Dragon Haven

by Robin McKinley

  And, okay, yes you can buy an autographed copy of the panorama postcard of Gulp and me, and Gulp doesn’t sign autographs.

  It’s true that they built our fortress before the money really started rolling in, but maybe the bank manager Dad got the loan from could smell that it was going to. Or maybe he just had a sense of humor. Or maybe Dad made up the idea for Dragon Squadron on the spot (actually, it was Dad’s idea—I didn’t know he even knew what a game was, let alone a computer game) and promised him first editions for his kids.

  And speaking of people who were born to go on TV (the spiny-ridged ones that peep and the two-legged ones that bellow), Eleanor also made a huge difference in how the whole story went over at the beginning, when a lot of the country was still mostly on the Searles’ side and the Searles were trying to make out, oh, I don’t know exactly, it all made me so angry I couldn’t think about it, just like at the beginning when there was a dead dragon and a dead stupid evil jerk and Lois was a secret—the Searles tried to make it out there was some kind of child abuse going on with my dad sort of giving me to the dragons as a sacrifice or something, or like that famous psychologist who raised his kids in a box to keep out bad influences (and I think my dad is a control freak). Seems like poor Dad was always getting whacked for the way he raised me—last time it was for handing me over to the Rangers. (Nobody ever tried to argue that the dragons had handed Lois over. Duh.)

  So some enterprising reporter started looking for other kids and there are only Martha and Eleanor and Eleanor took over immediately and said that they’d known about Lois from the beginning and like sue her, she’s eleven years old. This took the wind out of a lot of political sails, especially when Eleanor told the story of how it was Martha who found out that Lois liked her tummy rubbed, you just had to wear gloves to do it. Hardened senior Republican senators watching on the video link were going “awwwww” and then trying to pretend they were coughing.

  Then the Searles tried to make it out that someone had taught Eleanor what to say, but the same enterprising reporter managed to convince Katie to let Eleanor have what amounted to a press conference, with questions from the floor and stuff. By the time Eleanor, perfectly self-possessed and articulate, had explained that it maybe wasn’t true that I was the only human who’d ever tried to mom a dragonlet—there were one or two old Australian folk tales about it (they’re in one of Mom’s books) but they were so bizarre that the white guys that translated them thought they were about taking too many drugs, the Searles had lost. And without the Searles goading them nobody wanted to look bad by trying to put me or Dad in jail. So it was Gulp and Lois and Smokehill to a landslide victory. Just like Eleanor’s is going to be when she runs for president in forty years or so.

  I’ve gotten ahead of myself again. But this is sort of the happy ending part—or at least the cautious if a trifle shaky happy beginning—and also I didn’t think the story was going to go on this long and I’d like to get it over with. But there’s some other stuff I want to tell you the real version of. Like the animal rights activists breaking into Smokehill and letting all the things in the zoo out and how one of them (the zoo critter, not the activist) tried to eat Eleanor. There’s a lot that happened in those last few weeks, after Lois and I fled west and the Searle army closed in, but I can’t be bothered sorting out most of it, and there are already millions of people writing magazine articles and thumping great books on everything to do with Lois and dragons and Smokehill now so you can read them. I’m mostly only writing this at all to make Dad and Martha happy, and a little bit to try to get in some of the stuff all the other great thumping books leave out, or get wrong. Like the animal activists—there weren’t any, okay?—and anything even trying to eat Eleanor.

  They’d started having regiments or units or whatever you call them of the National Guard (let me see, a noise of consultants, maybe a Saruman of National Guard?) moving in on Smokehill. The president hadn’t quite declared a state of national emergency but I guess he’d allowed as how there was at least a clear and present danger of something or other. (All of those thousands of ten-mile-long dragons are hungry.) You remember a busload of tourists had actually seen a dragon flying about half a mile away—so just how much obviously threatening behavior are we going to put up with from this final handful of a nearly extinct creature, anyway? The Searles’ spin doctors made it sound like it was like an armada of kamikaze bomber dragons and the tourists on that bus were all in the hospital being treated for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. So the guys in camouflage with funny hats rolled a couple of helicopters in.

  You remember that helicopters are the only things that can fly in here, and even they have instrument difficulty, and first you have to get ’em through the gate, but after one of our dramatic rescues about twenty years ago we got a little tiny extra driblet of congressional money to build a garage outside the gates where all the garages and the parking lot are, to hold a flatbed truck that would carry a helicopter with folded-up blades through the gate. We couldn’t afford a helicopter but we had our very own flatbed helicopter-carrying truck, which I suppose at least saved transporting it, since it went about five mph and made our solar buses look sporty.

  There wasn’t any place to put everybody so at first the Guard and their helicopters were camped outside the gate, and there was a lot of shouting about that, because the gate was so (comparatively) small and if they had to “mobilize” quickly, there’d be a bottleneck. Also the tourists objected to their parking spaces being taken up by heavies in uniform, since Smokehill was still open for business. Eventually Dad got semi-overruled and most of the people still stayed outside the gate but the first two helicopters and three guys to look after them got brought through. Our new tourist attraction. Not. (But it freed up some of the parking lot.) Well, that made everybody in our party really nervous, because the last thing they wanted was any of this gang being able to move anywhere fast, so people began to think of creative ways to make sure this didn’t happen.

