And she was hot. Zowie, was she ever hot. But it's funny though, it wasn't as overwhelming as you might think. You know how the closer you get to a fire the hotter it gets and if you're cold and you're longing for the heat you're like always trying to decide how close you can get before your eyelashes singe and your cheeks flake off? She was more like an electric blanket turned on high. So grown-up dragons develop temperature control maybe — although I wasn't offering to rub her tummy. She was almost attractively hot, like a hot water bottle that never cooled off. Except that she was the size of 1,000,000,000,000 electric blankets and had teeth as long as my legs. Not to mention my graphic memory of her flamethrower.
The way she smelled was kind of the same. It was a monster smell to go with the monster critter but it wasn't a bad smell, exactly, even if you slightly felt that if you peeled it off the dragon somehow, and then it like fell on you, it would probably crush you just as thoroughly as if the dragon itself sat on you. It was intense. Of course the famous Smokehill dragon smell was always a lot stronger once you got into the park away from the Institute — but here was living fire-breathing proof that the famous Smokehill smell was definitely dragon.
I tried not to run to the other end of the meadow from wherever she was as soon as she arrived, but I somehow always found myself at the point farthest from her kind of soon after. It gave Lois lots of exercise galumphing between us. Ha. She didn't always come at the same time and she didn't always stay for very long, but she came every day after the first. Every day. Every day I got out of bed with a knot in my stomach and wondered if she'd be back. Gulp. And she always was. Gulp. We weren't always in the meadow when she arrived either but like being called into your dad's office to get yelled at — I mean when you know that's why you're going — I used to turn around from wherever we were and trudge back there, if we weren't there, to get it over with.
I never didn't see her flying in, although I never really got used to not feeling the ground shake when she landed or as she was walking around. I don't know if we — I — got points for going to meet her or not. First time we weren't there she was sitting up looking around when we arrived. (A sitting-up dragon looks a lot bigger than any two-hundred-foot cliff, just by the way. Dragons have a corner on the whole looming thing.) After that first time she was always lying down when we arrived. Like she knew we'd come and she might as well get comfortable. If lying flat is comfortable for a dragon, which actually I wonder. But she lay down like I came to the meadow, I think. We were both trying hard.
She never fired at us — well, me — again. Although some days when she showed up she smelled smokier than other days and I wondered if she'd been hunting and if so, what. Oh, Jake, stop it. Dragons don't cat people. They never have. As far as we know. They just could. What Lois' mom did to that guy was self-defense — she wasn't trying to eat him. And it didn't even work.
But Gulp's first act on seeing me and Lois had been to try and toast me. That was almost as hard to forget as what the dead poacher had looked like.
Lois and I went on with our games, or our lessons, or whatever they were, although my concentration was a tiny bit shot somehow. I was getting used to the pressure, that is pressures, now, in my head, having something more particular to do with Lois than I'd recognized back at the Institute, where I thought it was all just some kind of hangover from the shock of Lois' mom after my mom, plus my la-la dream sense that Lois' mom's ghost or spirit or something was hanging around giving me a hand with things. But now Gulp. There'd been nothing like Gulp at the Institute.
"Getting used to" is a joke though. There was no "getting used to" about it. I was so far out of control in this situation it wasn't worth even pretending anything else. If life with Lois the last two years had been sort of day-to-day, I was down to minute-to-minute now, with Gulp around. Maybe second to second. But, I don't know, it was also maybe like the dragon had fried my worry list instead of me. I was still here. New world. New Jake, maybe.
Telepathy in books is always sort of misty. All woo-woo and staring earnestly into the middle distance and delicate and sensitive and stuff. This was like having rocks in your head. Ha ha. A whole freaking boulder field, but two of them — one big, one little — were especially active. Having two of them like that was what finally made me begin to pay attention to them as, uh, communication, even if they didn't communicate much besides "ow"
I don't know how long it might have taken me if it was just Lois and me, but thinking about it, I was pretty sure the real rock feeling had only started after Kit left — when Lois and I were alone together. I'd had Lois-related headaches since I'd had Lois, bad headaches, some of them, and kind of self-motivated. But they were still all maybe understandable just — in terms of stress and worry and the boy lost his mother when he was twelve and was a little peculiar after that wasn't he? (Humans always want stuff to be understandable the way they already do understand it.) So why wouldn't I have visions of old Mom dragon? When I was still dreaming about my own mom, and sometimes I'd woken up from those dreams with headaches too.
It's kind of embarrassing now to remember me assuming that since I was the human I was the only one of us who had anything to teach the other one. But Lois was a baby . . . it wasn't only species arrogance. I hope. I came around pretty quickly after Gulp arrived. I want to believe it's not only because I was too scared to be arrogant.
When Gulp was there she moved her head around to be as near to Lois as she could be, according to some rule of her own (I guessed) about not getting too close. At first Lois ignored her, but I've already said that Lois was curious about everything, and Gulp was far too big and strange not to be interesting. And didn't it occur to Lois that there was something, you know familiar about Gulp? It had been her roar that had jolted Lois out of terror and into defiance. Maybe Lois had just decided that she was going to go down fighting (while her pathetic mom remained glued to the spot, draped in his ripped T-shirt). But she'd reacted to that roar almost as if it meant something to her.
I was really torn, watching Lois begin to pay attention to Gulp, and Gulp trying to respond — I was sure — in a way that would make Lois, well, like her. I was torn because this was what saving Lois was supposed to be about: raising her till she could go back and live with dragons and be a dragon. Not have to spend the rest of her life at Westcamp or some other human place. If we could figure out how to socialize her first so the dragons would take her. But I hadn't expected to have to think about it so soon (speaking of my reigning tendency to want not to think about things). It would be a huge, HUGE load off if Gulp was going to take Lois away from me . . . it should he the most WONDERFUL, thing, that ultimate miracle I desperately wanted for Lois. Why wasn't I leaping for joy? But . . . I would miss her. A lot. (Duh.) Like I'd maybe adapted too far or something, headache — blasted dragon — mom Jake. Could I remember how to be an undragoned human any more?
And even in the middle of worrying about losing Lois and/or being made into human-burger it occurred to me pretty strongly that Gulp was acting, well, weirdly. Isn't it this whole big thing when you try and return a human-reared animal to the wild? It doesn't know how to be what it is, and its real relatives won't have anything to do with it because it stinks of human and doesn't know how to behave. And here was Gulp trying hard to win Lois over — and letting me hang around. The first successful reentry of two half-grown Yukon wolf pups to a wild pack had involved the gruesome death of one of the human minders, and they'd given up trying to reintroduce griffins and Caspian walruses and brought them back to their nice cages before they died. Which has to have been really depressing for the humans. (Although less depressing than being eaten by your fosterling's relatives.) I could maybe guess how they felt. (I don't know what they'd've done if they ever found an orphan baby Nessie. Sat down and cried, probably.)