But with about fifty miles between us and the gate, that fourth evening, I actually felt myself relaxing. It was such a strange feeling at first I didn't know what it was. I felt light-headed and sort of floppy or sloppy and my first thought was, "Oh no — I can't get sick now" — and then it occurred to me that I was just unwinding for like the first time in almost two years. (Or maybe four years. Since Mom died.)
It was true I always felt a little easier about things, which is to say about Lois, when I was out in the park with her, on our little field trips with Billy or Kit or Whiteoak, although even then it took about a day to sink in. So on the fourth evening of our not little but Big No Going Back trip, when Lois indicated that her working day was at an end by galloping up to me (she had a very strange gallop, diagonal, with her unwieldy tail held awkwardly to one side, and while her little legs were nearly a blur she didn't actually go very fast), cannoning into my feet, and starting to snore, I sat down, slipped my backpack off, and started trying to unknot my muscles, both from General Permanent Life at the Institute Maximum Stress and also not-familiar-enough walking-and-packing-through-the-park sheer physical weariness.
We were at the top of a little dell, with a stream at the bottom (there was always a stream at the bottom of dells in eastern Smokehill) going chucklechucklechucklehahahaha over the stones, the way running water does, and spruce and a few white birch raggedly climbing the slope among the rock and scree and scrub. I'd managed to slither into an almost chairlike series of small hummocks padded with dead leaves and pine needles (which were probably wet, but I didn't have to know that till I got up again) and wasn't sorry to be sitting still for a few minutes, guiltily aware that I should be helping gather firewood and set up camp, but if nobody called me. . . . I was half asleep myself when a bare browny-gray branch near the top of the nearest spruce spread its wings and turned into a great horned owl. I swear it came swooping down in our direction for no other reason than to get a closer look at Lois. That woke me up. But even awake (welclass="underline" call it fuzzily half awake) I felt different. Lighter. Sillier. Tell me a bad joke and I'll laugh. I just lay there enjoying the sensation (and feeling my backside getting soggy).
In about half an hour I had to wake Lois up and coax her toward the fire Billy by then had got going at the nearest plausible campsite, flickeringly visible from where we sat, or lay. Once Lois had crashed, she tended to stay crashed, and if I tried to move her mostly she ignored me, but if I performed the ultimate betrayal and went off and left her she would peep heartbreakingly (although as her chest deepened so did her peeping, and she had to work at it to sound as pathetic as she had when she was littler) and scrabble feebly with her claws like she just couldn't move another inch, and since this was, after all, an orphan baby animal of a rare and endangered species no human had ever successfully raised before, I was always worried that she meant it. Fortunately she could be lured by the prospect of a nap beside a fire. She did love fires. It was one of the things that made me, poor flimsy 98.6-degree-Fahrenheit wuss that I am, feel really guilty. (I fortified myself by remembering the first night twenty-three months ago, trying to convince the repulsive little globby thing I'd picked up that it didn't have to live in my shirt, that it'd be fine by the fire.)
She groaned like she was being tortured but she came. In her defense she wasn't used to spending all day walking any more than I was (she also didn't know how to walk — she was either zigzagging full tilt from Interesting Thing to Interesting Thing or keeled over) and I was built better for it, but I'd unfolded kind of slowly when I got up too, and I was really glad she agreed to do her own staggering, so I didn't have to carry her.
I already had a new mantra, from about the afternoon of the first day: We're farther in than we've ever been. It repeats really nicely when you're walking: da da da thump da da da (well, da again, but you can run "we've ever" into two) thump. We weren't really, not yet, but that's where we were going, and also it put a good spin on all the No Going Back. We were going farther in than we'd been since I first brought her home as a blob, when she was still small enough to fit under my shirt. The fourth night it was like I was beginning to believe it, or believe that we were going to get away with it somehow. At least for a while longer.
I couldn't think about it that I'd probably never be able to bring Lois back to the Institute, because she'd've got too big, and would have wings and a flame-thrower . . . couldn't think about the fact that no doubt Billy and Dad knew this just as well as I did and they hadn't said anything about it either, at least not to me. I mean, sure, we'd talked about our long-range plan — substitute, about Lois getting to the point that she didn't have to have me around all the time, but we'd only talked about it sort of sidelong and half casual, like it was obvious and irrelevant and didn't really need discussing.
Lois and I were both stiff the second morning and worse the third (although this may have been aggravated by the power struggle over how close we slept to the fire every night). I know this is a fitness thing and proves that we weren't, but it's funny how you get one day like free of charge. The second day starts to count (especially after that first night on the cold hard ground). And then it's the day after the second night when it all catches up with you. In my defense I was carrying a lot more gear than I would've been if this was just a few days of an ordinary field trip.
That third morning Lois was so slow starting off that nobody had to notice I would have been slow. Although maybe this wasn't so useful (I mean worth it to my vanity) because I had to carry her more. Finally Billy and Jane split my gear between them and I concentrated on carrying Lois for a while. I was a little worried about her because there was no drama about her collapses. She just collapsed. And if I didn't notice right away and kept shuffling on she didn't even sound like an opera heroine when she cried after me. She just sounded exhausted. But I thought about how tired I felt and decided this was just what happens to you when you're still pretty little and you go for a real walk in our park. She may have been picking up on our motivation or something too — I wouldn't put it past her to notice that this wasn't a field trip like our other field trips. We weren't really going any faster than we ever went when she and I were part of the convoy, but we were more determined. And then of course I had to have one of my Guilt Attacks because she was a dragon and she shouldn't have spent the last twenty-three months in a house.
She fell asleep with her head on my shoulder and her (prickly) brow ridge wedged under my left ear. I hadn't had a burned ear before; on other, less intense trips she was too busy looking around. Always new experiences with Lois around. Oh well.
But like all the rest of us (humans) who'd gone for walks in our park and had to learn how, she brightened up again slowly over the next few days. She was already better that fourth day, when I had my unexpected insight into the concept of "relaxation." And a good thing too, since the farther we got from the institute the rougher the tracks got. I was also starting to notice that while we went up and down and back and forth and sideways and other — sideways the trend was definitely uphill. The Bonelands were several thousand feet higher than the Institute, they were just far enough away to make the slope gradual. Sort of. You rarely went up anything: You were busy tacking for the best footing, and sometimes you snaked up the same bit of slope several times before it like stayed up and stopped sending you back down into another streambed. We had lots of prairie farther in, mainly north and south; the Bone