  Martha started chatting up one of the guard Guards—have I mentioned that she’d started getting really cute when she hit her teens?—and he showed her a lot more about his helicopter than he should have, but then she’s just a dumb girl, isn’t she? So when the order finally came that they were going to start Operation Dragon Vanquish (I am not kidding) by finding out what had happened to me, there was a flurry of people putting plans of action into action. I don’t know exactly what Martha did to her helicopter (when I asked her she said demurely that she “disrupted the synchronization between the front rotor and the rear one.” With a little help from a wrench. “Oh,” I said) but that still left one. Now pay attention, because this is where it gets exciting.

  Eric opened one of the cage doors at the zoo. Just think about that for a minute. Eric. Opened. One. Of. The. Cages. Eric. But we were looking at the possibility—no, the likelihood—of losing Smokehill, so last-ditch efforts were in order. I’m still really impressed. But this is the best part: If you’re going to do something like let something out of its cage to make an uproar, you want to let the one that’s going to cause the most uproar out, right? Like, you might say, the biggest stink. So guess who he let out. You get three guesses and the first two don’t count.

  So then he came screaming up to the Institute, which was by then buzzing with Guards doing moving-out things, and all these great horrible (Martha said) army super-jeeps and things were rolling through the gate like Grond at the siege of Gondor, and Eric had a tantrum of, I guess, epic proportions even for Eric (even Eleanor was almost impressed), and nearly brought the entire National Guard to its knees single-handed, between the tantrum itself and—well, you guessed it, right?—odorata, who was cavorting around having a high old time doing what odorata does.

  It just happens that this was all going on during odorata mating season, so all the males would have been trying out their courting steps anyway, and while the young males had all been too crestfallen (so to speak) while they were all crammed in t
he same cage with the big guy, once they got let out they decided to have a stab at the show themselves, so we had mating-dance odorata pretty much all over the landscape—I’m sorry I missed it—and big strapping members of the National Guard passing out from the smell right and left (have I mentioned that odorata is especially smelly during mating season? Because the males are proving to the females that they can protect them) and Eric trying to kill anyone in a Guard uniform, claiming that some damned soldier had opened the cage door and that he was going to have the entire Guard court-martialed unless they brought the guy who did it forward and let Eric kill him. And, you know, one of the reasons Eric was so convincingly off his rocker was that he was worried sick about the possibility that odorata might get hurt. He’d decided that it was worth the risk, but he still hated doing it. And it made it really easy for him to channel that hatred at the guys who were making it necessary.

  Dad had been on the phone at that point for about forty-eight hours straight, trying to get hold of somebody who could cancel the order to do this big search for my dead body—I mean, where’s a nice little international incident when you need one? If there’d been any real news going on even all the Searles’ money couldn’t have turned our dragons into a civil war—because he knew that as soon as they found anything they could pretend was evidence that I or anyone else had come to some kind of harm, they’d start killing dragons. Don’t ask me how they were managing to discount my twice-daily check-ins—that the dragons were holding a gun to my head and making me say I was okay?

  I asked Dad about this when I was trying to write this part, and was sorry then, watching it in his face as he went back to that terrible time. Finally he said, “Nobody sounds too great on our two-ways and the one you were using was worse than usual. Somebody decided that maybe it wasn’t really you. That I’d rigged it somehow. That’s when they started…keeping a watchful eye on me.” Jesus. If I knew who it was I’d…hang him out to dry and then give him to the dragons for their fire.

  So everything had gone seriously wrong enough that Dad—and Eric—thought it was worth it to tell me to get out—the way the party politics were being driven, finding Lois would be even worse than finding me dead—gee, thanks—but whatever they were going to find (or whatever they were hoping to find) they were still going to start looking at Westcamp. Of course back at the Institute they didn’t know about Gulp. Dad has said since—and I did not ask—that he got ten years older for every day after I disappeared and there was no news of me of any kind….

  Anyway. Even odorata couldn’t make the second helicopter dematerialize, of course, although they were doing a very good job of razing troop strength and creating rampant chaos—and the big strapping guys keeling over weren’t later on going to admit that it was just a bunch of smelly lizards, so that’s where the violent, club-wielding animal activists got shoved into the story. Okay, there’d been some animal rights guys—way too low-key to call activists—hanging around, but they only wielded banners and they never made it through the gate. (Although they did spray-paint one or two of Saruman’s jeeps.)

  But meanwhile Eleanor was also on the case. While Eric and odorata were doing their various dances, Eleanor was hitting herself over the head with a shovel—you know how scalp wounds bleed—and staggering in to the Institute covered in blood and crying for Katie. (Martha says she really was crying and she really was staggering but Eleanor says she wasn’t, that it was all planned. Martha says that it wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t really been crying and staggering and that she was paying her a compliment so please relax but it was also the stupidest thing she’d ever heard of, and I say amen to that, also that she’s amazingly brave and maybe that’s all that counts, since it worked, aside from the fact that it was an utterly idiotic thing to have done and she’s lucky she didn’t give herself permanent brain damage.)

