In about half an hour I had to wake Lois up and coax her toward the fire Billy by then had got going at the nearest plausible campsite, flickeringly visible from where we sat, or lay. Once Lois had crashed, she tended to stay crashed, and if I tried to move her mostly she ignored me, but if I performed the ultimate betrayal and went off and left her she would peep heartbreakingly (although as her chest deepened so did her peeping, and she had to work at it to sound as pathetic as she had when she was littler) and scrabble feebly with her claws like she just couldn’t move another inch, and since this was, after all, an orphan baby animal of a rare and endangered species no human had ever successfully raised before, I was always worried that she meant it. Fortunately she could be lured by the prospect of a nap beside a fire. She did love fires. It was one of the things that made me, poor flimsy 98.6-degree-Fahrenheit wuss that I am, feel really guilty. (I fortified myself by remembering the first night twenty-three months ago, trying to convince the repulsive little globby thing I’d picked up that it didn’t have to live in my shirt, that it’d be fine by the fire.)
She groaned like she was being tortured but she came. In her defense she wasn’t used to spending all day walking any more than I was (she also didn’t know how to walk—she was either zigzagging full tilt from Interesting Thing to Interesting Thing or keeled over) and I was built better for it, but I’d unfolded kind of slowly when I got up too, and I was really glad she agreed to do her own staggering, so I didn’t have to carry her.
I already had a new mantra, from about the afternoon of the first day: We’re farther in than we’ve ever been. It repeats really nicely when you’re walking: da da da thump da da da (well, da again, but you can run “we’ve ever” into two) thump. We weren’t really, not yet, but that’s where we were going, and also it put a good spin on all the No Going Back. We were going farther in than we’d been since I first brought her home as a blob, when she was still small enough to fit under my shirt. The fourth night it was like I was beginning to believe it, or believe that we were going to get away with it somehow. At least for a while longer.
I couldn’t think about it that I’d probably never be able to bring Lois back to the Institute, because she’d’ve got too big, and would have wings and a flame-thrower…couldn’t think about the fact that no doubt Billy and Dad knew this just as well as I did and they hadn’t said anything about it either, at least not to me. I mean, sure, we’d talked about our long-range plan-substitute, about Lois getting to the point that she didn’t have to have me around all the time, but we’d only talked about it sort of sidelong and half casual, like it was obvious and irrelevant and didn’t really need discussing.
Lois and I were both stiff the second morning and worse the third (although this may have been aggravated by the power struggle over how close we slept to the fire every night). I know this is a fitness thing and proves that we weren’t, but it’s funny how you get one day like free of charge. The second day starts to count (especially after that first night on the cold hard ground). And then it’s the day after the second night when it all catches up with you. In my defense I was carrying a lot more gear than I would’ve been if this was just a few days of an ordinary field trip.
That third morning Lois was so slow starting off that nobody had to notice I would have been slow. Although maybe this wasn’t so useful (I mean worth it to my vanity) because I had to carry her more. Finally Billy and Jane split my gear between them and I concentrated on carrying Lois for a while. I was a little worried about her because there was no drama about her collapses. She just collapsed. And if I didn’t notice right away and kept shuffling on she didn’t even sound like an opera heroine when she cried after me. She just sounded exhausted. But I thought about how tired I felt and decided this was just what happens to you when you’re still pretty little and you go for a real walk in our park. She may have been picking up on our motivation or something too—I wouldn’t put it past her to notice that this wasn’t a field trip like our other field trips. We weren’t really going any faster than we ever went when she and I were part of the convoy, but we were more determined. And then of course I had to have one of my Guilt Attacks because she was a dragon and she shouldn’t have spent the last twenty-three months in a house.
She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder and her (prickly) brow ridge wedged under my left ear. I hadn’t had a burned ear before; on other, less intense trips she was too busy looking around. Always new experiences with Lois around. Oh well.
