(One of the theories about Mom's death has to do with maybe her finding out that someone in Kenya had managed to steal our fence specs but couldn't get them to work. Kenya has the worst poacher problems and everyone knows their dragon population is going down and they never had more than about three hundred dragons to start with. The worst idea is how maybe she was pushed off that cliff because something was done to her before she was pushed — that someone was trying to get it out of her, about our fence — and she wouldn't have known, okay? She wouldn't know any more about the fence than I do. She wouldn't have known anything — and then they had to push her to hide what they'd done. You're sitting there thinking, You poor sad paranoid schmuck, it's too bad about your mom but you keep hammering on about Smokehill being so poor and all; you can't have it both ways. True. But we're dead poor because we're trying to protect our dragons. There are still guys out there who think there's a fortune to be made off dragon hormones or dragon blood or powdered dragon bone or something — and that the only reason we're not breeding them for this is because we're all wimps.)
So Old Pete took the padlocks off his cages and the dragons ambled out, sniffed the air, and wandered off. You can tell from his journal that he can't decide if it was a huge anticlimax or not. It was, he said, almost as if they were expecting him to open the doors.
Dragons have some peculiarities if they really are reptiles, because they aren't, properly speaking, cold-blooded: but that's because they have an extra stomach full of fire, right? Which you'd think might be pretty hard to keep going in the kind of winters we have but they do it somehow. Everybody's first idea was that dragons must have learned to hibernate, but Pete kept saying that they didn't hibernate, that when he had them in cages they just ate more when it got cold and when he let them out of the cages, after the wall went up, he continued to find fresh tracks and shed scales and banged-up trees from dragons passing too close or scratching their backs, all winter long — as well as a lot of disappearing wildlife.
One of the most important things our Rangers do is keep an eye on the numbers of the dragon dinners, partly because bison and sheep and deer and antelope are so much easier to count than dragons. Dragons are incredibly hard to count. Australia and Kenya say the same, it's not just us. The usual sorts of field surveys just don't work with dragons. Uh-huh, you say, thirty to eighty feet long (plus tail), flies, breathes fire, and you can't find them to count? Yup. That's right. You can't. After Old Pete opened the cages, they didn't just wander off, they disappeared. That's one of the reasons that a few people — Old Pete included — started wondering if dragons were, you know, intelligent.
Well, the mainstream scientists weren't having any of that, of course, humans are humans and animals are animals and anyone who says it's not that simple is a sentimental fool and a Bad Scientist. There is nothing you can say to a scientist that's worse than accusing them of being a Bad Scientist. They'd rather be arrested for bank robbery than for sentimentality. But when somebody found out that all the lichen on Mars get together occasionally and suddenly go from a lot of mindless little symbiotic thingies that eat and excrete and exchange gases and not much else and become a THINKING MACHINE, all kinds of ideas back on Earth blew up into smithereens, including some scientific definitions of sentimentality.
Most of the money has gone into studying lichen — there are getting to be so many information-collecting satellites around Mars it's going to have rings soon, like Saturn — and there's a fair number of new studies of Earth lichen going on too, just in case any of it is getting ideas. But Draco australiensis has come in for a little of it, because of the old question of their intelligence, and we can use all the money-dribbles we can get, even if they come attached to obnoxious, know-it-all-already scientists who have to be told no seventy-nine times in a row before they begin to believe that if they want to study our dragons they have to follow our rules.
That's one of the reasons dragons attract so many tourists — and so many fruit loops — the creepy pull of dragon intelligence. It's a thrill, so long as dragons are safely on the endangered list and only exist behind walls in a few parks, to have something that could not only eat you, but think about it. Although the fact that dragons have never seemed very interested in eating humans means that we have the slack to be cute about it.
But it's interesting that the f.l.s mostly only ever wanted to argue about what dragons are. Not many want to argue about whether australiensis is intelligent. They come here because they're fascinated but they get here and they kind of back off. Too scary maybe. I shied away from thinking about it much myself although as a kind of cool distant concept I always liked the idea — dragons are intelligent — right, okay, got it, now stop.
It's a big thing with tree-huggers that dolphins might be intelligent, but you can go have mystic experiences dancing with phosphorescent dolphins in the eternal sea at dawn and come back transmuted into your higher self. Not an option with dragons. The guys with sixty-seven PhDs who submit study projects to investigate dragon intelligence — or rather the very, very occasional ones who actually pass Dad's thermonuclear screening and assessment process — usually give up and go home early. If our dragons were hard even to count were they going to come out and play mind games with academic chuckleheads? I kept thinking there ought to be a good cartoon in it somewhere something like Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. I leave it to you who plays what.
Dorks and villains have been trying to get in here without permission since before Pete got national park status. It just got a little harder after that, not that many of them care about laws, but they have to care about the fence. That fence, which is the single biggest reason why we're so poor. Most of what to Congress probably does look like a multi-whale pod-supporting ocean of money goes to maintaining that fence. But it does keep our dragons in, in the popular imagination — I told you that dragons don't move around much, but try to convince Mr. Normal of that. The fence would also keep the fruit loops out, except — damn! there's a gate.
I learned to read so I could read Pete's memoirs. Mom used to worry that I was growing up strange because I wasn't interested in the usual kids' books. Goodnight Moon, baaaaarf. I didn't even like Where the Wild Things Are because none of them looked enough like dragons. But I still remember the first time Dad read me "Jabberwocky." It's probably my earliest memory; I think I was three. Mom — who was busy worrying that The Cat in the Hat didn't move me — said, "Oh, Frank, you'll only confuse him. It's not even in English," but Dad was having one of his manic fits. He'd done amateur theater when he was younger, and he could still turn that crazy public thing on when he wanted to. He doesn't do it much any more — except for congressional subcommittees — but he still did it when I was little. I don't know whether I was confused by "Jabberwocky" or not, but I was riveted by it, as my dad shouted and danced and snicker-snacked across my bedroom. I'd've named Snark Jabberwock if it hadn't been too hard to say ("Jabberwock, sit! Jabberwock, stay!") so I settled for Snark.