the staff of the Institute and waste our time arguing and complaining about the traveling restrictions inside the park and the information available at the tourist center and the brush-off they get from our Rangers.
The staff of the Institute, what a joke. That's my dad and a short-term graduate student or two. (Sometimes they're only part-time. Their grant pays for them to live here but they spend most of their time writing their PhDs.) Since Mom died they haven't even given him an extra graduate student. But these people don't get it that we have to be this way, this strict and cautious, and we're not ripping them off, we need their ticket fees to stay alive. And the government doesn't get it either, which is why they never let us have enough money.
But Mom's the one who had the sense of humor about it and while she was alive I used to think our fruit loops were funny because she did. She's the one who started calling them f.l.s. It was after Mom disappeared that the f.l.s. didn't seem so funny any more and my brain started zoning out and I started playing a lot more Space Marauder or Annihilate than I ever used to, and then when they found her at the bottom of that ravine with her neck broken and only her teeth to tell them who she was and no way of ever knowing what she was doing dead at the bottom of a ravine because she was a very, very careful person but what would you do if the only half sabbatical you were going to get that decade was being wasted because some pighead administrator had screwed up? And then my dog died and I was kind of a mess for a while. You don't need to know any more about that, except that as almost fifteen-year-olds go I was maybe a little twitchier than sonic.
All this and a lot more besides went boiling through my head for about the millionth time when Katie told me not to be so mad about all the crap there was around, while the nincompoop went on scrambling his students' brains (actually he probably wasn't - I don't think many of them were paying attention), and where I stopped thinking was If I go berserk right now - in public - start hammering the walls with my shovel and screaming - in front of a bunch of sixteen-year-olds - I'll never forgive her. Which was true, even if it wasn't her fault. There was a lump like a burning basketball in my throat and I didn't dare blink my eyes for fear of what would spill out. But even Eric's eyes water sometimes when he's doing odoratus.
The main thing I was thinking was, It's been two years. Almost three. And a little thing like Katie being the wrong kind of sympathetic at the wrong moment and I'm going to pieces.
At last I managed to say, "The gate money wasn't much. They'd've got a school discount."
Katie took this as a joke, and laughed, and the danger was over. I went back to scrubbing, although I probably took some of the floor with it.
When I was younger I used to say that I didn't understand why so many nuts had to be crazy over dragons. What about Yukon wolves, cougars, grizzly bears, ichthyosauruses, griffins, several kinds of shark, lions, tigers, and Caspian walruses, any of which will eat human when it's available, and every one of which is on the next-step-extinction super-endangered list, partly, of course, because of their eating habits? But no. The biggest, fruitiest fruit loops go for dragons. Enter "dragon" at your favorite search site, and stand back. In fact, go make yourself a cup of coffee, because it'll still be churning out hits by the time you get back. None of the rest of the critters comes close. Well, Nessie does pretty well, especially since they found her a couple of boyfriends in one of those Scandinavian lochs. Now everyone's standing around waiting for her to reproduce. She hasn't though. Maybe she's a he after all, or the he's are she's too. It's not only dragons we don't know enough about.
For some reason I used to like to bring this up at breakfast, about dragons and fruit loops. Mom would say, "Yes, dear." Or, "Eat your oatmeal, dear." Or, "Have you done your homework, dear?" This last was a trick question because I'm homeschooled. If I wanted to spend my life on a bus I could've just about made it in to Wilsonville and back every day, to their crummy little primary school, but I'd've had to go to boarding school once I graduated from sixth grade and there was no way. And never mind being the freak who would have to have special transportation out to Smokehill. Mom had tried to get me to go to Wilsonville at first but she gave up.
(That made a precedent then, so when it was time for Martha to go to school she said she wanted to stay at Smokehill with me. Katie did some wavering and I know she and Mom talked about it a lot, using phrases like "social development" and "peer group." But Martha in her quiet way can be pretty stubborn, and then it turned out she could already read - of course she could read, I taught her - so they were going to have to jump her a year, and where's your social developmental peer group then? Especially because Martha was small for her age. At six you could like barely see her. So they let her stay home and it was pretty interesting because that's when Katie and Mom came up with the bright idea of getting some of the Smokehill staff to teach us stuff, now there were two of us, so it was a "class." So it wasn't just Mom, Dad, the computer, and the boring out-of-date textbooks from Wilsonville we barely pretended to use.
