For something with no legs to speak of Lois just-out-of-the-sling sure liked to climb. Maybe it was being short when everything else was so tall (Eleanor liked to stand on chairs). Maybe it was the complicated process of getting in and out of the sling which had kind of a lot of up and down to it. Anyway, Lois climbed. Or tried to climb. At first she was too tottery to do anything but totter and then for a while when she'd come to something in her way she'd just stop, like it was the end of the universe. Then later she tried to climb. Going around appears to be a very late developing concept in dragonlets.
After a while she stopped trying to climb on anything she'd found out wasn't very dragon-shaped — the kitchen chairs for example — and I sat on the floor a lot to make life easier when she was first starting to explore life outside the sling, since at first she'd go two steps and then rim hark to Mom and then she'd take three steps and run back, and the house was small enough that when she got up to four steps she started bumping into things. At first this was just The End, as I said. But then it was like . . . sometimes I imagined she bumped into them almost kind of thoughtfully, because I don't think she ever tried to climb on anything if she hadn't bumped it thoroughly first.
I don't know if her eyes didn't focus right to begin with (which would be my fault for raising her wrong, guilt guilt guilt) or maybe were built to focus in different light (the light in the dragon caves in my dreams was always weird) or on something very different from human house stuff (duh) — or if baby dragons just do bump into things a lot, like instead of having whiskers, which dragons don't, telling them about how much space there is or what the shapes of the solid parts in it are. But she was a big bumper, and she did a lot of bumping into things sidelong; she didn't necessarily lead with her nose, the way something with whiskers does. But it was like she didn't know what it was till she'd bumped into it a few times. Which was harder (or at least gunkier) on the things than whiskers would have been.
I didn't mind sitting on the floor, I'm mostly not big on soft squashy furniture and certainly no cold draft had a chance to bother me with Lois nearby, and also I found watching her so interesting. (Proud Mom. Obsessed Mom. Silly with relief for even a few feet and a few minutes of semi-freedom Mom.) For example, not only did she do a lot of her bumping from a funny angle, bumping into things to learn what they were seemed to depend on the thing rather than where it was. She'd bump into some things no matter where they were and some things after the first few times she never bumped into them again, also no matter where they were either. Go figure.
Even when she was no longer using her sling she still didn't want to be more than a few feet away from me if she could help it, and she preferred some kind of contact. She was hopeless as a lapdog — the wrong shape, and she was too thick-bodied to curl properly — but she'd lie pretty contentedly on my bare feet, or behind my ankles — that's when she was willing to stop exploring, and lie down at all. She went on wanting skin, and she still spent the nights lying against my stomach.
Fortunately Ranger cottages don't run to wall-to-wall carpeting — I don't even want to think about wall-to-wall carpeting with a greasy, low-slung dragonlet in residence. Grace rolled up their few little rugs and stashed them, and I helped her mop the floors, except that Lois usually wanted to play with the mop. And if you held it steady for her, in the developmental stage between Too Small and Too Big, she could climb up onto the top of the broomy part of a broom and sway there for a minute, like a high-wire act.
Grace is a saint. After all, she was there all the time — Billy mostly wasn't. She'd used to go hiking to find her own plants for her drawings, but once we moved in she stayed home. The Rangers brought her what she asked for, plants and photos, but it wasn't the same — not that she said so. But I knew she was trapped too — that she'd just let herself be trapped. And nobody had asked her. We just showed up, that first day, after my interesting interview with Dad. I was too shell-shocked to notice much after that so I can't tell you about the expression on her face when we arrived. I don't remember what Billy said, or whether he said it in Arkhola or English. I don't remember anything, except I also don't ever remember Grace being anything but Grace, which is to say kind and unfrazzled, all the time Lois and I were infesting her space. (Her Arkhola name translates as Beautiful Dancer. I think I was raving to Kit about the way Grace put up with us and he's the one told me. So "Grace" is a pretty good job.)
And I've said that everyone at Smokehill would sell their grandmothers to be invited for a meal that Grace cooked — she liked cooking for people, and now she couldn't do that either, or only for the few of us official secret Lois society members. And she lost her studio because Lois and I took over Jamie's room — she had to set up her drawing board in the kitchen. But the funny thing is that Lois learned not to whang into the drawing board first, when she was still really little and tottery. She was still crashing into the kitchen table occasionally when she was big enough to make a glass standing on it fall over, just from not paying attention. (Maybe she picked it up from me. I've made a few glasses fall over in my time.) But she never did that to the drawing board. And it wasn't that Grace was ever mean to her about that or about anything. Made you wonder just what she was learning by all that bumping.
But the stuff about the poacher and the dead dragon — Lois' mom . . . I mostly didn't know how bad it was till a lot later. Even at the time I knew that everybody was trying their damnedest to make sure I didn't know . . . but I was trying not to know too. I know how much of a jerk this makes me look. But I had really, really, really as much as I could handle with just Lois. And the dreams. And the headaches. And the no-way-out. I don't want to get all moany and whiny about this but even if it's a unique scientific opportunity giving up your life to keep someone else alive is kind of hard, and pain is tiring and headaches, you know, hurt, and while the burn marks weren't too bad, they were tender, so if they got clawed or gouged that hurt too.
And the dreams . . . sometimes, after a really vivid one, it was like I never quite woke out of it all day, like if I only went a little bit farther into this trance I was trying to hold off (or maybe I was trying to bring it on), I'd see big bus-wheel eyes shining at me from the trees around the house. I wasn't putting on the Space Cadet thing, I was there. And I'm sorry I was a jerk. But Lois pretty much blotted everything else out.
I don't know how everybody else stood it, everybody else who knew about Lois, even if it wasn't them she couldn't be more than three feet away from all the time. Being a Space Cadet was also kind of a help, for me, being so out of it.