Dragonhaven (8 page)

The eye I could see had moved slowly, following me, and now it stared straight at me. Never mind the fire risk, being stared at by a dragon—by an eye the size of a wheel on a tour bus—is scary. The pupil goes on and on to the end of the universe and then around to the beginning too, and there are
landscapes
in the iris. Or cavescapes. Wild, dreamy, magical caves, full of curlicue mazes where you could get lost and never come out and not mind. And it's
hot
. I was sweating. Maybe with fear (and with being sick), but with the heat of her staring too.

So there I was, finally seeing a dragon up close—really
really
up close—the thing I would have said that I wanted above every other thing in the world or even out of the world that I could even imagine wanting. And it was maybe the worst thing that had ever happened to me. You're saying, wait a minute, you dummy, it's not worse than your
mom
dying. Or even your dog. It kind of was though, because it was somehow all three of them, all together, all at once.

I stared back. What else could I do—for her? I held her gaze. I took a few steps into that labyrinth in her eye. It was sort of reddish and smoky and shadowy and twinkling. And it was like I really was standing there, with Smokehill
behind
me, not Smokehill all around us both as I stood and stared (and shuddered). The heat seemed to sort of all pull together into the center of my skull, and it hung there and
throbbed.
Now I was sweating from having a headache that felt like it would split my head open. So that's my excuse for my next stupid idea: that I saw what she was thinking. Like I can read a dragon's expression when I mostly can't tell what Dad or Billy is thinking. Well, it
felt
like I could read her huge dying eye, although maybe that was just the headache, and what I saw was anger—rage—despair. Easy enough to guess, you say, that she'd be feeling rage and despair, and it didn't take any creepy mind-reading. But I also saw…hope.

Hope?

Looking at me, as she was looking at me (
bang bang bang
went my skull), a little hope had crept into the despair. I saw this happen. Looking at me, the same sort of critter, it should have seemed to her, as had killed her.

And then she died.

And I was back in Smokehill again, standing next to a dead dragon, and the beautiful, dangerous light in her eye was gone.

And then I did touch her. I forgot about the dead-dragon fire-reflex, and I crouched down on the stinking, bloody ground, and rested my forehead against a tiny little sticky-out knob of her poor ruined head, and cried like a baby. Cried more than I ever had for Mom—because, you know, we'd waited so long, and expected—but not really expected—the worst for so long, that when the worst finally arrived we couldn't react at all.

Twenty rough miles in a day and crying my head off—when I staggered to my feet again, feeling like a fool, I was so exhausted I barely could stand. And while none of this had taken a lot of time, still, it was late afternoon, and the sun was sinking, and I needed to get back to Pine Tor tonight if at all possible. I began drearily to drag myself back the way I had come. I had to walk past all the little dead dragonlets again. I looked at them not because I wanted to but to stop myself from looking at the poacher's body. Which is how I noticed that one of them was still breathing.

A just-born dragon is ridiculously small, not much bigger than the palm of your hand. Old Pete had guessed they were little, but even he didn't guess how little. I'm not even sure why I recognized them, except that I was already half nuts and they seemed to be kind of smoky and shadowy and twinkling. The color Mom goes to have them and get their tummies lit up lasts a few hours or as much as half a day, but no one—not even Old Pete—had ever seen the babies or the fire-lighting actually happening and maybe that's not really when they're born or lit at all, and it's just Mom's color that makes humans think “fire.”

But I did recognize them. And I could see that the smokiest, twinklingest of the five of them was breathing: that its tiny sides were moving in and out. And because no one knows enough about dragons one of the things I'd read a lot about, so I could make educated guesses just like real scientists, was marsupials. If I hadn't known that dragons were marsupial-ish I think I probably still wouldn't have recognized them, nuts or not.