But like all the rest of us (humans) who’d gone for walks in our park and had to learn how, she brightened up again slowly over the next few days. She was already better that fourth day, when I had my unexpected insight into the concept of “relaxation.” And a good thing too, since the farther we got from the Institute the rougher the tracks got. I was also starting to notice that while we went up and down and back and forth and sideways and other-sideways the trend was definitely uphill. The Bonelands were several thousand feet higher than the Institute, they were just far enough away to make the slope gradual. Sort of. You rarely went up anything: You were busy tacking for the best footing, and sometimes you snaked up the same bit of slope several times before it like stayed up and stopped sending you back down into another streambed.
We had lots of prairie farther in, mainly north and south; the Bonelands sucked up most of the west, although beyond them it began to get a little friendlier again; where we were the landscape was still mostly a mixture of patchy forest and meadow with the occasional sudden startling burst of hill and rockface. You wouldn’t think it possible that something a couple hundred feet tall and vertical could jump at you from nowhere, but sometimes it did, and you’d have to swerve aside, like not walking into a wall, with it looming over you. But the moments when you had the best view and might have wanted to stand still a minute looking around and saying “gosh wow” I was mostly looking around for Lois and her Interesting Things; the farther we got in too the more wildlife, and I couldn’t guarantee that everything was going to get out of Lois’ way. And ours of course.
Most things will give humans a wide berth if they have the chance, and I assume they feel the same about dragons. And Lois made a lot of noise. She talked to herself—and to me—and she crashed and lolloped through everything. Going around was mostly not in her vocabulary. (I was reminded of how late she figured out “going around” in Grace’s kitchen, when she was first experimenting with leaving the sling.) I did occasionally see her doing her sideways investigative bumping-into trick, but not very often. Mostly it was just plunge and thunder. As we got into more open territory I told myself that any self-respecting rattlesnake would have got out of the way long before she arrived—and I’m not sure a rattlesnake’s fangs would get through even a twenty-three-month-old dragonlet’s skin, which is already pretty horny. Fortunately I never had to find out. (Or whether skunk musk will stick ditto.) But there was so much birdsong (and bird warning-screech) sometimes I couldn’t hear Lois burbling and crashing and then I really had to look round for her. I had reason to be tired by the time we stopped for the night: Nobody else was twisting themselves into pretzels keeping an eye on their hyperactive dragonlet.
By the seventh day I was carrying all my own gear again—and I’d noticed, when Lois scrabbled around at night, that the bottoms of her feet had got rougher and grittier, like when you take your shoes off for the first time that year, when you’re (probably) not going to get frostbite from going barefoot. First few days you wonder if it’s worth it and then suddenly you’re okay, except the noise your feet make on the kitchen lino is suddenly less of a slap and more of a scritch. I was used to sleeping with an overheated self-maintaining turbine going nowhere fast so this comparatively minor alteration for the worse didn’t really wake me up…but then I was awake already.
The dreams about the dragons’ cave were getting worse, or more vivid, again, out here deeper and deeper in the park, and about a week in the Headache seemed to be trying to change sh
ape again, and it pissed me off in this fretty, oh-go-away useless way. The dragon dreams were enough—and the way they had too many moms in them, Lois’ and mine. Can’t stick reality, and this time imagination is no comfort either. Well, damn. So much for relaxation. It had been a nice idea. Although also in a strange, freaky, not-going-to-admit-it-even-to-myself way I was kind of glad to see the caves again, it was like going back to somewhere you used to know really well and haven’t been in a long time. Oh, yeah, remember that tunnel, with the long pink streak in the rock overhead, it always used to catch my eye like it might turn out to be a sort of monster Cthulhu earthworm, and it still does…I even recognized several of the dragons, not just Lois’ mom.
But last time I was seeing the caves this clearly and graphically I was spending up to twenty hours a day asleep, wrapped around a small sticky dragonlet. There wasn’t enough of me to have two lives, you know? The sleeping and the waking. And I had a life (of sorts) when I was awake, now.
