I'm still doing a lousy job of giving you any sense of time passing. Well, time passed, and all of us pre-adult things kept getting bigger, me, Martha, Eleanor . . . Lois. And the seasons kept changing, the way they do. You don't not notice things like which season it is in Smokehill. (Well. You get confused sometimes, like when it snows in August, or when the February thaw is longer than usual and every critter in the zoo and the orphanage starts shedding, and everything underfoot that isn't rock turns to mud, and that year you have to go through this twice.) But weather and seasons are kind of the same even when they're different: It may be spring now, but winter will come round again soon enough. You know that. So I was lying awake smelling farts like burned toast and scorched hamburger, and thinking about how Lois was getting on for two years old.

She'd turn two right before I'd turn seventeen. I'd have my high-school equivalency certificate by then easy, and then I could stop pretending to be a fast-track early-acceptance Ranger apprentice and become a real one  -  out of reach of social workers and bureaucrats. At last. And doctors trying to treat me for a unique variety of eczema. We'd been so lucky so far. (I keep saying that. But it's maybe the most important thing of all.) Martha told me there was a big new Friends of Smokehill movement that was holding the Searles off. The Searles were the parents of the villain. Somehow I didn't manage not to learn their/his last name. They said that while it was true that their son had been in the park when he shouldn't, he only wanted to see a dragon and that this one had turned on him for no reason. Like they were there and saw it happen. Like that explained the spare grenades he'd still been wearing when she flamed him and the big-bore lightning rifle heavy enough to penetrate six rhinos standing in a row. Even I'd half-noticed the heavy artillery at the time. Sure he'd only wanted to see a dragon.

Our Friends had made a biiiig fuss about the lightning rifle and the grenades, which is why the Searles hadn't closed us down yet, but the Searles said that he would of course have taken gear to protect himself in case of an unprovoked attack . . . blah blah blah. . . . The forensic morgue guys had even proved that he'd died instantly when she flamed him, so he had to have shot her first. But . . .

Several eons ago I'd been hanging around the ticket booth bugging Katie who has always been really good about being bugged (even before Eleanor was born). Snark was with me because he always was with me. I had him lying down. My parents had hammered it into me that if I was going to have a dog I had to train him because of all the tourists (and, of course, the park itself). This was fine with me. It's not like I wanted to play football with my pals every afternoon after school. So I trained Snark to do all kinds of stuff. Lying down for a few minutes while I gave Katie a hard time was nothing to Snark.

There were only a few tourists around and I wasn't paying attention. Snark was behind me, and Katie's view was blocked by the corner of the ticket booth. I turned around in time to see some kid only a little younger than me trying to poke Snark in the eye  -  I don't know, to get a reaction or something?  -  because Snark would have been ignoring anybody who was a stranger. Several things happened at once. I saw Snark jerk his head away from the poking finger, the kid said, "You're a really stupid dog, aren't you?" and poked at his other eye, I yelled, "Hey!" and Snark jerked his head again . . . and growled.

And the mother of this kid suddenly appeared from nowhere  -  where had she been a minute ago?  -  shrieking that this was a vicious dog and we were to destroy it at once and it was savaging her only child in a national park, and she was going to write to her congressman  -  I was screaming that her kid had been trying to poke my dog in the eye, and Katie was trying to shut us both up. Katie lied and said that she'd seen the kid  -  she knew Snark, it wasn't really like lying  -  the mother said she didn't believe it, I was nearly in tears  -  I now had Snark standing beside me with my hand around his collar  -  and it might have been a whole lot worse than it was except the kid tried to sneak around and give Snark a kick while everyone else was busy yelling at each other, and not only Katie but a couple of other Rangers who'd been drawn by the commotion saw it. The mother saw it too although she denied it. She didn't deny it convincingly however and when Katie told her she had better take her freaky kid and leave, she actually went.

People are amazing. They'll do stuff you can't believe anyone would do and not believe stuff that is under their noses. You can't trust them and you certainly can't reason with them. The laws are schizophrenic because people are schizophrenic. So even if the Friends of Smokehill might win against the Searles about their should-have-been-drowned-at-birth son because dragons are rare and endangered and romantic (so long as you forget they have pouches), you still had to assume we wouldn't survive the discovery of Lois. We'd not survive even worse if it came out about the eczema. It wouldn't matter that it wasn't her fault and that I didn't mind (much). It would make her a bad dragon  -  and it would make all the grown-ups around me bad grown-ups for letting it happen. And she was a bad dragon anyway  -  look at her homicidal mom  -  and we were bad (and crazy and dangerous) for having sided with the dragons against our own kind by trying to save her.