I suppose we learned more about the geology and ecology of Smokehill than we'd've got at Wilsonville, and we never got to the exports of Brazil and the national debt of Taiwan at all, but we learned what our Rangers taught us and how many kids learn the exports of Brazil and the national debt of Taiwan? Then it was Eleanor's turn, and as it happens, there were some other kids at Smokehill then, and they were going to Wilsonville, but then they had been going to normal school when they lived in a normal place and they were so freaked out by Smokehill that being on a bus all day didn't bother them, at least not in comparison to staying here all the time. But Eleanor wasn't having any of that. Of course she could read by then too - she wasn't a big reader, like Martha or me, but it was clear to her that one of the ways to be older was to learn to read, so she learned - but that was just a way of making it easier for the grown-ups to cave. I don't think turning Eleanor loose in a regular school would have been good for her social development anyway. I think if she'd got a taste for playground domination at an early age the world wouldn't be safe by the time she was a teenager.)
But at least Mom would answer me, even at 7 A.M. Dad was always buried in his latest conference abstract or the forty thousand pages of fax I'd lain awake the night before listening to churn through the machine, usually from somebody from some country that Dad only half knew the language of, so the table would be covered with grammars and dictionaries too. Mom readjust as much as Dad did, but she never forgot there was a world outside Smokehill. Outside dragons. In some ways I take after my dad. But it was nice to have someone who'd talk to me at breakfast.
Dad has tried to learn to talk at breakfast. It was pretty awful till I hit on the brilliant plan of trying to read some of the stuff he reads. I don't get most of it (even when it's in English - have you ever tried to read a professional monograph from some thumping big scientific conference? You're lucky if you can get past the title) but it gave us something to pretend to have a conversation about. And I got credit for trying. (See: extra slack for when I screw up elsewhere.)
But too many of these people who get hung up on dragons don't know what a dragon is. A Yukon wolf is a Yukon wolf, which is to say two hundred odd pounds of tawny hair and long teeth, and you're not going to mix it up with a chipmunk. Calling Draco odoratus a dragon just because of the Draco is as stupid as arguing that a chipmunk is a small striped wolf that eats acorns.
But you can't say that, and there's only so many ways to say "that's a very interesting theory" before even an f.l. catches on that you're blowing 'em off. And when a fruit loop decides he or she hasn't been treated with due respect and consideration by the staff of the Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Studies, the f.l. writes to his or her congressperson and says our weeny miserable funding should be cut because we're not doing what we're paid to do with their, the taxpayers', money, which is study dragons, and they can prove this because we don't agree with them.
And we live here, Dad and me, right here in the Institute, like I told you - the rest of the staff are either in the Rangers' barracks or they have their own little houses, there's a sort of little compound set back behind a lot of spruce and aspen, away from the tourist sprawl. (A few commute from Wilsonville but mostly only part-timers.) Sometimes I go hide out with Martha and Eleanor - at least Eleanor has some sense, even if she's not real open to negotiation with alternative points of view about things she doesn't agree with, like bedtime for seven-year-olds. (I'm a useless babysitter, but that doesn't stop Katie using me when she's got an evening meeting. Admin usually has evening meetings because during the day everyone is chasing tourists.) Actually I can't wait till she gets old enough to tackle the f.l.s on their own ground but that's still a little in the future. No matter how good at arguing you are it's easier if you're taller than the other guy's belt buckle.
Most of the f.l. crap lands on Dad now - a few of 'em talk to the Rangers, but most of 'em want someone they can call "Doctor" - and Dad tries to keep me out of the way because since I'm a kid I have to be even more polite to them. When Mom was around it was different - at our best we'd had Dad, Mom, and three graduate students, two of whom already had their first PhDs and therefore also answered to "Doctor" - but that was a long time ago. Dad's the only real scientist we've got now and he shouldn't have to waste his time.
The ones who think that the peculiarities of dragon biology and natural history can be explained by the fact that dragons are an alien species dropped off by a passing spaceship a few million years ago are so far out there themselves that sometimes they're kind of interesting. I've had good conversations with some of them. I've had a lot of good conversations with ordinary tourists, people who just think dragons are really cool and get a bit gabbly when they're actually here at Smokehill and want to talk to somebody, which I perfectly understand. The f.l.s that are a pain are the ones who want to drone on about all the Dracos that AREN'T DRAGONS. You could say it's our own fault because of the "Integrated" in our name, but that's nothing to do with us. The director before Dad and Mom almost went under, taking Smokehill with him, and the only way he'd managed to dig himself out was by agreeing to have a sort of zoo of all the other Dracos, and call the institute Integrated: But there is only one real dragon; there's nothing to integrate, not really.
