Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  And for all I know the apparent attempt to be slow and gentle was as much for her benefit as ours—trying to relate to something like me, whose proportions are all wrong from a dragon perspective, maybe made her feel queasy, aside from what she might think of humans in general, which, at a guess, wasn’t too positive either. And it made sense if you’re something the size of a young hill hanging out with something the size of a fat wolfhound (skin problems, short bowlegs and peculiar skull development optional) you need to try and find some kind of compromise. Since her neck was half as long as the entire meadow (well nearly) she still had a lot of negotiating room.

  And she was hot. Zowie, was she ever hot. But it’s funny though, it wasn’t as overwhelming as you might think. You know how the closer you get to a fire the hotter it gets and if you’re cold and you’re longing for the heat you’re like always trying to decide how close you can get before your eyelashes singe and your cheeks flake off? She was more like an electric blanket turned on high. So grown-up dragons develop temperature control maybe—although I wasn’t offering to rub her tummy. She was almost attractively hot, like a hot water bottle that never cooled off. Except that she was the size of 1,000,000,000,000 electric blankets and had teeth as long as my legs. Not to mention my graphic memory of her flamethrower.

  The way she smelled was kind of the same. It was a monster smell to go with the monster critter but it wasn’t a bad smell, exactly, even if you slightly felt that if you peeled it off the dragon somehow and then it like fell on you it would probably crush you just as thoroughly as if the dragon itself sat on you. It was intense. Of course the famous Smokehill dragon smell was always a lot stronger once you got into the park away from the Institute—but here was living fire-breathing proof that the famous Smokehill smell was definitely dragon.

  I tried not to run to the other end of the meadow from wherever she was as soon as she arrived, but I somehow always found myself at the point farthest from her kind of soon after. It gave Lois lots of exercise galumphing between us. Ha. She didn’t always come at the same time and she didn’t always stay for very long, but she came every day after the first. Every day. Every day I got out of bed with a knot in my stomach and wondered if she’d be back. Gulp. And she always was. Gulp. We weren’t always in the meadow when she arrived either but like being called into your dad’s office to get yelled at—I mean when you know that’s why you’re going—I used to turn around from wherever we were and trudge back there, if we weren’t there, to get it over with.

  I never didn’t see her flying in, although I never really got used to not feeling the ground shake when she landed or as she was walking around. I don’t know if we—I—got points for going to meet her or not. First time we weren’t there she was sitting up looking around when we arrived. (A sitting-up dragon looks a lot bigger than any two-hundred-foot cliff, just by the way. Dragons have a corner on the whole looming thing.) After that first time she was always lying down when we arrived. Like she knew we’d come and she might as well get comfortable. If lying flat is comfortable for a dragon, which actually I wonder. But she lay down like I came to the meadow, I think. We were both trying hard.

  She never fired at us—well, me—again. Although some days when she showed up she smelled smokier than other days and I wondered if she’d been hunting and if so, what. Oh, Jake, stop it. Dragons don’t eat people. They never have. As far as we know. They just could. What Lois’ mom did to that guy was self-defense—she wasn’t trying to eat him. And it didn’t even work.

  But Gulp’s first act on seeing me and Lois had been to try and toast me. That was almost as hard to forget as what the dead poacher had looked like.

  Lois and I went on with our games, or our lessons, or whatever they were, although my concentration was a tiny bit shot somehow. I was getting used to the pressure, that is pressures, now, in my head, having something more particular to do with Lois than I’d recognized back at the Institute, where I thought it was all just some kind of hangover from the shock of Lois’ mom after my mom, plus my la-la dream sense that Lois’ mom’s ghost or spirit or something was hanging around giving me a hand with things. But now Gulp. There’d been nothing like Gulp at the Institute.

  “Getting used to” is a joke though. There was no “getting used to” about it. I was so far out of control in this situation it wasn’t worth even pretending anything else. If life with Lois the last two years had been sort of day-to-day, I was down to minute-to-minute now, with Gulp around. Maybe second to second. But, I don’t know, it was also maybe like the dragon had fried my worry list instead of me. I was still here. New world. New Jake, maybe.