But I must have been sleeping pretty okay in spite of Lois’ feet and the dreams and the Headache. Because I really enjoyed the last few days of the hike in a way I couldn’t remember enjoying anything. The nearest I could think of was from when I was like ten and Snark and Mom were still alive. Pretty sad really. (But it made me think of one of Martha’s and my favorite jokes: You need to get out more! It applied to almost anything about life at Smokehill. And then we’d laugh like we were going to break a rib. So that cheered me up again.) But it was like time out, in a way. We weren’t there, wherever there was. We were leaving one there and going to another one. (We’re farther in than we’ve ever been.) But at the moment we were suspended in between. Footloose and carefree, except for the thousand pounds of backpack and the baby dragon.
The other thing that messed me up sometimes was in the evenings when we called in to the Institute. We called in every day just like everyone who walks in our park has to. I always talked to Dad and since we couldn’t talk about Lois over the air we had a nice fresh valid reason not to have anything to say to each other. He found different ways to make jokes about not talking about her though, which was brighter than I was. He’d say things like “Hope your pack isn’t too heavy” or “Hope you aren’t sleeping too close to the fire and waking up toasted.” And then I’d laugh and then we’d agree that he and I were both fine and then I’d give him back to Billy for the grown-up debriefing.
No grown-up had still ever mentioned the Searles to me, or the Human Preservation Society. Sometimes it was hard to remember I didn’t know anything. Occasionally Billy actually had the chutzpah to send me off to collect firewood while he was talking to Dad. Oh come on. Second time he did it I said, afterward, after I’d brought some more firewood and Billy was off the two-way, as blandly as I could, “What’s going on?”
Billy never looked sheepish. He knew well enough what I meant. He gave me one of his almost-smiles and said, “Nothing you have to worry about.” From Billy this isn’t the put-down it would have been from almost anyone else. When Billy said it he meant, “You’ve got the dragon. It’s up to us to do the rest of it.” He’d been totally like this from the beginning, you know? Billy was big on focus. He’d understood a lot more a lot sooner than I had—from when we’d had that first awful bath at Northcamp and Lois hadn’t wanted to be put down his shirt. But I still couldn’t help wanting to know something.
Martha and I had figured out a code about some of it. I got to talk to her a couple of times on the hike in, and I’d say, “Anything good on TV?” And if she said, “No, just stupid science fiction,” it was okay. But if she said, “There’s a new cop show, and it’s kind of scary,” then it was not okay. The second time I got to talk to her was after Billy had sent me to pick up firewood the second night in a row while he talked to Dad, and when I asked her about TV she hesitated and said, “There’s supposed to be a new cop show starting soon and it sounds pretty scary.” Oh great. “Well, try not to lose any sleep over it,” I said.
“I’ll try,” said Martha. “But I’ll probably watch it anyway, you know?” I knew.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Westcamp was in a bit more of a mess than the permanent camps usually are. And I actually helped with some of the clean-and patch-up. It was weirdly exhilarating. It was because we were out in the middle of nowhere and I didn’t have to watch Lois every minute. And also because I was doing something that both was not about Lois and was about helping somebody else out for a change. Even my time at the Institute, the last couple of years, had been about Lois really—about pretending everything was normal, to try and keep her safe and secret—even if most of the work I did was also useful that had been almost beside the point.
Of course like a good parent I quickly learned to shift my worries to the present situation so now that we’d got here and weren’t immediately leaving again I was afraid she’d eat something that would poison her the third or fourth time she went by it because it had got familiar (or that she’d been snatching mouthfuls right along and the third or fourth time the toxic accumulation would finally get her) or get lost because she hadn’t learned where the new edges of her new territory were or blunder into something like a herd of no-nonsense Bighorn that would recognize her as a predator even though she didn’t know it yet herself, and stomp her to death. But she stuck pretty close to me just like she usually did (…so I started wondering how long that would last before she got used to the idea that I wasn’t watching her every minute, and how her next developmental stage would be exploring beyond Mom, and then she would blunder into the Bighorn, etc.), and then after a while it wasn’t so exhilarating but we had to do it anyway. Also I couldn’t stop myself jumping every time the two-way yammered at us.