The Institute is near the front gate of Smokehill, of course, the front gate having been put there at the spot nearest to a road and a town, although the road is only two lanes and the town is only Wilsonville. Since Mom and Dad came and the zoo was built we've got popular enough that there are eight motels, two of them like shopping malls all by themselves, and four gas stations between us and Wilsonville, and the track in from the main road is paved and wide enough for buses and trucks. Having them breathing down our necks like this (in the summer the first coachloads are already there waiting when we open at 8 A.M.) is a drag but it does mean we get regular deliveries of gas to run our generators. I admit I wouldn't like living without computers and even hot baths (occasionally). We're festooned with solar panels but they aren't enough. Too many trees and too many clouds, and solar panels don't seem to like the dragon fence much either. (Our solar-powered tourist buses do most of their tanking up in the parking lot outside the fence.) There's the barracks and the staff houses and a few permanent camps farther in, but that's about all in terms of human stuff. It's enough in terms of upkeep to get through our winters.
So I'm going to give you a rundown on the zoo, and then we're out of there, okay? So pay attention. The whole Draco mess started with some eighteenth-century British explorer guy calling that Russian lizard Draco russo. We have three nice russo in the zoo, and the female's pregnant, finally. She's Eleanor's favorite because they're going to be the first babies since Eleanor's been old enough to pay attention to what goes on at the zoo. Russo's pretty mellow too so nobody stops Eleanor from (strictly out of tourist hours) poking rhubarb through the bars at the expectant mom, since only the males are poisonous. And Eleanor does know to call them lizards. I told you she has some sense.
After that we have the Chinese dragon, Draco chinensis, which usually goes about eight foot long and mostly eats snails. Sure, if it stepped on your foot you'd go "ow" and it has a scary face, but those fangs are just tufts of hair on the jaw. We have six of them, but they all poop in the same corner most of the time, which makes me like them, as much as I'm going to like any lizard, but sweeping up the snail shells is a pain, because we have to do it really carefully - they won't eat anything they haven't peeled themselves so that limits the options. One of them still managed to get an infected foot once from a broken snail shell and wasn't that a big hassle. There's a vet in Cheyenne that knew a lot about lizards before she moved to Cheyenne and has learned a lot more since, but it's expensive to get her here. We don't have our own regular vet, of course - we can't afford it. I have to give Eric credit, much as it goes against the grain, he invented his own correspondence course in reptile veterinary, and mostly he copes.
Then there's the Madagascar dragon, Draco madagascariensis, with its vestigial wings, but if you were up on your paleontology you would know that it spent a few million years being a bird and then changed its mind and went back into Reptilia, and it hisses because it hisses, not because it used to breathe fire. It eats anything and everything, including very small children and very tottery old people, but it's no threat to the rest of us and no threat at all as long as it's got plenty of other stuff to eat - it doesn't actually like to go to the effort to catch anything.
My favorite f.l. arguments though are for Draco sylvestris. This is just a big chameleon, and the point is it lives in trees. The thicker the trees the better it likes it. Sounds like a real short evolutionary dead end to me, evolving flame-throwing when you live in a forest. Duh. Because it all comes back to fire, you know. Never mind the size, or even the wings. Dragons are the only animals (besides humans) who habitually eat their food cooked. They don't like it cooked through, but they like a nice char-broiled effect.
By the way, sylvestris is the least popular of the zoo exhibits - they're really hard to see. You don't believe they can be, because they run up to twenty feet long, but you'd be surprised. They look like branches of trees. Really. Us cage cleaners have to count them to make sure we got them all before we lock them up on the other side and clean their empty cage, or we may find one of the tree branches getting startled and trying to run away. I awfully nearly lost one out the door once, where I'd parked my wheelbarrow, but fortunately it didn't like the look of the wheelbarrow either and veered away at the last minute. Kit was next door cleaning out madagascariensis that day so he saw what happened, but he didn't tell Eric.
I've already told you about odoratus, who is at the very end of the other row of Draco houses. It doesn't usually get much more than six feet long, but it has these huge smelly sulfurous belches that the f.l.s say mean that it used to breathe fire like a real dragon, and that it's just evolved in the wrong direction for the last million or so years. Please. It evolved into huge smelly sulfurous belches because no one would want to eat anything that smells like that. Which is why our odoratus house costs more than all the rest of the zoo put together, because it's all glass, to protect the tourists. We need the tourists to keep coming. We need the money. I know I already said that. We say it to each other all the time. It's the truth. And, okay, I admit it, the zoo is a draw, since you're not going to see our real dragons, except in the tourist center theater.