Or maybe when Lois grew up crippled or something I'd be the bad human who raised her wrong. You just don't know how other humans are going to react. And there were of course so many ways I could be raising her wrong. It was like even in my own head I couldn't answer all the people who would tell me I was, if they knew I was trying to. ALL ways were ways for me to be raising her wrong.

. . . And at this point my synapses all snap simultaneously and one of the emergency circuits cuts in and diverts me onto a familiar worry loop before I self-destruct.

. . . For example Lois ate everything now, at least she did if I didn't stop her, everything from raw spinach (ewwwww) to cream puffs with ice cream and chocolate sauce. Grace made cream puffs to die for, I admit, but you don't necessarily expect a dragon to get the details. The funny thing about Lois is that unlike a dog she never went around nose to ground vacuum-cleaning the floor or the yard or anything. What she did was watch us and eat whatever we ate. She didn't get many vegetables till she started watching Grace and Billy and not just me. But she'd eaten apples and popcorn almost from the beginning which seem even less dragony than vegetables. (You know the business of carnivores getting their greens from what the herbivore they're eating has in its stomach. And a lot of dogs like graze. Snark didn't eat grass so much as moss. He loved moss. Given the landscape around the institute he had plenty of opportunity.) If she'd ever learned to open the refrigerator door we would have been in big trouble. Fortunately she didn't. (I did keep her away from the cream puffs, after the first time, when I hadn't realized how sneaky she could be: Chocolate is poisonous to dogs, for example, and sugar isn't good for anybody, and Lois had enough marks against her already.)

And have I mentioned she snored?

But the point was that I was losing my nerve. The emergency-worry shunt was beginning to overload too because it was getting used so often. I began to feel like me turning seventeen was some kind of deadline  -  and the ads the Searles were paying for were so everywhere on TV now that Martha told me even Eleanor didn't want to watch TV any more. (Billy and Grace didn't have a TV. The farther-out Rangers' cabins mostly couldn't pick up the signal that the Institute's Godzilla-being-attacked-by-a-flying-saucer special unique aerial dish thingummy somehow squiggled through the fence.)

I was making up the deadline part, of course. Me turning seventeen  -  so long as the school equivalency went through okay  -  was going to make the game we were playing a little easier. But it wouldn't change the fact that the game was a deadly one. And you do start going nuts under pressure eventually. Not to mention the increasing difficulty of keeping a perpetually hungry, German-Shepherd-sized, more or less untrained and so far as we knew untrainable, very-high-activity-and-curiosity-level illegal animal, who might start setting fire to things any day now and whose wings were finally beginning to sprout, cooped up in a small house.

And it's a lie that Lois was untrainable. It's just that the idea of training usually means that you're supposed to end up where, if you ask someone to do something, they do it. If it's a dog it's like "sit" or "leave it." If it's a kid it's like "do your homework" or "turn the TV down." Or training like teaching a kid to get dressed in the morning, till he does it himself. Or a dog to go outside and not on the floor. I didn't housebreak Lois, she did it herself, which Billy and Dad and I sat around agreeing probably means that dragons have dens where they raise their kids, even after the kids climb out of the pouch.

I forgot to tell you, Lois doing it outdoors began the era of amazing numbers of outdoor barbecues, to give some disguise  -  and some excuse  -  for the latest eye-wateringly peculiar smells that hung around Billy and Grace's cottage. We were such barbecue freaks we were even out there in the winter and, trust me, at Smokehill, that's wacko. We did stop as soon as it got cold enough that even hot dragonlet poop froze pretty much instantly . . . but Billy had to help dig the trench next spring when it all melted  -  and we dug that trench fast.

Lois in the winter was a hoot, by the way. By her first winter she was way active enough that I'd've had to get her outdoors somehow to run some of her energy off anyway, but she was little enough and short-legged enough that without her body temperature acting as a natural snowplow it might have been a problem. As it was I worried about anybody who didn't know about her wondering about the weird snow mazes around the cottage, where Lois had melted some extremely bizarre trails. She didn't run, really, she cavorted. And I had to cavort along with her or with my pathetic human heat production I'd've frozen into a Jake-cicle.

