Then I gave the two-way back to Billy and he and Dad started discussing immediate ways and means. Billy was going to stay out here a few more days, needed help, and couldn't spare anyone to see me safe home while they investigated because he wanted anyone who could be spared to join the hunting party. Clue-hunting party. He said, And besides, Jake can help. That was the best joke of all. I heard him say it. He lied amazingly. I didn't know he had it in him. Billy can just not say things, although I'd never heard him do it on quite such an epic scale before, but I'd never heard him lie.
I'd better make this point now and then I'll make it several more times later on because it's one of the things that makes no sense — or maybe it's the thing that makes the no-sense make sense to you reading this about Crazy Jake and His Dragonlet. If it hadn't been for this sticky, smelly, hot little blodge of dragonlet I'd've been totally blown away by the poacher. I should have been totally blown away. This was The End of Life As All of Us Knew It, at Smokehill. Dragons were safe here, that's what Smokehill was for — we may save raccoons; rats and squirrels too, and provide cage space (and cleaning) to a lot of lizards, but dragons are what we're for. But to everybody outside Smokehill, the really important thing that Smokehill was for was to prove to people, from the other direction, that dragons were safe — that they didn't kill people and nobody ever, ever had to worry that they might, and besides, no one could get through the fence.
I can't BEGIN to tell you how important this was — how important everyone at Smokehill knew it was. Except me. I knew the poacher was really bad and everything — but wasn't it time to feed the dragonlet again? Yes. It was always time to feed the dragonlet again. If there were any cracks in my dragonlet obsession, they were full of remembering its mom. The way she'd looked at me. Slightly in my defense, it was a pretty overwhelming experience. It had been overwhelming enough that Billy reminding Dad of it had stopped Dad in midroar, which wasn't something that happened in the world as I had known it. And Dad didn't know the half of it.
That first conversation with Dad I got sort of for free though. I had to pull it together more after that, because of course Dad was expecting me to. That was pretty bad. I had this brilliant idea of telling Dad I'd walked into a tree branch while I was looking the other way and it banged up my throat, so talking kind of hurt. After Billy assured him it was no big deal Dad let me get away with this too. I don't know if he suspected anything right away or not — but he probably couldn't afford to waste time thinking about it. Dad had to figure out what he was going to tell the world about the poacher, and he had to figure it out fast, so I imagine that he was relieved to take Billy's word for it and leave his clumsy, idiot son in Billy's hands for a while longer. He did sound a little distracted, although it made him keep asking me if I was really okay, which I suppose meant he cared, although it sounded a lot like he'd just forgotten I'd already said yes thirty seconds ago. Although really it was pretty amazing of him to remember he had a son, in the circumstances. I'm not sure I would've in his shoes.
Billy's everyone, when they arrived, turned out to be three more of the oldest Rangers, and he must have told them what they were getting into because I don't remember their acting surprised when they were introduced to me and my new buddy. Or maybe I don't remember because I was so stupid from being that tired. I registered that they'd brought me some more clothes and a couple of old baby bottles from the stash at the orphanage. I didn't ask how they'd got them past Eric. And I wondered when Billy had told them what kind of orphan to expect.
Anyway, Whiteoak took over the Jake-tending duty while Billy, Jane and Kit went on to Pine Tor. They were away for three days. And when they got back something else had happened. The dragonlet had gone from needing to be fed every half hour (or twenty minutes) to needing to be fed every two hours. Suddenly. On the tenth day of its life it had still wanted half-hour feedings. That night it slept two hours . . . and then two hours . . . and then two hours . . . and then two hours.
When it woke up, there was Whiteoak with warm broth. I don't know if he'd been waiting an hour and a half each time or not and I didn't ask him. Only partly because he wouldn't have answered. I was in awe of Whiteoak — he could speak English but he didn't want to, and mostly he talked to the other Arkholas in their own language which I knew about six words of. (Eleanor, for whom it is a principle of life never to be in awe of anyone, said that he did this so he got off tourist duty. I wouldn't want to say absolutely that she's wrong. But that only made me admire him more.)
It was weird enough to have anyone waiting on me, even if it wasn't for my sake but the dragonlet's, but it was particularly weird that it was Whiteoak. I mean, just his name — all the other Arkholas had some kind of Anglo name that they used. I guess Whiteoak thought he was meeting us halfway by translating whatever the Arkhola for "white oak" is into English. So it was kind of all part of the space-cadet quality of everything that it was Whiteoak who got left behind to keep me going. And then I was dazed by getting some sleep, finally. You know how when you finally do get some sleep you're more tired? That's how I felt. Three days without sleep didn't seem to faze Whiteoak at all.
But it was still confusingly weird, like I had any room for any more confusingness or weirdness: wham — two hours was okay, for feeding the dragonlet. I know how it sounds to put it this way, but it was like I he dragonlet was now saving my life, for saving its.
Over the next week I began to get pretty good at sleeping for two hours at a stretch, and since the Rangers were doing absolutely everything for me but actually having the dragonlet down their shirts, the fact that this meant I was spending twenty or more hours a day horizontal didn't matter. Although I got bedsores. Yuck. I was a healthy almost-fifteen-year-old boy (or at least I had been). But if you lie in the same position for hour after hour, whether it's because you're old and weak and sick or because you don't want to wake up a dragonlet, and maybe you need all the sleep you can get because your permanent headache means you don't sleep very well besides having to wake up again every two hours (and also because you're maybe having a better time in the dream cavescape in your head than you are outside and awake), you get bedsores. They weren't bad, but that's what they were. Whiteoak had some kind of new gummy stuff for this which stank but helped. Although I'd wake up with the dragonlet trying to get its tongue under me to lick it off. It had a surprisingly long tongue. And its tongue was hot too, so along with the blotches I started getting these sort of skinny whiplash red marks.
But I'd been away from the institute for long enough by then that I think even with everything else that was going on (or maybe because of it) Dad was smelling a rat pretty hard — and this was the first time he'd let me out of his sight since Mom died and this is what happened.
I was still talking to Dad on the radio every day and I sounded a little better than I had but I was still so tired I know I must have sounded funny, even on a two-way where you tend to kind of squawk and squeal anyway, and the branch-across-the-throat excuse didn't cover my brain. He always sounded sort of preoccupied and jumpy at the same time when he talked to me, which is a good trick but I wasn't enjoying it. I was too tired to jump after him. Once my throat had supposedly healed he'd wanted to talk to me about finding the dead dragon and the dead guy again, but this time while I got a little farther I got way over the top upset — and nearly called her "she" which would not have been a good slip to make — so he let me off again. It's just as well because he was getting me so spooked with his jumping-around-ness and of course I kept thinking about his not knowing about the dragonlet that I might have blurted out something even worse.