  Telepathy in books is always sort of misty. All woo-woo and staring earnestly into the middle distance and delicate and sensitive and stuff. This was like having rocks in your head. Ha ha. A whole freaking boulder field, but two of them—one big, one little—were especially active. Having two of them like that was what finally made me begin to pay attention to them as, uh, communication, even if they didn’t communicate much besides “ow.”

  I don’t know how long it might have taken me if it was just Lois and me, but thinking about it, I was pretty sure the real rock feeling had only started after Kit left—when Lois and I were alone together. I’d had Lois-related headaches since I’d had Lois, bad headaches, some of them, and kind of self-motivated. But they were still all maybe understandable—just—in terms of stress and worry and the boy lost his mother when he was twelve and was a little peculiar after that wasn’t he? (Humans always want stuff to be understandable the way they already do understand it.) So why wouldn’t I have visions of old Mom dragon? When I was still dreaming about my own mom, and sometimes I’d woken up from those dreams with headaches too.

  It’s kind of embarrassing now to remember me assuming that since I was the human I was the only one of us who had anything to teach the other one. But Lois was a baby…it wasn’t only species arrogance. I hope. I came around pretty quickly after Gulp arrived. I want to believe it’s not only because I was too scared to be arrogant.

  When Gulp was there she moved her head around to be as near to Lois as she could be, according to some rule of her own (I guessed) about not getting too close. At first Lois ignored her, but I’ve already said that Lois was curious about everything, and Gulp was far too big and strange not to be interesting. And didn’t it occur to Lois that there was something, you know, familiar about Gulp? It had been her roar that had jolted Lois out of terror and into defiance. Maybe Lois had just decided that she was going to go down fighting (while her pathetic mom remained glued to the spot, draped in his ripped T-shirt). But she’d reacted to that roar almost as if it meant something to her.

  I was really torn, watching Lois begin to pay attention to Gulp, and Gulp trying to respond—I was sure—in a way that would make Lois, well, like her. I was torn because this was what saving Lois was supposed to be about: raising her till she could go back and live with dragons and be a dragon. Not have to spend the rest of her life at Westcamp or some other human place. If we could figure out how to socialize her first so the dragons would take her. But I hadn’t expected to have to think about it so soon (speaking of my reigning tendency to want not to think about things). It would be a huge, HUGE load off if Gulp was going to take Lois away from me…it should be the most WONDERFUL thing, that ultimate miracle I desperately wanted for Lois. Why wasn’t I leaping for joy? But…I would miss her. A lot. (Duh.) Like I’d maybe adapted too far or something, headache-blasted dragon-mom Jake. Could I remember how to be an undragoned human any more?

  And even in the middle of worrying about losing Lois and/or being made into humanburger it occurred to me pretty strongly that Gulp was acting, well, weirdly. Isn’t it this whole big thing when you try and return a human-reared animal to the wild? It doesn’t know how to be what it is, and its real relatives won’t have anything to do with it because it stinks of human and doesn’t know how to behave. And here was Gulp trying hard to win Lois over—and lettin
g me hang around. The first successful reentry of two half-grown Yukon wolf pups to a wild pack had involved the gruesome death of one of the human minders, and they’d given up trying to reintroduce griffins and Caspian walruses and brought them back to their nice cages before they died. Which has to have been really depressing for the humans. (Although less depressing than being eaten by your fosterling’s relatives.) I could maybe guess how they felt. (I don’t know what they’d’ve done if they ever found an orphan baby Nessie. Sat down and cried, probably.)

  But that’s supposed to be at least part of the excuse why saving a dragon’s life is against the law. A great big fire-snorting flying thing that got a taste, even accidentally, for human was way too dangerous. We weren’t going to hand them any ops. And a smelly hot palm-sized slimy grub that was going to grow into a great big fire-snorting flying thing that couldn’t be sent back to live with its relatives was going to be even more dangerous. I couldn’t bear to think about Lois growing up to be dangerous but…. Maybe the lawmakers weren’t quite as stupid as I thought. They probably had in the backs of their tiny mean minds too that humans who do stuff like half kill themselves and/or get paid crap wages and/or live a hundred miles from a decent restaurant and/or have never seen a movie in a real theater, are crazy, or they wouldn’t do it, but the reason they do it (besides being crazy) is that they get kind of fond of the animals they rescue. Which is maybe the most dangerous thing of all.