By her second winter her neck plates gave me enough purchase that I could grab one and be kind of towed along, all bent over of course, and more clumsy than you can imagine. But laughing helps keep you warm too. The only drawback was that she ate even more after she'd melted a lot of snow. Just like in Old Pete's diaries about dragons in winter. Also just like Old Pete's diaries she showed no inclination to hibernate.

It was also pretty interesting  -  you do get a little claustrophobic here in the winter. Even being closed to tourists for three months doesn't quite offset this, although, believe me, it helps. And the main Institute building is pretty big, especially when it isn't full of tourists. (Snark and I used to have great games in the empty tourist hall.) But you miss being able to go outdoors easily  -  or being able to breathe without your nose gluing itself together and your lungs going into shock  -  or having to re-shovel the path you just shoveled the last time you had to hack your way down to the zoo or whatever  -  everybody does a lot of shoveling, besides the big plows that fit on the front of some of the jeeps  -  and although the fence slows some of the wind down, it'll still kill you if it can, and the big winter storms are just scary. How much bigger than you are are things like weather? A WHOLE LOT BIGGER. I guess you can ignore this most of the time if you live in a city, but you don't forget it for a minute in a place like Smokehill, and it sort of comes after you in winter.

But having an igniventator-equipped companion had a really funny effect on me  -  suddenly I didn't care about winter. If I felt chilly I could just warm myself against Lois for a moment; leaning over her to breathe would even unstick my nose. Except for the eating, and the relative increase of difficulty in cavorting due to whatever quantity of snow had to be melted first, the cold didn't seem to faze Lois at all. Although I admit that not having up to several thousand visitors a day the way it was in peak season, any one of whom might manage to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, might have had something to do with my suddenly more liberal attitude toward deep winter.

But even Billy's incense and me burying everything I found wasn't enough, we needed to add charcoal briquettes to the bouquet. But while Lois getting it that the entire cottage was a no-go area might mean that she was preprogrammed by thousands of years of dragons raising their dragonlets in dens, I wondered if that was all it was. Because Lois was so amazing a mimic. When we were out in the park we all went outdoors so there was a precedent. I'm just grateful I didn't have to teach her to use the toilet. But the mimic stuff gave me an idea about training. Which is how I trained her to fetch sticks  -  by fetching them myself first. Getting her to pay attention to me and what I was doing was never a problem. (Pity I couldn't teach her to do French, or Latin.) I thought of fetching sticks because it was something I thought would translate  -  I wasn't sure I could get "sit" across to something shaped like Lois, and while I tried to train her to lie down, she didn't seem to think she had to do this unless I stayed lying down too. That's the thing  -  I never felt like Lois' owner, or boss. Mom, maybe. But how many little kids actually do what their moms tell them?

So I went to Billy and told him I wanted a project that would take me into the park and let me  -  us  -  stay there for a few months. As near to uninterrupted as we could manage. I'd still be under seventeen, but as I put it to Billy (I'd thought this out pretty carefully), the reason we were going to give was that I wanted to be sure that this Ranger thing was what I really wanted to do before I turned seventeen and signed the contract. Between having to stay home and keep Lois company and the rising worry level, I'd gone on acing every test the school guys could throw at me, and they'd been throwing them at me harder because of the early-acceptance Ranger thing that I think they suspected was undue influence or something. Which it was, of course, but not from the direction they were looking in. Also because I kept proving I could, which seemed really unfair. If the rat can learn to find the food at the end of this maze, let's try a harder maze. Like just for laughs. I think school-equivalency bozos have too much time on their hands.

Why I still wanted to take all these stupid languages I was so bad at if I was going to be a Ranger no one ever asked me (if I'd wanted to make myself useful as a foreign tourist guide I should have been choosing Swahili or Catalan, the Rangers've already got most of the big languages covered)  -  but then I never let on how much I sweated those tests. And I guess it was a way for me (and maybe Dad) to pretend I still might get a PhD some day.

We cooked it up that Lois and I would stay at Westcamp, which was the smallest and the least used of the permanent camps, and study the incidence and patterning of found dragon scales, and any other signs of dragons, in that area. There'd already been dragon tracking studies at South, Limestone and High camps  -  North and East were too close to the Institute to bother  -  but nobody had bothered at Westcamp either even though it should have been the right general area. But there were too few dragon sightings there and grant writers had to go for numbers because the money givers tend to understand numbers.

