Smokehill is actually really precarious, although I know that's kind of hard to get your brain around when you're looking at several million acres of rock and dirt — and that fence. The Bonelands — the deserty part — are probably their own best defense, but developers would love to get their hands on the prettier bits of Smokehill, and the government would love to get their hands on the money developers would pay them, if they could find a good excuse to break their promises to us — and there might be gold here after all. And now I might have provided the excuse the government wanted. My not having made it back to Northcamp by nightfall would have been the last thing Billy was thinking about at that moment.
It's no wonder I kept talking to myself. I wasn't keeping myself awake, I was drowning out thoughts like these.
And that's still leaving out the poacher. A dead human killed by a dragon.
On the other hand there'd be no way that Billy would ever have told me to let something that had the possibility of living die without a struggle, and he wouldn't care whether it was a dragon or a caterpillar, so that part of it was all right, as far as it went. But I had put everyone in deep deep trouble by what I'd done automatically — automatically as a result of having been Billy and the other Rangers' willing slave from the age of two. What I'd done was exactly what every Ranger would have done. And they'd have done it automatically too. Hey, our Rangers bring back orphaned or injured gray squirrels. They'd bring back rats, if we had rats. Well, we do, but our Rattus are Rattus maculatus and R. perobscurus, and endangered.
My point is, we save things. It's what we do.
I was drifting in and out of . . . semi-consciousness, let's not call it sleep. When the dragonlet woke up again Billy watched very carefully while I fed it, and the next time it — and I — woke up Billy had the broth ready and some piece of something he'd cut off something to make a nipple, and his nipple worked, and that made things a lot easier. The rest of the night was better. I didn't get a lot more sleep, but I didn't have to think about anything else either — Billy did all that. He didn't offer to touch the dragonlet, but he did everything else. By morning I probably had nearly half my brain available again, which was up on the 10 percent I'd had at midnight when Billy arrived.
We made it back to Northcamp that day, don't ask me how. I think Billy was beaming Strength Waves at me or something. If I could keep a baby dragon alive anything was possible, including Strength Waves. It took us all day, and Billy carried my pack as well as his own, and we stopped a lot, and every time I sat down (which I had to, to feed the dragonlet without worrying about dropping it), I thought I'd never get up again. But I did. Also standing up always made my headache worse (bang bang bang), and I kept trying to walk so as not to joggle my head, let alone the dragonlet.
At some feeding or other I noticed that the dragonlet was already bigger than it had been two days ago. If I held it upside down in my hand now, it spilled over onto my wrist. It wasn't going to fit up my sleeve much longer. And it was heavier too obviously. I didn't have to come up with any way to measure that. It was a good thing Billy'd brought food. The dragonlet got through a lot of broth.
When I staggered into the little clearing in front of Northcamp I almost couldn't believe it. It was like adopting a baby dragon had sent me into some kind of alternate reality where things like buildings and electricity didn't exist. Billy got the generator going while I was still sitting in a chair and staring at the stove in the big central room. Stoves didn't exist in my alternate reality either. Or chairs. When the teakettle whistled I jumped a mile and the dragonlet woke up and started peeping. I wasn't sure whether it was a frightened peep or a "hello, who are you?" peep but it stopped as soon as the teakettle did and went back to sleep. Feeding it sitting in a chair was weird too. Dragons just don't fit in the human world. Duh.
And then there was taking a bath. . . . In a way that was the first time some of the hairiest implications of what I'd done began to sink in. I'd told Billy, during some night feed or other, that it went nuts any time I tried to lay it down . . . and then we'd found out the hard way the next day that it hated Billy trying to hold it only slightly less than it hated being laid down. This was a blow. Make that a BLOW. Until it happened I hadn't thought about having someone to trade off red welts and disgustingness duty and nooo sleep with — but it occurred to me real fast at that point that I didn't have it. That I wasn't going to have it. And dragonlets stay in their moms' pouches how long??? Also I was used to Billy being able to do anything — including get me out of any trouble I was in. But I was too zonked to follow what this really meant very far. And that's a good thing.
Maybe the teakettle and being in a square place lined with planks (called a "cabin") and furniture and plumbing and stuff were the thing too many for the dragonlet (see: dragons do not fit in the human World, and don't forget the "duh") like getting back to human space seemed to be this weird shock to me. My new permanent headache, which I was almost sort of getting used to, was making me feel queasy and dizzy. But the bath was a kind of a watershed (ha ha ha) moment for both of us. The dragonlet had a complete mini Eric-type meltdown. I thought it was going to do itself an injury when we tried to make it a nest with (a) warm ashes, (b) warmed-up blankets, (c) anything else we could think of.
So the way it ended up was, we kept the dragonlet half wrapped in a piece of my by then truly gross shirt and moved it kind of up and down my front while I got in the bath that way and tried to wash around it, which is to say Billy held it while I tried to wash — this was more embarrassing than I can begin to tell you and it was only being so tired and out of it that made it even possible — and then I got up on my knees and Billy held it against my back while I crouched forward to wash my face and hair. Oh good. New red spots too.
Billy noticed the red spots, both old and new — he'd probably noticed before but maybe he hadn't realized how many of them there were — and did his more-expressionless-than-expressionless wooden-Indian face thing and I noticed, which was interesting, since I wasn't noticing anything, but I suppose it just proves I was fully into my new dragonlet-defending-and-fostering role, because I said, "Oh, they don't hurt, they're just marks, they're no big deal, they're no deal." And I looked at Billy and Billy looked at me and I could see that Billy knew I was lying but I just kept looking at him and . . . he looked away. I didn't get into staring contests with Billy because I knew who won and it wasn't me, and furthermore I'd had this one standing there naked and stinking (and red-spotted). The maternal instinct is sure powerful.
The dragonlet hated all of this. I started getting so worried that it would explode or something that I sort of hurried up. Besides, there's only so much embarrassment you can take at one time.