  The first time I saw Lois climb up Gulp’s shoulder and hang over her neck like a two-year-old dragon would do with its own real mom, there was a big lump in my throat that had nothing to do with the prospect of what might happen to me the next time Gulp lost her temper.

  But Lois always came back to me—so far. And I didn’t know whether I should be trying to persuade her to stay with Gulp, or whether that would just mess her up further. Who knew what she’d had to learn to survive her weird upbringing. I sometimes felt I was “overhearing” conversations between the big rock and the little rock, but if you’re going to ask me, I’m going to say that they weren’t speaking the same language. Like if a German parent was suddenly reunited with his kid who’d been being raised by a French family. They wouldn’t talk to each other very well. And Gulp was always silent, and Lois, having spent her first two years hanging out with yacketing, nontelepathic humans, was always, well, chattering. I wonder if Gulp got this. I hope so.

  I didn’t talk to Lois anywhere near as much when Gulp was around as when she wasn’t, but I still talked to her. For one thing, if Gulp was watching over our shoulders (brrrrr) while we played one of our learning games, I needed to hear myself talk about what we were doing to steady myself down. I just didn’t chat. It also occurred to me, rather uncomfortably, that if I talked, Gulp might get the idea that Lois didn’t talk because she was defective, but because I talked. This probably wouldn’t make Gulp like me any better, but…well, like what if the German-speaking parent found out that the French family that had been raising his kid were all drug addicts or serial murderers or something? How do you balance the fact that your kid’s alive at all because of them with the fact that they’re really bad for her?

  And the little rock in my head got all sort of warm and soft and glowy and gooey every time Lois left Gulp and came galumphing back toward me. I wasn’t making it up. I wasn’t.

  So, this non-idyll had to end, one way or another, right? It ended a lot sooner and more dramatically than I might have guessed, although if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with Gulp I would have picked up that something was going on back at the Institute. Among other things it should have occurred to me that there was no way I was keeping my own interesting new preoccupation to myself. Anyone who had any spare brain for noticing anything except that I was still signing in like I should, should have noticed that I sounded funny. Distracted. Okay, more distracted. And they didn’t.

  I wasted some time trying to figure out some kind of code to get the idea of Gulp across to Martha, but I couldn’t think of any. It wasn’t anything we’d set up code for. “Hey, guess what, there’s this big dragon who comes to visit Lois every day.” We had a phrase (“good sunrise this morning”) for having seen dragons, but I was afraid if I said that every day she’d get frightened, so I didn’t. I didn’t even say it once. It didn’t occur to me to say it after Gulp’s first visit, because there’s a big difference between seeing a dragon or dragons flying gloriously silhouetted against the sky at a nice distance and having a close encounter of an almost fatal kind with a dragon.

  I tried to remember if Billy had ever mentioned any close sightings of dragons on the ground—coming around an outcropping or out of a narrow pass or something “gee what’s the funny smell, smells like dragon only stronger…oh”—and I couldn’t remember any. I personally had never even seen one of the trees they used as scratching posts although Billy had—not till Gulp I mean: and watching her make a big pine tree shake like a sapling in a gale is another of those little awe-inspiring details of time spent in the company of a full-grown dragon. Mostly dragon sign like that is way far in (the scales blow in the wind, so you get them everywhere), farther than I’ve ever gone. Westcamp’s on the edge. It wouldn’t have been surprising if I’d, uh, had a good sunrise at Westcamp, but Gulp was cruising out of normal dragon range.

  So I should have been worried when I didn’t hear from Martha for three days. Martha checked in most days. But all I was was disappointed—and a little worried that maybe she’d tried some time when my radio was pretending to be ornamental art. (Pretending badly. Our radios are not beautiful objects.) But since I hadn’t figured out how to tell her about Gulp, I wasn’t missing talking to her as much, if you follow me. I just wanted to hear her voice. Even radio-squeaky.

