Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  The smoker was already there, but I’m the one who kept the fire going. However smoking is smoking so you might as well do more than less so I told myself the deer was fine. Billy made me practice some of the cutting-up too but you could sure see which he’d done and which I had. You’d think all you’d need is a sharp knife and a steady hand. Wrong.

  He also tried to make me practice a little with his rifle, but Lois hated the noise so he let it go. He’d taught me to shoot a few years ago and I had been a demon with old beer and soda cans (they recycle just as well with holes in them) pretty much up till Lois arrived, so I still knew the, you know, theory, and my hands still knew the motions, but I was way out of practice and Lois hating it meant I was freezing before I pulled the trigger which ruined my aim and my shoulder. I might not have been able to hit what I was aiming at anyway for thinking about why Billy was suddenly taking it into his head to have me brush up on my gun nonexpertise.

  But then Billy merely shifted survival-skill gears and got me brushing up on snare-setting instead. (I’m not exactly hopeless with a bow, but…close.) But rabbits are smaller. I could’ve coped with the idea of the occasional fresh rabbit. Supposing I could set a snare properly. We’d eaten rabbit and pheasant on the hike in. But it didn’t really matter because I was never going to be here alone, of course. There was always going to be a Ranger with me, and Rangers can set snares in their sleep (I mean snares that catch something).

  We’d just about got everything fixed up so Jane was finally getting ready to go back. There’d been a lot of radio contact including about stuff Kit could bring when he came to take Billy’s place. After this there was only going to be one Ranger at a time here with me. So Jane left and then Billy waited for Kit, and Kit turned up on schedule with various small crucial bits and pieces—including one to make the radio work better; it had been dropping in and out a lot in a pretty uncomfortable way and everyone on it sounded like they were being strangled while breathing laughing gas. We’d had a lot more problems with the two-ways since the techies had monkeyed with the fence, so we all hoped the monkeying was working—there was no real way to know except backwards, by people not breaking in.

  So Billy left (leaving me the rifle, just by the way, and spare ammo and reload stuff), but Kit finished making everything as everything-proof as you can ever make anything everything-proof out in the middle of a nowhere that didn’t care if you were human, dragon, or squidgy tentacled blob from Alpha Centauri. Which was the good news.

  Because the bad news was they had an outbreak back at the Institute. Nothing to do with dragons—flu. I’d been worrying about everybody’s stress levels and why nobody had a heart attack or a nervous breakdown yet, right? Well they got summer flu instead. (Maybe it was because they all relaxed as soon as Lois and I were out of bus-tour radius.) First flu epidemic we’d had since I’d been alive, and believe me, tourists on holiday come and sneeze and cough all over you rather than miss their chance by keeping their germs at home. (No, you’re right, I don’t really blame them. I’d come to Smokehill with terminal body-parts-dropping-off-it-is if it was my only chance.)

  By the time Billy got back to the Institute there were seven Rangers down and with it being summer which is high season anyway, the extra tourist load (and lingering investigative drones, although there were mostly only a symbolic crab and grumble of these left) meant everyone still standing was going crazy. Kit sort of hung around being twitchy for several days and then he asked me if I thought I could stay at Westcamp alone for a little while. The alternative was going back with him to the Institute. No way.

  There’s maybe a drawback to suddenly looking like a grown-up, which is what I had started to do the second half of the year I was fifteen. By now—and yeah, no doubt partly as a result of all that good-student crap first so they wouldn’t take me away after Mom died and then later to protect Lois—I could put over maturity-beyond-his-years like you wouldn’t believe. I’d also had my own growth spurt and was six-foot-something and bulky too—you try hauling a baby dragon around and see if it doesn’t grow you muscles like a furniture mover. So I knew what I had to do with Kit—I’d also guessed it was coming so I’d been like secretly practicing my role. I just about packed his gear for him and shoved him out. There was no question about risking Lois back at the Institute. That tourist who had bumbled past our cottage had gone missing when we had a full complement of Rangers watching out.

