This had been a while back, as I say, really when Lois was only just getting big enough to like experiment with, including that she'd be willing to go far enough away from Mom to fetch a stick. So I got a stick, waved it at her a moment so she'd notice it instead of me, said, "Fetch!" in a firm, no-nonsense manner, and then I threw it. First time I went after it she went after me because that's what she always did. Second time you could see her thinking about it. Please feel free to insert a verb you like better than "thinking." Third time I threw it and yelled "Fetch!" she came with me when I went after it like she was still thinking about it but hadn't reached any conclusions. Fourth time I hesitated a little bit at the end so she got there first. She sort of pawed at the stick for a moment and looked at me inquiringly. So far so dog really. The fifth time I went after it a little more slowly yet, just to see what would happen and this time she positively shot in front of me (those legs a blur and her panting a little harsh grunting noise with breathless I'm-sure-explanatory peeps in it), and started to pick it up. . ..
She tried to pick it up with one of her forelegs. Fourteen-month-old dragons don't have much grasping strength, and they're also still effectively four-legged. According to Old Pete they start using their front legs more like arms when their wings get big enough to provide a different balance, before they can fly. In Lois' case that started happening when she was about three, although that may be early because, of course, she was still trying to be me, in spite of . . . no, I'm getting ahead of myself believe me, it's getting harder and harder not to . . . she was trying to be me and I'm two-legged and two-handed. And so she tried to pick up a stick with a front claw, and she couldn't do it.
And the joy instantly drained out of her. It was awful. She flopped down on the ground beside the horrible stick and started to cry. No, there weren't any tears, but I didn't have any trouble translating what the noise she was making was, any more than you don't know what a dog's wails mean when you've locked him up and are leaving him behind. And the sound she was making went right through me and aggravated the Headache till I was seeing her through this twinkly red haze and that did not help the situation.
I raced up to her, threw myself down beside her — swearing at myself for a fool — and picked the stick up in my mouth. (This was not easy. Human faces are too flat, and your nose gets in the way.) And then began waddling back the way we'd come, on my hands and knees.
She stopped crying and followed me. It was a measure of how demoralized she was that she wasn't instantly thrilled that I was down on her level. But she'd never seen me go any distance on my hands and knees before (ow ow ow ow ow, just by the way: also yuck yuck yuck yuck about the taste of the stick) and she got, I think, so interested, she forgot to be her usual kind of excited. And I swear she suddenly got it about how helpless I was on all fours. It was like this aspect of my strange reluctance to get down on the ground with her finally made sense to her (so far as I know she never understood about my eczema. For which I am very grateful. Awful sort of thing to know, that you burn your mom every time you touch her). I went all the way back on my hands and knees, and very tired and cramped and chafed I was when I got there too. But I wanted to be sure that if she was getting the lesson at all this time she was going to get it RIGHT. Then I threw the stick again.
We both started after it. I didn't hurry and she got there first. She picked it up in her mouth. She carried it back to where I'd thrown it from, and then danced around peeping and burbling (through the stick in her mouth. A sort of urrrrrglrrrrrr noise). "Hot stuff, Lois," I said (there was no way I was going to say, "Good dragon, Lois!" and "hot stuff" seemed kind of a relevant praise-phrase for a dragon), and gave her a hard rub between the eyes, which she liked. (Rubbing her between the eyes would actually make her sit still for a few minutes, while you did it, which was useful, till your fingers started getting tired, because you had to do it hard.)
Okay. This is pretty cool. Training stage accomplished. She was happy, I was happy, it worked, we're back on track, trauma averted (I hoped). So it's time for rationalization. Dogs aren't trying to be you, they automatically do stuff with their mouths because that's what their instincts tell them to do. (Although I don't think a dog ever brings a stick back first time. They've got it that it's a game, but they have other ideas about the rules.) So dragons imprint on their moms more individually than puppies do. No big deal.
Except that there's one other thing. She took the last three steps back to me on her hind legs, or she tried to. She fell over between each step, mind you, but she got up again, half-swayed and half squunched on her butt forward, and fell over, three times.
I could have got round the picking-it-up-in-her-hand, I think, but this was a, ahem, step too far, ha ha. I don't know about yours but my okaymaybe-they-sort-of-have-a-kind-of-language-sometimes-but-animals-are-only-animals-really rationalization faculty goes screeeeeeeeek at this point and then breaks down entirely, and like suddenly it's a whole new world and anything is possible.
Maybe it won't seem like that big a deal to you, because you already know what happened later. But it was a big deal to me. The Headache was so bad at that moment that I'd had to sit down, so Lois pranced over and sat on me, complete with victory stick. The red haze began to clear, but my vision was still kind of distorted, and I had a stronger than usual feeling that if I looked really carefully into the trees I'd see some of those big deep shiny dragon eyes that I saw in my dreams looking back at me. It's hard to think clearly when your skull is trying to explode, but this is the idea that I suddenly couldn't get rid of That the reason why I'd got away with this Scam of Scams, this Swindle of Swindles, this Flimflam of Flimflams, this human raising a dragonlet, was because Lois' mom was hanging around keeping an eye on me. Plus Grace's cooking of course.
But it's way too late for you to send for the small white van with the smiling men holding out the jacket with the sleeves that tie round the back, so you might as well relax.
And Lois did occasionally remind me of Snark. This was one of those times. Possibly because this was a very special stick she was compromising her principles and chewing on it, and drooling lovely gooey wood fragments all over my jeans.
Anyway. It wasn't some kind of geometric progression of insanity after that. I don't think. It was like only a small gradual worsening in the mental terrain (with about as many switchbacks as hiking across Smokehill). I still missed having someone who spoke good English to talk to about it, but because of stuff like this, I mostly hadn't told any one else about it. So once we were alone at Westcamp I didn't feel so much trapped-with-Lois-the-baby dragon-my-unique-and-dangerous responsibility as the people back at the Institute might have thought I did. Although I was and she was. And I did have the two-way on all the time I was indoors.
And this was when the Headache changed again. It had sort of given warning on the trip out to Westcamp but had then subsided when we arrived and started dragging the trees off the roof and killing deer and so on. Maybe it had been regrouping. I know you're bored with me and my Headache. My fairy tale about Lois' mother keeping an eye on us is creative but unconvincing, right? A headache is a headache. No it isn't. Lois headaches had always been different, had always had a slight sense of the Alien Spy Thingy in Your Brain. This latest model was definitely several rungs higher on the ladder of weirdness.