But Dad had actually wanted a dragon survey done at Westcamp for years because what signs and sightings there were were odd, even for dragons, and that was why Westcamp had been built, and Dad might have done the study himself if Mom hadn't died. Maybe that was why he let Billy and me talk him into letting me go. Maybe he'd been trying to get used to the fact that I really wasn't going to be totally answerable to him any more soon enough anyway  -  and while Dad's a control freak he tries to be a fair control freak, and he would have been thinking about this. And not letting me out of his sight just wasn't an issue after Lois, it no longer existed in the new universe with Lois in it.

Maybe he'd been braced for my asking to do something much worse. I'd thought of worse things, certainly. I'd thought of trying to go to Silver Valley where we all knew there were dragons, and trying to introduce Lois there, like taking your kid to the local playground to meet other kids. I doubted that would work, and I also  -  selfishly if you like  -  didn't want to die, which seemed to me a possible side effect. I know I keep saying dragons don't kill people, but don't forget we'd just killed not just any old few dragons but a mom and her babies, and even if this didn't piss them off it could certainly have made them twitchy.

Because the dragons seemed to have noticed the poacher too, or the death of Lois' mother, after all. They're only animals, right? What really would they notice? Everybody dies, even dragons. I might keep telling myself that the dragon dreams were only dreams and what I remembered about Lois' mom was just some side effect of how awful that had been . . . but I kept remembering and I kept having the dreams and they had an effect. So I didn't seem to have the luxury of the old they're-only-animals thing much any more. What I kept thinking instead was stuff like if there'd been any other dragons on the spot, presumably they'd've taken Lois with them before I got there  -  perhaps if they'd got there soon enough they'd have rescued some of her brothers and sisters too  -  and all these thoughts brought me back to the pissed-off place. The weird thing, it seemed to me, was that it seemed to have taken almost two years for them to notice.

But the dragon movements that the Rangers could read had changed . . . and then a busload of tourists had been thrilled, almost into seizures, by the sight of a real live dragon flying by. It was so far away it was only just recognizable  -  but there really isn't anything that looks like a dragon except a dragon, if it's big enough to be even a speck with wings. A weirdly long and humpy speck with fantastically long wings, even as a speck.

And no ordinary tour-bus tourists had ever seen a live dragon before in the history of Smokehill.

It was a headline in our local papers and it made the national wire service. (Martha told me that the Searles tried to insist that we'd faked it somehow to get the public on our side, but this time the public definitely liked our version better.) As a result we got even more tourists, and we were already getting more tourists because of the Searles and their vendetta. But while a bunch of tourists seeing a dragon really made our numbers soar, which we were just about able to deal with and the money was nice, that made it even more urgent that Lois and I get as far away from the tourist area of Smokehill as possible.

I said we were just about able to deal with the latest increase in numbers. Usually we have like one person a year who manages to get away from their guide and start poking around where they're not wanted. In the two months after the tourists saw the dragon we had three escapees, and one of them (from where Nate had found him) must have gone right past our cottage. What if it had been one of the afternoons that Lois and I were outdoors training each other to fetch sticks and roll over and play dead? And talk. It wasn't. But it might have been. It was right after that that I asked Billy to help us think up a project to take us deep into the park.

The last week at the Institute I was jumping at shadows and I had to control myself really hard when I went down to the zoo because Eric knew I was leaving and while I suppose the idea that you're going to be stuck cleaning odorata's cage more often  -  I was cleaning it twice a week again by then  -  is enough to put anyone in a bad mood, Eric on a tear makes Krakatoa look like a hibachi. I was having a lot of trouble not giving him any kind of reaction that would please him. At least I could scowl because since I was a teenage boy my face was expected to be paralyzed in a sullen adult-defying expression till my twentieth birthday. But I really wanted to tell him to get the hell off me and then what to do with himself, only he would have enjoyed that. He got on my nerves so much I nearly put a pitchfork through my foot, which would have been really great, since it would have stopped me from taking Lois to Westcamp, and that made me even madder.

"It's just that he's worried about Smokehill too," Martha said in an undertone, as we were cleaning out one of the raccoon cages at the orphanage the next day. I blinked at her. I hadn't realized she'd gotten over being afraid of him in the last two years. I wanted to say that what Eric worried about was Eric but I was two years older too and I finally knew what Dad had been talking about when he'd told me that we were lucky to have him. Although why it was like he had to make up for all the good stuff and hard work he did by being sheer torture to be around is one of those mysteries of life.