  So I had to stay, and I had to convince Kit it was okay if he left me. Us. I did. And I’m afraid Billy’s rifle helped—helped convince Kit. (He hadn’t seen me try and shoot it.) But then I had to convince Dad. That really challenged my competent-maturity program, and it was only a beta really. Turned out that he’d just told Kit to bring me (us) back. When he mentioned that—almost in passing—like it was no big deal—then I mainly had to not lose my temper and yell. If I’d yelled Dad would’ve just yelled louder and ordered me back to the Institute, and the main thing about handling Dad is preventing him from giving an order, because then it’s an order and that’s the end of the discussion.

  The problem was that I was scared. But it wasn’t a scared that anybody else could do anything about. When I was younger sometimes being ordered to do something was secretly kind of okay because then it was Dad’s (or Mom’s) fault, I couldn’t do anything about it. I kept telling myself it would actually be easier if there wasn’t anybody else around; Lois’ and my training-each-other-to-do-things sessions were getting more and more complicated, and if it was just me and Lois I could concentrate more on her, and not worry about explaining anything to anybody who caught us at it, and who knew how far we would get how fast.

  But, you know, look at what had happened to me the last time I’d been in the park alone, which I know I’ve said before, but are you surprised it kept kind of running through my mind? Okay, maybe it had been a good disaster. But it was still a disaster and it had changed all our lives tremendously in a stretch-till-you-snap way and there was no stretch left for even a little tiny disaster-ette. This flu was pushing it. And I was also not absolutely sure I wanted to find out how far Lois and I could get how fast—or why didn’t I want anyone around to notice?

  There’s another little tiny factoid about all this. Sure, I’d been Billy’s willing slave since I was two. And I knew a lot more about Life in the Wild than your average seventeen-year-old. But that’s not the same thing as knowing what you’re doing out here. To the extent that you ever know what you’re doing. And then I also had to work way too hard not to wonder what, exactly, Billy had been anticipating when he left me his rifle (even if I couldn’t hit anything with it, except maybe stomping beetles with the stock end. The beetles in the cabin were kind of a plague).

  But I smiled and did my responsible trick, and Kit was satisfied, and maybe Dad was so impressed that I hadn’t lost my temper that he believed my beta program after all and said okay. Or maybe it was worse back at the Institute than I realized and what Dad really hadn’t ordered me to do was not come back, but stay at Westcamp, and he’d told Kit to bring me to piss me off, so I’d be sure to do the opposite. (Although this is a little devious for Dad.) Martha sounded really worried when I talked to her, and she was obviously trying to figure out a way to tell me something we hadn’t got into our code. There weren’t any cop shows, she said, but there was new thriller that everybody was talking about but she hadn’t seen yet.

  “Maybe you should stick to science fiction,” I said.

  “Maybe I should,” Martha said. “The problem with science fiction is…that it’s just all made up, you know?”

  Uh-oh. I knew. “Anybody else come down with the flu?”

  “No, but Mom’s driving one of the buses and I’m cleaning odorata’s cage.”

  “Oh, yuck for you. You know about using lemon juice on your hair after?”

  Martha giggled. It was good to hear her giggling. “Yes. I have to use so much it’s making me blond.”

  Which proves Martha has superior
hair too. All lemon juice ever did for mine was make it go kind of rusty in streaks, like there’d been a terrible chemical accident on my head.

  And then we had to stop because the two-way went into one of its snits, which it was still doing, even with the new gizmo. Kit was out of earshot so I didn’t tell him about the radio. It did not bear thinking about if the radio went seriously gazooey, but I was not going back to the Institute, so everything else was just going to have to be whatever it was, grotty radios included.