Listen to me now because there will be a test later. There is only one real dragon, and that's Draco australiensis. They're extinct in the wild, but there's a place not far from the Grampians outside Melbourne that's been made a sanctuary that has quite a few of them - maybe as many as five hundred - although rumor has it the numbers are dropping and it hasn't been as many as even four hundred in years, but it's not a rumor I want to believe, so I don't. Australia's nearly the only place that has enough space left to give some to dragons. I suppose they also have guilty consciences because it's mostly their own poachers that killed them off, although when dragon endocrine extract became the fashionable aphrodisiac about a hundred years ago a lot of foreign poachers came to help, aided and abetted by the local sheep farmers because dragons love toasted sheep.
The only other two places with dragons now are the park in Kenya where Mom died, and us, Smokehill. We think we have maybe two hundred here, and nobody knows why; the weather should've killed 'em off long ago. We've actually got more acres than the Australian place, but dragons are native to Australia so it's not surprising they can live there okay if nobody murders them.
Smokehill as a dragon preserve is an accident. Almost ninety years ago Peter Makepeace brought four dragons here because the Cleveland Zoo couldn't cope any more and nobody else would have them. That was during the era when most people thought the sooner Draco australiensis went extinct the better, although no one said it out loud because there were environmentalists even in those days. Old Pete knocked together a few cages (dragons hate cages, which is why zoos had such trouble with them - nobody ever built a cage that didn't feel like a cage to a dragon, and, of course, dragons are large, and experiments in dragon keeping are very expensive), and prepared to try to nurse them through their first winter. He always said later he didn't expect to succeed but somebody had to give it a try and he didn't see anybody else with a few thousand acres to spare in a better climate making an offer.
Smokehill was really wild then. It's like suburbia now in comparison. A few of the old cages are still sort of standing, and they're part of the bus tour. They are not in themselves very interesting, maybe, but they are huge which kind of reminds you about how big dragons are, and it also gives you a clue about how really creative Old Pete had had to be, to do what he did, to do it at all. I'm sorry his old cabin isn't still around. We've got some grainy old photos but that's all. It was where the Center is now. (Think, if you dare, about using an outhouse in our winters, where a bad January never gets above twenty below, and where a blizzard can arrive in less time than it takes to pee.)
Well, they didn't die. In fact they thrived, in spite of the cages, and the weather. Maybe they just liked Old Pete. From his journals, he didn't have a clue what he was doing, but he found them really interesting and although they had to live in cages they didn't have a lot of gawkers gawking which would sure be enough to put me off my toasted sheep. Whereupon he found himself the latest unwanted-dragon dumping ground. By the next winter he had twenty dragons and was running out of plausible places to put cages - besides how expensive building dragon pens was. And Pete didn't like gawkers either, so kept delaying turning his charity rescue project into a business. But he had to do it finally and eventually it became Smokehill National Park.
Old Pete's dad had bought up the Smokehill territory because he got the whiff of "gold" slightly before the government did, so when a few people started finding gold, the gov had to deal with old Mr. Makepeace. Old Mr. Makepeace senior was more devious than his son and a lot more aggressive, so the gov found itself between a rock and a hard place, the Native Americans on one hand who believed that the little piece of paper they'd got from the gov a while back meant that they owned the territory, and Mr. Makepeace, who had another little piece of paper that said he owned the territory, and he knew how to fight dirty in ways the Native Americans didn't. So the gov went on flapping and fudging, and old Mr. Makepeace died, and his son Pete grew up to have a social conscience ahead of its time. And then Pete found himself with twenty dragons on his hands and a lot of land that nobody was using for anything much.
So Pete got together with the Sioux and Cheyenne and Arkholas and they talked and talked, and Pete fell in love with someone's daughter and then he married an Arkhola (and then none of his dad's fancy town friends would speak to him which in his journals he calls "a serendipitous concomitant"), and maybe that's what tipped the balance, because the Native Americans weren't really in a mood to go along with anything a white man said at that point. But Pete got an agreement out of them that they'd stop being a pain in the ass if the federal government would make Smokehill a national park. And by that time the gov was tired of the struggle, said the hell with it, and folded.
Pete spent the rest of his dad's money first hiring a lot of inventors to create a dragonproof fence, and I can't tell you anything about that because the math and stuff is waaaay beyond me, but I can tell you that the inventors only succeeded because some of them got interested in the problem, or interested in dragons, and stayed on when Pete couldn't pay them any more - because once they managed to invent it he still had to pay to put it up - which cost like the national debt of Europe.
But they did it. Old Pete spent the last of his dad's money creating the Makepeace Institute, and died broke but (I hope) a happy man. And our best Rangers are Native American or part Native American, mostly Arkholas. Billy, he's Head Ranger and a brilliant guy, he's the great-great-grandson of Old Pete and his Arkhola wife.
