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.)