  You can’t really tell much from the voices over our two-ways; when they’re clear they’re clear enough but too clacky and mechanical to guess much about tone. One morning about twenty days after we saw Gulp for the first time, Dad said, “How are you doing for food?”

  “Fine,” I said, more or less truthfully. “Getting a little tired of beans, maybe.”

  “You need the meat for—” said Dad in one of those weird sentences that if anyone had been listening they should have thought suspicious. Maybe Dad just sounded like your usual nutty professor type, never finishing his sentences. Martha and I had a much better system.

  “Well, I’m careful,” I said, which was to say that Lois was getting the meat, and I was getting the beans. I didn’t mind all that much because I was pretty tired of venison too and I didn’t seem to have time to set rabbit snares any more. Not that I think they’d have caught anything. Everything cleared out once Gulp started visiting. We didn’t even get as many noises at night.

  Unfortunately during a slack moment (mine) Lois had made a dive for my plate and got a mouthful of ketchup and fallen instantly in love. So now she tried to climb in my lap and eat my beans once I put ketchup on them. Obviously I wasn’t going to tell Dad this over the two-way. Or about what I was going to do if she got mad and squirted some fire at me the next time I pushed her away. (Do dragons have a Teenager from Hell phase? And if so, when? Before or after they get so big you can’t push them away?) Or about wondering what ketchup would do to dragon physiology. I spent most of my life wondering what something or other was doing to dragon physiology. I hadn’t realized till we got out here how much I’d left all the nutrition stuff up to Grace. But in theory I didn’t let her eat anything with sugar in it, just like a good mom. Ketchup has sugar in it. (Do dragons get ADHD?)

  “I’m okay,” I said. “Really.” Westcamp could hold six (humans) and was automatically kept provisioned for a siege. Weather around here can be pretty dramatic and it doesn’t pay to take chances. Although Billy’s deer was mostly gone by now, which is why I’d stopped eating it, even the way Lois ate we weren’t going to get through all the rest in a hurry. And if we got desperate enough I suppose I’d get Billy’s rifle down from the wall and put some shells in it. But with G
ulp scaring the neighbors I’d have to go a long way to find anything to shoot (at). If Lois looked hungry, would Gulp bring her something?

  There was silence on the two-way. A crackle-crackle-crackle silence, but Dad wasn’t saying anything.

  “Dad?”

  “We have a…situation here,” he said at last. “There appears to be some…question, in certain people’s minds, whether we are…fulfilling…our trust.”

  Oh help. Has someone guessed about Lois???

  “I—”

  “Not you. Exactly,” Dad’s voice continued, slowly, with its painful pauses. He sounded funny, even allowing for radio whimsy. If the pauses were to give me a chance to think about he was trying to tell me…they weren’t working. They hadn’t guessed about Lois but—?

  “They feel you might be in danger,” said Dad.

  So they might try to come after me. Us.

  “I’m not,” I said, too quickly and for once not thinking about Gulp at all. “I call in twice a day like I’m supposed to and I’m always fine. You know that. The—er—dragon study is really interesting and I don’t want to leave. And you’re still short from the flu.”

  “I believe you,” said Dad. “We all believe you. But there have been some…incongruities, which some…other…people have found…alarming.”

  Other people meant not Smokehill people. That was easy. Nothing else was easy. Did he mean more dragon sightings? Westcamp was well beyond visibility from the Institute; even if you had a telescope you’d have to be able to see through rock with it. So it can’t have been Gulp herself that was making anyone (else) jumpy, and there wasn’t anybody else in the park now. We were still turning everyone from outside away; and any stubborn investigators would have a Ranger on them. (Until this minute I’d forgotten all about my “study” since Gulp came, but what I said to Dad was, ahem, still true.) But I’d already worried about the fact that the reason Gulp found us was because she was flying where dragons didn’t fly. If one dragon was going where they shouldn’t…Was whatever it was so bad Dad couldn’t even say the word “dragon”?