  Kit took off the morning after I had that conversation with Martha. I checked in on the two-way as soon as he’d gone. I now had to check in twice a day, Dad said. He would’ve liked to make it three times but I said I was still going to go on with the dragon study even though there was no one to help me, which meant I’d be out a lot of the day. I could hear Dad thinking about ordering me to take the radio with me but fortunately he didn’t. Reporting in even twice a day I was wondering if my crummy sense of time was going to be cover enough if the radio had too many hissy fits and I checked in at the wrong time too often. But I’d worry about that when it started happening…and then, before I had to think about staying here alone, where the nearest other human being would soon be a light-year or two away…Lois and I went for a walk.

  Lois was thrilled. Usually we were doing chores in the morning. I know, she thrilled easily, but she totally loved the greater freedom of the camp almost as much as she loved fires. She was either on a constant adrenaline high (insert Unknown Dragon Equivalent here) or two-year-old dragonlets are like that. She galloped and rootled and scrabbled and poked…and peeped and chortled and gurgled and burbled and purred and hummed and cheeped and chirruped and hooted and…her amazing range had only got amazinger as she got older, and her qualifications as a chatterbox had been established long ago.

  And it was like she was in her element once she had the conversation all to herself and didn’t have to wait for anybody but me. I was also kind of broody so I left her to it. And boy did she go for the opportunity. I couldn’t help thinking about it some more. I’d never heard that dragons talked (all right, “talked”) to each other. Old Pete had never mentioned it in any of his journals. And if his dragons had been anything like Lois he would have. In fact he’d’ve spent his life wearing earplugs. Also usually one of the limitations on animal “speech” is that animal vocal cords and larynxes aren’t set up for a lot of variation. Lois had lots of variation. She could do anything but human words. She probably could have done the tentacled blobs from Alpha Centauri, but she was stuck with me.

  Her humming had like expanded. At first it was just kind of a bumpy mutant purring—what I’ve been calling purring, although if any cat made that noise I’d recommend you call the vet fast—and then after a lot of time practicing with the shower it got pretty, well, hummy. Almost, like I said, like a human might hum. (Emphasis on the almost.) But after she caught on it wasn’t only with the shower any more. And whatever it was, it went more up and more down, jiggedy jaggedy, more like a, well, musical scale than her other noises.

  I had brought my old player from the Institute when I moved in with Billy and Grace, but I decided pretty much all by myself that arena rock probably wasn’t a good thing for your infant dragon, and besides, I’d been reading up (a little wildly) on parenting and about how Mozart is soothing to fidgety kids, so mostly I played Mozart, and even got to kind of like it myself. (Except the operas.) And I sang to her sometimes the way all of us (even Eric) sang to our zoo orphans; once you’ve been caught saying the standard “Theeeeeere, isn’t that gooooood?” a few times you have no shame left. Shamelessness is required if you sing like me. But humans are just so voice oriented, you want to say things, and you get bored with “Theeeeeere isn’t that gooooood?” after a while. Singing is the obvious alternative to moronic monologue. You think you’re being soothing, but does a raccoon or a robin think “Barbara Allen” or “The Ash Grove” is soothing? I think we’re soothing ourselves. But there wasn’t any music, soothing or otherwise, at Westcamp so maybe Lois was reinventing it for us.

  We went for a lot of walks after Kit left. Away from Westcamp I didn’t feel quite so alone. Or rather, it was okay to feel alone away from the camp—away from the human place. And I took my notebook with me, and my marker sticks, and sometimes I brought a few scales back to the camp and labeled them and bagged them up like I was getting ready to take them back to the Institute, like this “project” was real.

  The project was one more legitimate reason to keep me outdoors as much as possible—indoors at the camp my voice echoed. Of course the main thing keeping me outdoors as much as possible was Lois—but the dragon-scale-counting project suggested that I was still a part of the Institute. That I still had something like a normal place—and future—at the Institute. My security blanket. I don’t think moms are supposed to need security blankets. Two or three nights after Kit left I dreamed that I was wrapped up in the holey old blankets Snark and I had watched TV on a few centuries ago, leaning up against Lois’ mom’s side in one of those flickery red caves, and my own mom was singing to me. At least it was her voice, although I couldn’t see her. When she sang “Barbara Allen” you knew what it was.

