So anyway that was my life. Meanwhile . . .
The very very first instant thing that had happened after Billy gave the bad news over the two-way from Northcamp, is that our rules for anyone getting normal permission to enter the park to study something, any farther than the usual short, guided tourist treks, suddenly got impossible — even the zoo lizard note-takers got banned. You have a certificate signed by God that you can come in? Sorry. God's not good enough.
At first since as I've told you, I wasn't into the big picture about anything, I just thought "some good out of a whole cheezing lot of bad" that we weren't going to have nosy prying researcher types around at all. But we'd only ever had a few researcher types around at a time, and their nosying and prying was usually pretty focused — and actually some of them were pretty nice too — and instead we had all these investigator people hanging around wanting to, well, investigate, and there were a lot of them, and none of them were nice, and they wanted to investigate EVERYTHING, so we didn't finish ahead after all.
Almost everything. At least they didn't want to investigate the Chief Ranger's house and even the Institute director's nutcase son was mostly only interesting as a side issue, of how living in the wilderness was bad for children, I guess. Because I was a kid — and because of the nightmares and what the cadaver removal guys had said — and Billy had somehow managed to subtract the "solo" out of it so most people kind of thought he'd been there too — they didn't insist on interviewing me all over the place. Some nice-cop type took my statement once and then they left me alone. Maybe I put over "pathetic idiot" really well too and they decided they weren't going to get any more out of me. Although that meant they immediately wanted to take their high-tech magnifying glasses and deerstalker hats (ha ha ha) and stuff into the park where it happened, but they were going to do that anyway.
A long time later I asked Dad if they hadn't thought of pretending not to know anything about the poacher or the dead dragon — Pine Tor is twenty miles from Northcamp, and Billy had only officially scheduled us as far as Northcamp. Dad said that of course they had but had rejected it. In the first place, we don't like lying. You have to work too hard on keeping your story straight if you're lying. (We know.) But the big issue was, as always, PR.
Some of the other big predators bag the occasional human in some of the other wilderness parks, but that's okay or something (except to the bagged guy's friends and family), part of the natural order out in the wild, the risk you take by going there, yatta yatta. Dragons are different. Like those two speleologists who disappeared on their way to the Bonelands twenty years ago — you know about them, right? — are still getting brought up pretty much every time Smokehill gets mentioned in the national press, and the point is they disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to them. Quick — how many people have been taken out by grizzlies — are known to have been taken out by grizzlies — in the last twenty years? You don't know, do you? But it's more than two. Maybe it would be easier if more people did deny that our dragons exist.
We couldn't risk it that the villain hadn't told someone what he was going to do, and then having to arrange our faces in the appropriate expressions of surprise and consternation when someone came to ask where he was. Which in fact he had done — left a record of what he was planning to do, I mean. ("I'm going to break into Smokehill and ruin everything because I'm a sick, greedy bastard.") With his girlfriend. Can you imagine a guy like that having a girlfriend? But our Rangers cover eastern Smokehill pretty thoroughly, and a dead human might have turned up anyway (even if the dragon was ash by then), and it would be major bad press for us if it didn't because nobody but someone who lives there realizes what "wilderness" really means, and, as I keep banging on about, everybody's really jumpy about our wilderness because it has dragons in it.
So anyway we had the investigative police-type people and the investigative scientist-type people and the investigative tech-type people and a few investigative spy-type people, who tried so badly to look like the rest of 'em that even I noticed: I hadn't realized dragons counted as intrigue — and of course the investigative journalists who were a total pain because if it wasn't bad it wasn't good copy.
Especially now that a dragon had killed someone (circumstances irrelevant) there was no way anyone, which is to say investigative creeps, was going to be allowed into the park without an escort, and Dad did manage to prevent our being swamped with the National Guard right away (that came later), which left the Rangers, and then some high-ranking jerk insisted that as a condition to not being swamped by the National Guard, all the escorts carry guns. If anyone had stopped to think about it they would have noticed that the grenade launchers and bazookas and things that the poacher had been carrying hadn't done him any good. . . . Anyway this made even our Rangers cranky, and it takes a lot to make our Rangers cranky, but being investigator-minders meant that they weren't doing any of the stuff they felt was their real job, about keeping an eye on the park. And the dragons. And Rangers only carry guns if they want fresh meat for dinner. Not to mention what a big rifle weighs.
But since the fence went up, and Smokehill became Smokehill, we hadn't had any successful burglars, thieves or murderers. At least we didn't know of any — the two guys from twenty years ago still haven't turned up. That's an eighty-six-year clean record. Till now. And the first conclusion everyone had jumped to was that someone must have finally managed to steal the fence specs — that that had to have been how our poacher got in. And if it had happened once presumably it could happen again. The thieves might even be out there flogging them on eBay. Speaking of feeling insecure. We'd trusted that fence. The techies were working like blazes to change the waves or fields or the particle flow or some damn thing or things so that if there were stolen specs out there they wouldn't work any more, but the fence had been hard enough to invent in the first place. . .
So why we didn't have staff dropping like hailstones in a spring blizzard with weird stress diseases and panic attacks and stuff I have no idea. But we didn't. We all hung in there. Even Dad. He's a great guy, my dad, even if he tries to hide it sometimes. Sometimes I think about those first months with Lois, before we were like used to unbearable strain, and I think Dad and I probably never looked each other in the face that whole time. Although Dad came down and had dinner with Billy and Grace and me (and Lois) almost every night. And started a joke about how he'd let me sign on as an apprentice when he found out I'd he living with Billy so he could sponge up more of Grace's cooking. So at least he got something good out of it.
But somewhat strange behavior on the part of the only child of the widowed head of the Institute wasn't too much commented on. I heard one cop investigator say to another one, "You know I think this has addled Dr. Mendoza. He's pretty well turned his only kid over to the Rangers, you heard about that?"
I was sorting postcards on my knees behind the counter in the gift shop. This was the sort of thing I did now, to make myself noticeable, instead of mooching around in tourist-free zones. You wouldn't have caught me dead offering to sort postcards in the gift shop before Lois. And furthermore I'd got there on time. I'd said I'd be in at three, and here it was 3:05, and I was already here with a lapful of boxes.