They look kind of lizardy, to the extent they look anything, because mostly what they look is soft and squidgy—just-born things often look like that, one way or another, but dragons look a lot worse than puppies or kittens or even Boneland ground squirrels or just-hatched birds. New dragonlets are pretty well still fetuses after all; once they get into their mom's pouch they won't come out again for yonks.

This baby was still wet from being born. It was breathing, and making occasional feeble, hopeless little swimming gestures with its tiny stumpy legs, like it was still blindly trying to crawl up its mom's belly to her pouch, like a kangaroo's joey. I couldn't bear that either, watching it trying, and without thinking about it, I picked it up and stuffed it down my shirt. I felt its little legs scrabble faintly a minute or two longer, and then sort of brace themselves, and then it collapsed, or curled up, and didn't move any more, although there was a sort of gummy feeling as I moved and its skin rubbed against mine. And I thought, Oh, great, it's dead now too, I've got a sticky, gross, dead dragonlet down my shirt, and then I couldn't think about it any more because I had to watch for the way to Pine Tor. The moon was already rising as the day grayed to sunset, and it was a big round bright one that shed a lot of light. I could use all the breaks I could get.

I made it back to Pine Tor and unloaded my pack but I didn't dare sit down because I knew once I did I wouldn't get up again till morning at least. I was lucky; Pine Tor is called that for a reason and in a countryside where there isn't exactly a lot of heavy forest (pity you can't burn rock) I was really grateful that I didn't have to go far to collect enough firewood. The moonlight helped too. I hauled a lot of wood back to my campsite, being careful not to knock my stomach, because even if the dragonlet was dead I didn't want
squished
dead dragonlet in my shirt. I hauled and hauled partly because I was so tired by then I couldn't remember to stop, and partly because if the dragonlet was still alive I had a dim idea that I needed to be able to keep it warmer than my own body temperature, and partly because if it was dead I didn't want to know and hauling wood put off finding out. There'd been too much death today already.

I got a fire going and started heating some water for dinner. There's plenty of water in most of Smokehill (except where there isn't any at all), and pretty much anywhere within a few days' hike of the Institute has streams all over it running through the rocks and tough scrub so it's less a matter of finding it than of trying not to find it at the wrong moment and get soaked (or break something in our famous fall-down-and-break-something streambeds). I pulled out a packet of dried meat and threw the meat in the water. We don't buy freeze-dried campers' supplies in shiny airtight envelopes from the nearest outdoor-sports shop—there isn't one nearer than Cheyenne, and the outdoors isn't a sport to us. We live here. Besides, we couldn't afford it. We dry our own stuff. One of the suggestions for the gift shop was that we sell some of our own dried meat but the Rangers already have enough to do, although the pointy-head tourist consultant guy seemed to think that tourists would go for wild sheep and wild goat and bison and stuff as exotic. Exotic. I ate at a McDonald's once, and I thought their hamburgers tasted pretty exotic.

But what I was thinking as the water got hot and I could smell the meat cooking is that we've always shared the dragons' dinners. Old Pete had figured out what dragons liked best of what he could offer them while he still had them in cages and fortunately there was enough of it that could live here. This wouldn't be a dragon haven if dragons only thrived on rhino and Galapagos tortoise, neither of which would do well at Smokehill. And Old Pete ate what the dragons ate because the dragons were the important thing. We still do and they still are.

This smelled like deer, but would sheep be any better? I'd just picked up the first couple of packets.
I
didn't care.

So I sat there and looked at my supper and thought, Even if it's still alive, how am I going to feed it? We don't know anything about dragon milk, or dragon juice, or whatever, even if Mom makes it from eating wild sheep and so on.

I put my hand into my shirt and the dragonlet woke up at once, if it had been asleep, wriggled around like crazy, and managed to attach itself to one of my fingers, sucking so hard it hurt. So it was still alive and it was hungry. If I'd been thinking clearly I'd've known it was alive, though, because it was so hot. It was hot enough that when I unbuttoned my shirt to get it out there was a red mark on my stomach. It didn't like being out of my shirt; it let go of my finger and started, I don't know, mewing, kind of, a tiny, harsh sort of noise that I didn't want to think sounded like a scream of absolute terror, and trying to burrow back where it came from.