"He got worse right after the poacher got killed," Martha went on. Well, I knew that, but at the time I was too Lois-possessed to recognize any subtleties about worseness, beyond the part about him cleaning odorata's cage more often because I wasn't available. And since then while I still put my away-from-Lois hours in as evenly around the Institute as I could I really dreaded the time within hoarse-bellow range of Eric, which I hadn't before, and lately, when I'd started taking three or even four hours away from Lois, one and a half in the morning and maybe two and a half in the afternoon, depending on how mellow she seemed to be feeling about it, that meant I had to show up at the zoo every day and I felt like Eric was leaving worse marks on me than Lois ever did.

"And he's got worse again lately," she added. "I'm quite worried about him really." She looked over her shoulder  -  toward the noise of Eric's voice roaring about something or other  -  with a tiny frown and she looked all grown-up and wise.

"Only you  -  or your mother  -  would waste time worrying about Eric," I said, probably rather bitterly.

Martha was silent for a minute while we lifted the raccoons hark into their nice clean cage and gave them a few peanuts to make them think the process was worthwhile. Raccoons are pretty easy if you're nice to them. It doesn't have to be a hugely complicated niceness with raccoons. When I'd first had Lois some of the orphans didn't like me for a while; I suppose I must have smelled like the enemy although I can't really see a dragon bothering with little stuff like chipmunks and sparrows. It was the raccoons that were willing to overlook my kinky new smell first and then in one of those weird ripple effect things everybody else decided that I was still okay too, as much as any human (any human bearing food) was okay and I'd never had any trouble since and occasionally something seemed to like me better. I'd had my first hands-on experience with a Yukon wolf cub about ten months before. (Because of Julie when San Diego's nursing bitch died they sent her one surviving cub to Eric.) It still hadn't started biting me  -  I don't mean puppy bites, I mean biting  -  weeks after everybody else was wearing heavy gloves and boots, including Eric. Curiosity probably killed the raccoon about the same time it killed the cat though.

Finally Martha said, "I know he picks on you. But he has to pick on someone and you're -  you're really the most Smokehilly of all of us, you know? You've got that same okay-maybe-there's-a-world-out-there-but-I'm-not-interested thing that he does. You were like that before -  before." Even out of earshot of anyone else, away from Lois you didn't say her name. "Even your dad and my mom have more of a clue."

I looked at her and felt my look turning into a glare. The idea that I was even more clueless than my dad wasn't going over too well either. "Are you trying to tell me that Eric hates me because I'm like him?"

Martha laughed. (She wasn't afraid of me at all.) "No. I think he picks on you because you're what he'd've liked to have been. Do you know he grew up in the city? Washington, DC. Twelve stories up. He started out with goldfish and turtles because they were small and cheap and they didn't make a lot of noise, and he could get them past his parents, who were some kind of lawyers for the government." Which only goes to prove that Martha can get anyone to tell her their life story. "And you know I think he's horrible to the investigators deliberately. Let them waste their time on him."

It kind of made me thoughtful, especially since Martha had the same idea about Eric and the investigators as I'd had. I might've come up with the idea out of perversity as much as anything, but Martha was coming at it straight on and still thought so. So on the last day  -  I'd be leaving before dawn the next morning, the better to smuggle Lois past anyone who might be looking blearily out their kitchen window waiting for the kettle to boil  -  I actually tracked him down in his office. I admit I wavered on the threshold, before he'd seen me.

He was crouched over his computer (very unhealthy posture: someone should tell him: not me) where he was surrounded by piles of papers even scarier-looking than my dad's  -  this was partly because the window was always open in there (any time the temperature was above freezing) and not only wind and rain came through but also Eric's crow and this summer's crow offspring. A lot of crows croaking and creaking together actually sound a lot like Eric (in a good mood). But it was only Eric (muttering to himself) this afternoon.

I stepped firmly over the doorsill and as Eric whirled around in his chair with a scowl no mere teenage boy could hope to compete with, I said, "I just wanted to say thanks for everything you've taught me about -  about animals. And stuff. It's going to be really useful when I'm out at Westcamp."