A tree had fallen on the roof and poked a window out on its way, in spite of the heavy shutters. Jane climbed up onto the roof to lop branches till we could get the rest of it off without doing any more damage (waste not, want not, I would be cutting it up and stacking it for firewood, but I like chopping wood, so that’s okay…just so long as a baby dragon doesn’t get in the way. Worry worry) while Billy looked to see if there was any spare glass in the store (there was) and if it could be made to fit (yes) and if there was a glass cutter and sealer (yes). And made notes to replace what we were using. Fortunately the tree hadn’t taken out the solar panels for the generator—that would have been a disaster. Then all over again for the door frame, where some kind of Arnold-Schwarzenegger-wannabe sapling had managed to crack the door away from the sill. (That was a bit of a mind boggler to me since I believe that the Rangers, you know, rule, and that no mere sapling would dare.)
And the hole that sapling had made, with the window, meant that the indoors had been pretty well colonized, which is why the Rangers are so anal retentive about keeping the permanent camps as invader-proof as poss. It’s a lot of remedial work when things go wrong. I did way more than my fair share of the blanket-mending because I was so cheezing good at it from all those months of patching diapers. I did a lot of muttering when I had a needle in my hands. Lois really did pick up that mood—she’d come and mutter too, winding around my legs like a cat except for the fact she wasn’t built for winding, and she was tall enough now that my legs would go bumpbumpbumpbump down her spinal plates which did not help, and the blanket would fall or get pulled off my lap when she’d get tangled up in it, and…. Billy managed not to laugh at this. Jane didn’t. Manage not to laugh.
So anyway both Jane and Billy stayed longer than they’d originally meant to because there was all this work to do. Billy also went out hunting one afternoon. I’d noticed he’d bothered to pack in a rifle, which I was kind of surprised about, since we didn’t have any investigators with us, ha ha ha. Maybe it was just a Ranger thing for longer hikes, although generally speaking a Ranger would rather sit up a tree for a week than kill something that had a perfect right to be there, and to keep themselves fed on long trips they mostly used snares or bows and arrows—no, I’m serious. I keep telling you our Rangers ar
e good. Jane had her bow with her.
I suppose I must have noticed when Billy left Jane and me replacing shingles with his rifle cracked over his arm, but I didn’t think about that either. He came back later and told me to come with him. He’d shot a deer and needed someone to carry the other end of the pole, to get it back to camp.
Lois came too and was very surprised by the deer. She was used to her food coming to her in small pieces in a bowl of soup, or flicked at her. (I’d managed to teach her “Yours!” without having to demonstrate grabbing stuff tossed to me in my mouth, but food is a great motivator to learning.) Dragons don’t chew—they have pointy, widely separated teeth, for stabbing, tearing, and holding on—but along with all the other things nobody knows about dragons we didn’t know when Lois’ infant digestive juices might be up to bigger chunks, so she wasn’t getting any yet. (Lois’ teeth were one of her trouble-free zones. They just appeared. She never went through a chewing-everything-she-could-get-her-jaws-around-but-particularly-the-things-you-most-mind-being-transformed-to-gloppy-shreds phase the way puppies do. This was actually sort of off-balancing. It’s one of the ways you know a puppy is growing up. There were no familiar markers with Lois, except that she kept getting bigger.)
She had a lick at the spilled blood where Billy had gutted it but didn’t seem to think much of it. She was a little subdued on the way back like maybe she was thinking about it. I was a little subdued on the way back because why was Billy already laying in a whole deer? I’d seen the store cupboard, which was still about half stocked with usual stuff, plus everything Billy and Jane had brought, which seemed to me enough even for several Loises, or if one Lois put on a tremendous growth spurt, and it wasn’t like they were going off and leaving me. Oh well. Maybe he just wanted a break from cabin repair.
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