I was tired, and hungry myself, and my head really
hurt
, and I was all wound up about what had happened, and about the fact that I had landed myself with an orphan dragonlet that I hadn't a clue how to take care of, and how it was all going to be my fault when it died and I
already
felt as if everything that had happened was my fault—even though I knew that was stupid—and when it died too I'd never forgive myself and go crazy or something. I was way out of my depth. I wasn't a mother dragon and
I didn't have a
clue.
Oh yes and what I was doing was totally illegal. Don't ask me who makes the laws or why they don't like get together sometimes and notice if the laws make any
sense
. But while it's illegal to hurt or kill a dragon it's
more
illegal to try and save a dragon's life.

Dad tried to explain it to me once, that it's about
noninterference
—like the way big parks (including this one) let lightning-started fires go ahead and burn everything up because it's part of the natural cycle. Okay. Maybe. But people get bent about dragons in ways they don't get bent about other natural cycle stuff. Apparently the witless wonder who was pushing for the dragon legislation got so bent about the anti-harminga-dragon part of the bill that he pulled all the stops out getting really vicious language into the anti-preserving-a-dragon's-life part of the bill. The result is that trying to raise a baby dragon would be like the most illegal thing you could possibly do, next to assassinating the president maybe, and is probably one of the extra reasons the Institute has to beg for money, because we might do something illegal with it, like learn how to save dragons.

Well it would all be over soon and it would be dead and I would be crazy and Dad would have to put my gross baby-dragon-yucky clothes through the washing machine because I would be in a padded cell and couldn't do it myself.

I rebuttoned my shirt except for one button over the belt, muttering to myself, or to it, and tucked the dragonlet back in, tail first and belly up, with its head near the opening. It stopped struggling and lay there like it was peering out through the gap and looking at me. Its eyes were open—unlike a puppy or a kitten's—but they were blurry like they didn't see much, like a baby bird's. They were also a funny purplish color. It was really ugly all over, not just the eyes, sort of bruise colored, not just purplish but also yellowish and greenish, as well as smushed-looking and crusty with dried whatever.

“You are the ugliest damn thing I have ever seen in my entire life,” I said to it, clearly, like I wanted it on the record what I thought, and I swear its blurry purple eyes tried to track where the sound was coming from and it made a little grunt like an acknowledgment.

Have you ever tried to raise a baby bird or a raccoon or something? Something, you know, easy. They die a lot. We're way too good at raccoons—that's Eric again—since our successes are now bringing their great-great-great-grandkids for evening handouts behind the Institute—but we all still sweat when the Rangers bring in new orphans. And even with Eric's voodoo and all the info every bird society or raccoon society or beetle society (that's a
joke
) can give us (actually we wrote some of it), so you know exactly what to do and you do it…they still die. A lot. And it hurts. And that's when you even know what they eat and for stuff that is at least already, you know, born. Which a new dragonlet isn't, not really.

I locked open my camping spoon and dipped up some of the meat broth, gave the dragonlet my finger to suck again, which it was happy to do, and poured some broth in the gap between its mouth and my finger. You'd think I'd know better, but remember I was pretty deranged.

Of course most of the broth went all over me and the dragonlet, but some of it must have gone down its throat because it choked and gargled and then I knew I
had
killed it. I whipped it out of my shirt again and held it up head down in the air and it gacked and gagged and then started mewing again and trying to get back in my shirt. Poor awful little monster. I'd be crying here again in a minute. This time I unbuttoned my sleeve and stuck it in tail first (against the thin skin on the underside of my forearm and let me tell you its body heat
hurt
) till only its face was showing, and I cupped my hand around its head and it subsided, and I swear it looked traumatized, ugly and weird as it was.