  It was a gorgeous summer that year. That helped. I’d brought rain gear of course as well as long underwear and a goosedown vest and wool socks and stuff. Even in August you can get a frost in Smokehill, and Westcamp wasn’t in one of the milder bits of Smokehill either, and the Bonelands started just over the Glittering Hills to the north. (They’re called hills, but they’re mountains really. You’d know this if you tried to climb one.) But I didn’t need any of it. The skies stayed blue and it was hot enough at noon to lie down in a meadow and soak it up and warm enough even early and late that if you kept moving you didn’t get cold.

  Lois had got a lot fitter since we’d left the Institute (well so had I) so if I wanted to walk really fast for a while she managed to keep up with me, though she still did it in spurts. She’d walk—she’d finally learned to walk, I think because she discovered that you can be more thorough about prying into stuff at a slower speed—till she got far enough behind to make her (and me) nervous and then buzz past me at her funny gallop and then maybe walk again, although sometimes the enthusiasm level was just so high and the world was just so big and exciting she had to have an extensive hurtle. You know those cartoons where animals run by all four legs going forward at once and then all four legs going backward at once. I know no real animal runs like that but Lois sure looked like she was.

  I ambled sometimes too so we could walk together. Her walk was one foot at a time, like a normal walk, although looked down at from above…you know the way a dog looks surprisingly sinuous, almost snaky—explains why they can curl up in a circle—well, maybe it was just the way the spinal plates waggled along her humpy back that made Lois look like she was coming unhinged.

  She never offered to chase—or flame at—any of the wildlife we saw, and despite the amount of noise Lois made, both with her mouth and her feet—and I couldn’t walk nearly as quietly as Billy even when I was concentrating, but there was no point trying with Lois around—we saw a lot. They’d stand there and stare at us like they couldn’t believe their eyes. Is that a dragon? Is that a human? Are they together? Some things like raccoons do that anyway—but our four-legged dragon suppers couldn’t seem to decide if they had to bother about us or not, and mostly they didn’t, although I sometimes expected their eyes to pop out from staring. Once we even saw a lynx and lynx are usually really shy. The times the deer or the sheep or whatever would scatter they didn’t seem to be paying attention to us at all. Which was kind of nervous-making in a different way. If those tales about cougar curiosity are true probably the local puma was following us around and maybe sometimes the suppers got wind of him. Or her.

  But we still had to go back to camp eventually. I found out the hard way that I wanted to get back in daylight. I wanted to be indoors with the fire lit and one of the lamps bu
rning before it got dark. There were bears around here—as well as the cougar—but that wasn’t why. Nor was the fear of getting lost. It was that coming back to a silent dark cabin was too creepy. First time we did it, coming back in twilight, even Lois shut up, and that made it worse. You’d think the sky would get bigger in daytime, when you can see more of it. It doesn’t. It gets way bigger at night. And the forest and prairie and desert don’t go on for five million acres after dark, they go on forever. I pretty much turned my dragon-scale-counting project into a real project after all, sweating over my charts and graphs in the evenings, studying and noting down the differences from one scale to another to another (long, short, cleanly shed or ragged, color, texture, blah blah), marking where I found them (and the map this made was different from the readings from the other camps) to be doing something. Something that made me pay attention to it, instead of sitting there trying to count up to eternity.

  And the rifle helped again, about that, about being alone. Just hanging there in its rack, it made me feel a little less helpless. And in spite of the deer all beautifully smoked and wrapped up in the store I did start setting rabbit snares—the pile of deer parts was going down, and that deer had been nearly the first thing Billy had done, and I (almost) always believe what Billy tells me, even when he doesn’t say anything. Also once you get in the habit of counting up to eternity it seems to stretch in a lot of different directions. And after about a week—hey presto—my snares even started catching the occasional rabbit. Weird. Maybe I could learn to hit what I aimed at with the rifle if I had to. (Besides beetles.)