What I can tell you about the dragon fence is that most of it is sort of invisible, except for these fancy cement pillars every half mile or so where all the gizmos and stuff live, with little metal plates set in and big red DANGER signs. If you try to walk through it it's like walking into a wall but worse. It's like the wall zooms out to punch you. (And no, the science guys say it is not strong enough for any kind of serious like war use. I hate it that people keep asking this. So, listen, no, one little tiny half-hearted bomb and the fence melts, like holding a match to a balloon, big noisy messy POP. When the Borg or the Klingons land, we've still had it, okay?) But when you look through it everything looks kind of runny, and the colors are all wrong, and watching anything moving, a tourist coach or even a bird, will make you seasick so fast you won't know what hit you.
This last effect is so bad that the front part of the park, where the Institute and the tourist center are, and the beginning and the end of the bus tour route (the middle stays away from the fence), has ordinary boring solid walls twelve feet high. The funny thing is that some people think that is the dragon fence, and they're disappointed. Like twelve feet of anything would keep in something that flies. Yo, left your brain at home, did you?
Anyway. Pete ended up with about fifty dragons before the worldwide crash of Draco australiensis, when the few that were left in zoos all died, and they were confirmed as extinct in the wild. There were five parks or preserves to begin with that still had any, but the Louisiana and Patagonia preserves both folded in the first couple of decades, partly because of fencing problems. Which means keeping bad guys out a lot more than it means keeping dragons in. Dragons don't actually move around that much once they're settled. (They hung around in the middle of Australia for millions of years.) So the poachers just changed their airplane tickets or their donkey cart coupons or whatever and started going to Louisiana and Patagonia because their fences weren't very good. Ours is way far the best, but no one wants to pay for the specs and no one has successfully stolen them. And everybody pretends that we need the fence because dragons are the biggest of all the big dangerous wild animals and they would eat humans if they got out. Sure, they could. But they don't. They never have.
(One of the theories about Mom's death has to do with maybe her finding out that someone in Kenya had managed to steal our fence specs but couldn't get them to work. Kenya has the worst poacher problems and everyone knows their dragon population is going down and they never had more than about three hundred dragons to start with. The worst idea is how maybe she was pushed off that cliff because something was done to her before she was pushed - that someone was trying to get it out of her, about our fence - and she wouldn't have known, okay? She wouldn't know any more about the fence than I do. She wouldn't have known anything - and then they had to push her to hide what they'd done. You're sitting there thinking, You poor sad paranoid schmuck, it's too bad about your mom but you keep hammering on about Smokehill being so poor and all; you can't have it both ways. True. But we're dead poor because we're trying to protect our dragons. There are still guys out there who think there's a fortune to be made off dragon hormones or dragon blood or powdered dragon bone or something - and that the only reason we're not breeding them for this is because we're all wimps.)
So Old Pete took the padlocks off his cages and the dragons ambled out, sniffed the air, and wandered off. You can tell from his journal that he can't decide if it was a huge anticlimax or not. It was, he said, almost as if they were expecting him to open the doors.
Dragons have some peculiarities if they really are reptiles, because they aren't, properly speaking, cold-blooded: but that's because they have an extra stomach full of fire, right? Which you'd think might be pretty hard to keep going in the kind of winters we have but they do it somehow. Everybody's first idea was that dragons must have learned to hibernate, but Pete kept saying that they didn't hibernate, that when he had them in cages they just ate more when it got cold and when he let them out of the cages, after the wall went up, he continued to find fresh tracks and shed scales and banged-up trees from dragons passing too close or scratching their backs, all winter long - as well as a lot of disappearing wildlife.
One of the most important things our Rangers do is keep an eye on the numbers of the dragon dinners, partly because bison and sheep and deer and antelope are so much easier to count than dragons. Dragons are incredibly hard to count. Australia and Kenya say the same, it's not just us. The usual sorts of field surveys just don't work with dragons. Uh-huh, you say, thirty to eighty feet long (plus tail), flies, breathes fire, and you can't find them to count? Yup. That's right. You can't. After Old Pete opened the cages, they didn't just wander off, they disappeared. That's one of the reasons that a few people - Old Pete included - started wondering if dragons were, you know, intelligent.
Well, the mainstream scientists weren't having any of that, of course, humans are humans and animals are animals and anyone who says it's not that simple is a sentimental fool and a Bad Scientist. There is nothing you can say to a scientist that's worse than accusing them of being a Bad Scientist. They'd rather be arrested for bank robbery than for sentimentality. But when somebody found out that all the lichen on Mars get together occasionally and suddenly go from a lot of mindless little symbiotic thingies that eat and excrete and exchange gases and not much else and become a THINKING MACHINE, all kinds of ideas back on Earth blew up into smithereens, including some scientific definitions of sentimentality.
