But that's supposed to be at least part of the excuse why saving a dragon's life is against the law. A great big fire-snorting flying thing that got a taste, even accidentally, for human was way too dangerous. We weren't going to hand them any ops. And a smelly hot palm-sized slimy grub that was going to grow into a great big fire-snorting flying thing that couldn't be sent back to live with its relatives was going to be even more dangerous. I couldn't bear to think about Lois growing up to be dangerous but. . . . Maybe the lawmakers weren't quite as stupid as I thought. They probably had in the backs of their tiny mean minds too that humans who do stuff like half kill themselves and/or get paid crap wages and/or live a hundred miles from a decent restaurant and/or have never seen a movie in a real theater, are crazy, or they wouldn't do it, but the reason they do it (besides being crazy) is that they get kind of fond of the animals they rescue. Which is maybe the most dangerous thing of all.
The first time I saw Lois climb up Gulp's shoulder and hang over her neck like a two-year-old dragon would do with its own real mom, there was a big lump in my throat that had nothing to do with the prospect of what might happen to me the next time Gulp lost her temper.
But Lois always came back to me — so far. And I didn't know whether I should be trying to persuade her to stay with Gulp, or whether that would just mess her up further. Who knew what she'd had to learn to survive her weird upbringing. I sometimes felt I was "overhearing" conversations between the big rock and the little rock, but if you're going to ask me, I'm going to say that they weren't speaking the same language. Like if a German parent was suddenly reunited with his kid who'd been being raised by a French family. They wouldn't talk to each other very well. And Gulp was always silent, and Lois, having spent her first two years hanging out with yacketing, non-telepathic humans, was always, well, chattering. I wonder if Gulp got this. I hope so.
I didn't talk to Lois anywhere near as much when Gulp was around as when she wasn't, but I still talked to her. For one thing, if Gulp was watching over our shoulders (brrrrr) while we played one of our learning games, I needed to hear myself talk about what we were doing to steady myself down. I just didn't chat. It also occurred to me, rather uncomfortably, that if I talked, Gulp might get the idea that Lois didn't talk because she was defective, but because I talked. This probably wouldn't make Gulp like me any better, but . . . well, like what if the Germanspeaking parent found out that the French family that had been raising his kid were all drug addicts or serial murderers or something? How do you balance the fact that your kid's alive at all because of them with the fact that they're really bad for her?
And the little rock in my head got all sort of warm and soft and glowy and gooey every time Lois left Gulp and came galumphing back toward me. I wasn't making it up. I wasn't.
So, this non-idyll had to end, one way or another, right? It ended a lot sooner and more dramatically than I might have guessed, although if I hadn't been so preoccupied with Gulp I would have picked up that something was going on back at the Institute. Among other things it should have occurred to me that there was no way I was keeping my own interesting new preoccupation to myself Anyone who had any spare brain for noticing anything except that I was still signing in like I should, should have noticed that I sounded funny. Distracted. Okay, more distracted. And they didn't.
I wasted some time trying to figure out some kind of code to get the idea of Gulp across to Martha, but I couldn't think of any. It wasn't anything we'd set up code for. "Hey, guess what, there's this big dragon who comes to visit Lois every day." We had a phrase ("good sunrise this morning") for having seen dragons, but I was afraid if I said that every day she'd get frightened, so I didn't. I didn't even say it once. It didn't occur to me to say it after Gulp's first visit, because there's a big difference between seeing a dragon or dragons flying gloriously silhouetted against the sky at a nice distance and having a close encounter of an almost fatal kind with a dragon.
I tried to remember if Billy had ever mentioned any close sightings of dragons on the ground — coming around an outcropping or out of a narrow pass or something "gee what's the funny smell, smells like dragon only stronger . . . oh" — and I couldn't remember any. I personally had never even seen one of the trees they used as scratching posts although Billy had — not till Gulp I mean: and watching her make a big pine tree shake like a sapling in a gale is another of those little awe-inspiring details of time spent in the company of a full-grown dragon. Mostly dragon sign like that is way far in (the scales blow in the wind, so you get them everywhere), farther than I've ever gone. Westcamp's on the edge. It wouldn't have been surprising if I'd, uh, had a good sunrise at Westcamp, but Gulp was cruising out of normal dragon range.
So I should have been worried when I didn't hear from Martha for three days. Martha checked in most days. But all I was, was disappointed — and a little worried that maybe she'd tried some time when my radio was pretending to be ornamental art. (Pretending badly. Our radios are not beautiful objects.) But since I hadn't figured out how to tell her about Gulp, I wasn't missing talking to her as much, if you follow me. I just wanted to hear her voice. Even radio-squeaky.
You can't really tell much from the voices over our two-ways; when they're clear they're clear enough but too clacky and mechanical to guess much about tone. One morning about twenty days after we saw Gulp for the first time, Dad said, "How are you doing for food?"
"Fine," I said, more or less truthfully. "Getting a little tired of beans, maybe."
"You need the meat for — " said Dad in one of those weird sentences that if anyone had been listening they should have thought suspicious. Maybe Dad just sounded like your usual nutty professor type, never finishing his sentences. Martha and I had a much better system.
"Well, I'm careful," I said, which was to say that Lois was getting the meat, and I was getting the beans. I didn't mind all that much because I was pretty tired of venison too and I didn't seem to have time to set rabbit snares any more. Not that I think they'd have caught anything. Everything cleared out once Gulp started visiting. We didn't even get as many noises at night.
Unfortunately during a slack moment (mine) Lois had made a dive for my plate and got a mouthful of ketchup and fallen instantly in love. So now she tried to climb in my lap and eat my beans once I put ketchup on them. Obviously I wasn't going to tell Dad this over the two-way. Or about what I was going to do if she got mad and squirted some fire at me the next time I pushed her away. (Do dragons have a Teenager from Hell phase? And if so, when? Before or after they get so big you can't push them away?) Or about wondering what ketchup would do to dragon physiology. I spent most of my life wondering what something or other was doing to dragon physiology. I hadn't realized till we got out here how much I'd left all the nutrition stuff up to Grace. But in theory I didn't let her eat anything with sugar in it, just like a good mom. Ketchup has sugar in it. (Do dragons get ADHD?)