  Katie understandably pretty much had a heart attack on the spot and gathered up her freely bleeding child and demanded the remaining helicopter to fly them out to the hospital now. Dad—who is very capable with needle, thread, sutures, staples, and those butterfly things, as most of us can vouch for—instantly backed her up, and so that’s what happened. Martha says she couldn’t be sure that the reason the helicopter crew volunteered so fast didn’t have something to do with the rapidly-spreading odorata smell, but the point is that was two helicopters out of two (they never did figure out exactly what went wrong with the other one: ninja chipmunks maybe?), and it took another six hours to get more helicopters “mobilized” to Smokehill, and that’s when they started hunting me. That last conversation with Dad was with the new helicopters rolling through the gate but he couldn’t just tell me that with Saruman monitoring him and that last shout from Eric was only because even Saruman was a little leery of him after his odorata performance, and he’d managed to snitch a two-way.

  But all of this had given Gulp and me a few more days to make some kind of a relationship, and who’s to say if I’d put my hand on her nose the day before or even six hours before and started thinking pictures at her, it would have worked?

  The new helicopters flew directly to Westcamp, and found no me, of course, but all my gear—including all the stuff that would let me stay alive in Smokehill—was still there. And of course there were signs of some big animal having been around a lot and a lot of recently-shed dragon scales, if any of them were clever enough to recognize them, which, since it was Handley and his guys, they probably were.

  (Dad certainly was, when they brought some of the scales back to the Institute. He says he kept telling himself that we’d all made the best decisions we could have right along from the beginning—from the moment I put Lois down my shirt the first time—and that if it was now all going horribly wrong we still couldn’t have done anything else. But that’s one of the worst things about this whole story, what those fifteen days I was missing did to Dad. It didn’t do anything good for Martha and Billy and everybody else but Dad was, ultimately, responsible, and I was his son…and I really was the only family he had left. And even if you counted Lois—which I did—she was missing too.)

  I don’t know if they commented on the vomit but I do know that the glaring lack of blood and guts gave them some pause (nobody had told them dragons generally don’t leave crumbs). My stuff had made them decide it was me that was missing after all, no impostors necessary, the lack of blood and guts made them willing to assume that I was still alive, and Dad’s phone marathon had eventually put some brakes on the whole gone-bananas spectacle of Dragon Vanquish—but since they had all this hardware flying around already they decided while they were out there they might as well look for me. So they did. And they had some kind of fancy infrared dingledangle and some high-tech bozo to read it, so they could keep looking for human-shaped things of the right temperature, since there would only be one of them out there. Unless another poacher had got in, of course. And unless I was dead after all and the dingledangle wouldn’t find me.

  I wonder, now, if it was just accident that Bud took us outdoors the afternoon that the choppers were due to fly over that meadow. Because even infrared gizmos can’t read dragons through rock. Let alone small human visitors.

  And Eleanor has an interesting new scar under her hair, and Eric got odorata rounded up again—which wasn’t as hard as it might have been because the local landscape doesn’t really suit them and they were beginning to drift uncertainly back toward their cages like sozzled party-goers stumbling home at dawn—and there was a record-breaking number of odorata babies the following season, so much so that we had to negotiate with some other zoos to build odorata cages and take some of them off our hands. But by that time we were golden and any zoo lucky enough to have anything to do with us would do pretty much whatever we said.

  I doubt Lois is ever going to get as big as she would have, if she’d stayed with her mom, if her mom hadn’t died. And she’s still a lot paler than any of the rest of the dragons I’ve met, although it’s become a kind of pinky-c
oppery-tawny-iridescent pale and—okay, never mind everything I’ve said about how ugly she is—is really kind of pretty, although I don’t know if any of the guy dragons are going to think so when she gets older, and I don’t suppose chances are she’ll be let (is “let” the right word?) breed, unless the dragons decide that the bond she and I have is the sort of thing that might get passed on somehow—or would be worth passing on. (No, I don’t know if dragons have sex for fun too. And I probably wouldn’t tell you if I knew.)

  Sometimes thinking that I’ve ruined Lois’ life really bothers me and sometimes it doesn’t. I mean, she’s alive, isn’t she? And it’s horrible that her mom died, and her brothers and sisters. But at the same time if all that hadn’t happened the Institute would still be worrying about how to keep the government from readjusting our status so the oil drillers and the gold diggers and the country-getaway builders and all the other greedy villains could come in and ruin our dragon haven—the only dragon haven left on the planet where the dragons are thriving—and now certainly the only one where they hang out with humans.

  And yet the millionaire parents of that utter total absolute piece of dog crap that killed Lois’ mom nearly got their evil law blasted through Congress (with a little help from the oil drillers) to kill off all our dragons. And if they’d succeeded, I don’t think the Kenya sanctuary would have lasted much longer, or the Australian park. I’ve told you, the dragons besides ours aren’t doing too well, which in a weird way gives people the excuse to make them do worse. And they may not want to admit it, but some of them are glad of the excuse. (We’re still waiting to see what effect what’s happened here may have on the other two parks. We’re waiting hopefully.)