Most of the money has gone into studying lichen - there are getting to be so many information-collecting satellites around Mars it's going to have rings soon, like Saturn - and there's a fair number of new studies of Earth lichen going on too, just in case any of it is getting ideas. But Draco australiensis has come in for a little of it, because of the old question of their intelligence, and we can use all the money-dribbles we can get, even if they come attached to obnoxious, know-it-all-already scientists who have to be told no seventy-nine times in a row before they begin to believe that if they want to study our dragons they have to follow our rules.
That's one of the reasons dragons attract so many tourists - and so many fruit loops - the creepy pull of dragon intelligence. It's a thrill, so long as dragons are safely on the endangered list and only exist behind walls in a few parks, to have something that could not only eat you, but think about it. Although the fact that dragons have never seemed very interested in eating humans means that we have the slack to be cute about it.
But it's interesting that the f.l.s mostly only ever wanted to argue about what dragons are. Not many want to argue about whether australiensis is intelligent. They come here because they're fascinated but they get here and they kind of back off. Too scary maybe. I shied away from thinking about it much myself although as a kind of cool distant concept I always liked the idea - dragons are intelligent - right, okay, got it, now stop.
It's a big thing with tree-huggers that dolphins might be intelligent, but you can go have mystic experiences dancing with phosphorescent dolphins in the eternal sea at dawn and come back transmuted into your higher self. Not an option with dragons. The guys with sixty-seven PhDs who submit study projects to investigate dragon intelligence - or rather the very, very occasional ones who actually pass Dad's thermonuclear screening and assessment process - usually give up and go home early. If our dragons were hard even to count were they going to come out and play mind games with academic chuckleheads? I kept thinking there ought to be a good cartoon in it somewhere something like Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. I leave it to you who plays what.
Dorks and villains have been trying to get in here without permission since before Pete got national park status. It just got a little harder after that, not that many of them care about laws, but they have to care about the fence. That fence, which is the single biggest reason why we're so poor. Most of what to Congress probably does look like a multi-whale pod-supporting ocean of money goes to maintaining that fence. But it does keep our dragons in, in the popular imagination - I told you that dragons don't move around much, but try to convince Mr. Normal of that. The fence would also keep the fruit loops out, except - damn! there's a gate.
I learned to read so I could read Pete's memoirs. Mom used to worry that I was growing up strange because I wasn't interested in the usual kids' books. Goodnight Moon, baaaaarf. I didn't even like Where the Wild Things Are because none of them looked enough like dragons. But I still remember the first time Dad read me "Jabberwocky." It's probably my earliest memory; I think I was three. Mom - who was busy worrying that The Cat in the Hat didn't move me - said, "Oh, Frank, you'll only confuse him. It's not even in English," but Dad was having one of his manic fits. He'd done amateur theater when he was younger, and he could still turn that crazy public thing on when he wanted to. He doesn't do it much any more - except for congressional subcommittees - but he still did it when I was little. I don't know whether I was confused by "Jabberwocky" or not, but I was riveted by it, as my dad shouted and danced and snicker-snacked across my bedroom. I'd've named Snark Jabberwock if it hadn't been too hard to say ("Jabberwock, sit! Jabberwock, stay!") so I settled for Snark.
It was shortly after that Dad started reading parts of Pete's memoirs to me - while Mom shook her head. But it made me want to learn the alphabet. Once I could read there was no stopping me. Dad said once, "Mad, do you really think any child of ours wouldn't be spellbound by dragons?" It was always Dad's little joke to call her Mad; her name was Madeline. Mom laughed a sort of grim non-laugh and said, "I suppose it's either that or he couldn't stand them." I couldn't imagine what she meant.
So I grew up on Lewis Carroll - and Old Pete - and Saint George, and Fafnir and Nidhogg, and Smaug and Yofune-Nushi, and all the others, famous, infamous, and totally obscure. Mom in particular has had - well Dad and I still have it - this amazing collection of literary dragons and the myths pretending to be science about the evolutionary forebears of the Chinese dragon and the smelly dragon and all of the other fake dragons, trying to justify that Draco label.
Because the real problem with Draco australiensis is that it raises its kids in a pouch, like a kangaroo or a koala. Things with pouches just aren't romantic. Saint George or Siegfried slaying a critter with a pouch? No way. Even the Australians have never quite taken their Draco seriously as a real live dragon - even if it is the biggest of the land animals on this planet - and still manages to fly - and breathes fire - and, you know, looks like a dragon. It's not like the pouch shows. Humans are perverse. You may have noticed. But here we've got thousands of years of pretty much every culture on the planet coming up with stories about big scaly things that breathe fire . . . and then, hey presto, we've got them. They freaking exist. You'd think we've have been dancing in the streets and slinging daisy chains across the borders from Ulan Bator to Minsk. But noooo.
