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.