Maybe if dragons had eaten more people when they had the chance humans wouldn't have been so offhand. (Although if they had they might have been made extinct before anybody thought to preserve them.) You're looking to design the real, true, only dragon, and what more can you want than big and flying and breathing fire? No pouch nonsense is what you want. Hence the attraction of all the silly little lizards like russo and chinensis.
Because, I hear you say, not only is there the pouch problem, but kangaroos and koalas are mammals. True. But nobody ever told reptiles they couldn't evolve a pouch to carry their babies in, did they? You've heard the phrase "parallel evolution"? And mammals and reptiles are cousins anyway, if you go back far enough, like maybe 250 million years or so, which gives you a lot of room to mutate in. The biology of dragons - and from here on let's get it straight that when I say dragon, I mean our one and only real dragon, Draco australiensis - is still pretty much one big blank space in the biology books.
And dragon corpses disintegrate really fast - so there goes that standard research route - including the bones - which is something to do with the fire-stomach too, or the body chemistry that supports the fire-stomach, or maybe the bones are built out of something we don't know about that weighs less than the rest of the planet's bones, which is why dragons can fly. Hitch over one of those rows of the periodic table, there's a missing dragon bone element to get in somewhere. One of the results is that no natural history museum in the world has a dragon skeleton on display, which in a weird way means that a lot of people assume they don't really exist. And there are some unhappy paleontologists and animal osteologists who would like to specialize in dragons and can't.
They think that baby dragons are born with some kind of embery gum or mucilage in their tiny fetal fire-stomachs - their igniventatores. They think that Mom somehow shoves 'em out - she usually has several at a go - and lights 'em up, that that's when they're born, that maybe the fire-lighting business is where the marsupial business started, that you have to get the fire lit while the baby is still kind of an embryo, for some reason or other, so maybe it makes sense to transfer them to a different holding container while you're at it. So she gets 'em lit and into her pouch where they stay for the next year or so.
So a long time ago the species must have figured out it couldn't go the several-hundred-eggs tortoise route if it wanted to work on this great new fire-breathing racket, so it went for pouch incubators instead. But the lab coats still haven't really decided whether dragons are reptiles. Maybe they're mammals. Or something else. I like the something else idea myself, what else has an igniventator? But apparently having some big new thing as high up in the hierarchy as the division between reptiles and mammals upsets everybody too much. Science under Threat by Unclassifiable Critter: film at eleven. I keep telling you lab coats are drones. Although I sometimes think the label guys went for reptiles only because Draco was already stuck on a lot of lizards, and it would be just too stupid to have something that finally obviously is a dragon called Thingamajiggium. Which maybe means lab coats have some imagination after all.
There's other weird stuff, like their scales are made out of something that is a lot more like mutant hair than like adapted skin. (They seem to shed more here at Smokehill than anywhere else. Something to do with the weather, presumably. But we sell shed dragon scales in the gift shop - as many as the Rangers can pack in - and they go really well. Have I mentioned recently that we're always desperate for money?) And they fly, which makes them the only non-bird that can take off and land and flap and soar like a bird, with none of that cheating stuff that "flying" squirrels or "flying" fish do. So maybe they're birds. Although the third pair of limbs is still problematic.
All of this bothers a lot of the fruit loops too. Dragons are supposed to be reptiles. Everybody knows that. All the fake dragons are real reptiles. They also behave in nice lower-order ways that scientists who want to study them like. They don't disappear. You can watch 'em having and raising their babies. Their corpses rot the way corpses are supposed to rot, and natural history museums can have as many skeletons as they like. That kind of thing. It's funny what everybody knows.
But the trouble with dragon public relations is pretty well permanent. First, they're too marsupialy and not lizardy enough, and then they're hard to find, to gawk at or to study (which is only a snobby form of gawking really), and then they might even be (do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do) intelligent. Why didn't we know about them till about two hundred and fifty years ago? Something that size? Even if they did hang out in the middle of a big empty continent? It's not like no one ever went there. The Europeans thought it was just another quaint aboriginal myth for a long time. I guess sheep are like chocolate or heroin to dragons, they just couldn't help themselves when the ranchers moved in. But they lost the war with the sheep ranchers because they never really fought it. The ranchers and the mercenaries and big game hunters they hired or pitched in with - and the poachers - killed a lot of dragons, and the rest of them pretty much disappeared. Again.
But there was about half a century of the australiensis golden age when everybody was fascinated by them, and you could study them all right, so long as the poachers didn't get there first. Well, you still didn't see them get born. But you could see them flying, for example. Something the size of a dragon is pretty damn visible, flying. And there are lots and lots of records of all those sober scientists streaming out to Australia to see for themselves. I was really jealous of the guys who could write about seeing dragons flying nearby, the hot smell of them - like fire but not like fire - the way their underparts tend to be paler and mottled - but you can't see a lot of their bellies because of the way they tuck their tails back under their bodies, like a dog tucking its tail between its legs. Birds use their tails as rudders. Dragons have some other system . . . but that's only one of a thousand things we don't know about dragons. We started killing them too soon.
When it was too late some of the politer scientists went round to the aborigines and said, Hey, can we talk to you about your dragon stories? It was those stories that first told the rest of us that australiensis had pouches. Maybe by then we were looking for a reason not to like them, since we were busy making them extinct. The really interesting thing about all the old aboriginal tales though is that there isn't a single one about a dragon eating a human. Oh well those are just tales, said the guys with the guns. And it's true that a few ranchers got fried in the non-war, but a rattlesnake won't bite you unless you worry it, and the ranchers were going after the dragons - there was no live-and-let-live policy or acceptable sheep loss rate.
I'd never seen a dragon flying - not up close. And I live here. And five million acres isn't big enough to hide (maybe) two hundred flying dragons. So, I hear you say, maybe our figures are wrong? Maybe we don't have two hundred dragons? Then what's eating the deer, the sheep, and the bison? We can count our bears and our cougars and our bobcats and our coyotes and our wolves well enough, and they aren't doing it by themselves. And our Rangers really do cover most of the park slowly, over a period of years. They said there were quite a few dragons out there, and Dad and I believed them.
Billy knows what goes on in this park better than any other human alive, and he'd only seen flying dragons a few times. There's a big valley sort of northwest of the center of Smokehill, one of the friendlier edges of the Bonelands, where he'd seen most of 'em, and he'd say he'd take me there when I was older - which was to say when Dad would let me. I didn't know when that was going to happen, because he'd been a little crazy about keeping me safe since Mom died. He'd barely let me out of the Institute, and the summer before the one I'm talking about we never did take our summer hike, which is three or four weeks backpacking through the park, having left Billy in charge of dealing with the f.l.s. It's true that it wouldn't have been the same without Mom and Snark, but I still wanted to go. The summer before that - no. But that summer - yes. I wanted to go. I wanted to find out what it would be like. Like after a major accident and months in the hospital and six operations and all that physical therapy - so, does the leg work again, or doesn't it? But Dad wouldn't even discuss it, so we didn't go.
That's not to say I'd never seen any dragons at all. I did, lots of times, maybe as often as twice a year - or I did in the few years I was old enough to do a lot of walking before Mom died - but only at a distance, like across one of Smokehill's rock plains, when one of the rocks is flying. They don't come near the Institute (another sign of their intelligence, I say), so you only are going to see them if you're one of the lucky ones who ever gets farther into the park. And I've smelled 'em more often than that - smelled 'em close, I mean. There's a dragon smell that isn't like anything else. It's a fire smell, and a wild-animal smell - pungent but not rotten or foul like some kinds of musk or a sloppy carnivore's leftovers that can turn your stomach - but it's something else too. Billy says it's because their fire isn't like the fire you make with wood; they burn some sort of weird resinous stuff they secrete for the purpose. Organic fire. And even way damped down, that fire gives off a little invisible smoke, and we can smell it.
The Institute smells of dragon. The tourists here pick it up immediately, as soon as they come through the gate. (I suppose the wall kind of keeps it in too.) You can see them sort of straighten up and get all sparkly-eyed. And it makes them feel that the dragons are close - it makes them feel better about not actually seeing any. And of course they are close, comparatively speaking. I don't notice the smell much at the Institute - I don't really notice it till I get out into the park.
Oh, and every human who walks in the park either carries a squirtgun or has a Ranger with them carrying a squirtgun. This is supposed to be the dragon equivalent of what most animals think about skunks, but I don't know how they think they know. None of our Rangers has ever shot theirs at anything. But the checker-uppers for the squirtguns come round every six months like the other checker-uppers come round to test your fire extinguishers. But even if you happened to have a handy backup antitank gun you're sunk if your squirtgun didn't work, since it's a federal offense to harm a dragon. This is pretty funny when it's also a HUGE messy spectacular federal crime to aid in the preservation of the life of a dragon - in fact one of the hugest and messiest - but that's another story, and I'm getting to it, just shut up and listen.