He'd stood up when he recognized who it was, which didn't help his mood any because in the last year I'd got seriously taller than he was, and with him glaring at me I forgot the rest of what I was going to say. So I stuck my hand out instead. This was not planned. There is no way I would have planned such a great opportunity for Eric to make a jerk out of me, when he refused to shake it. But he did. Shake it, I mean. It felt like a perfectly normal hand too. A little more callused than some, maybe  -  like a Ranger's hand. And then I turned and fled. Trying not to look like I was fleeing, of course, but I was. But Eric must have been as spooked as I was because he didn't shout anything after me.

So I got back to Billy and Grace's house  -  my house for the last almost two years  -  actually feeling kind of good, like I'd achieved something. I was in a bad way.

I was already as much packed up as I was going to be before tomorrow morning and adding the toothbrush and so on so I didn't have anything much to do  -  except play with Lois, of course. There was always playing with Lois. I'd often wished she slept more, like dogs do, and we'd never found a way to pen her up effectively. As she'd got bigger and friskier we'd tried. But she had a habit of simply walking through anything she didn't think should be there, and I didn't want her to hurt herself. Or to get any ideas about like house walls. In her mutant armadillo way she was pretty tough and strong. When she'd first been doing her I Am Master of All I Survey thing she'd managed to get herself stuck between two rungs of one of the kitchen chairs and she'd cracked the chair frame before I got her out  -  and she'd still been pretty little then. Although some of how the chair frame had got cracked was because she'd rushed screaming to Mom, and Mom took some collateral damage while as you might say fighting for the off switch.

But I was glad of the distraction that afternoon because while there is no way I'd've admitted it I was feeling kind of strange about this trip. It could have been only the grindingly ongoing thing of Lois as this increasing problem  -  plus I'd never done anything like this study I was supposed to be doing  -  because I really was going to try to do it, as well as hide Lois where no one could find her  -  plus I'd never been away from the Institute that long either  -  plus I had no idea how long that was going to be. The longest I'd ever been away was when I'd found Lois, and that wasn't exactly a reassuring memory. Did I just say "it could have been only"?

But it wasn't going to be that big a deal really (I told myself). It wasn't like I was ever going to be alone. There'd be a Ranger with me all the time, although only one  -  whoever they could spare  -  who knew about Lois. It wouldn't be Billy very often. He actually had national profile these days, did Billy. Martha and Eleanor told me that he was one of Smokehill's best counteroffensives against the Searles. A lot of people are still willing to get all soggy over any Native American with a cause, and Billy really looks the part. He didn't do a lot of talking (of course) but he'd stand there and look solemn and chiseled while Dad or someone did the moving-mouth thing.

Which meant we kept having camera people at Smokehill, and didn't they hate what our fence did to their equipment. At least this dampened their enthusiasm for trying to wheedle themselves into filming more of Smokehill, not that they would have succeeded. Sometimes they had the interviews at Wilsonville's weeny TV station instead. Wilsonville's weeny TV station, which looked like somebody's garage, possibly because it was somebody's garage, didn't know what hit it. The only live interviews they were used to getting were things like with the eight-year-old who got a kitten for her birthday but the kitten was so freaked by the parry that it went straight up a tree and the fire brigade had to get it down. (They interviewed both the kid and the fireman.)

And I'd miss Dad and Martha and Grace and everybody else. Partly because I know what wilderness really is I had the sense to be in awe of it. And to know that living at the Institute is nothing like living in the park. And then there was Lois. (All trains of thought lead to Lois.) What would she think of living in the park? To the extent that there was ANY long-term plan about all this, because even I knew I couldn't just spend the rest of my life marooned at Westcamp with Lois (. . . could I?), the plan was that the dragon study I was supposed to be starting was going to get so interesting (were we going to have to make up readings? That was a really depressing thought. That really is the worst thing in the world to a scientist  -  being accused of making stuff up, of falsifying data  -  worse even than being a Bad Scientist or a bank robber) that we'd decide to make it permanent. Which would mean somebody could always be out here keeping it running.

Ultimately this was supposedly going to mean that we got Lois used to having some other human stooge than me, so I got to cycle back to the Institute again and see everyone, while Jo or Whiteoak or somebody kept Lois company for a while. Martha was old enough, she could hike out with some change of the guard some time and come see me. Us. The idea of leaving Lois behind was way scary  -  being away from her for like weeks, which is what it would take. I'd  -  we'd  -  got her from ninety-second showers by herself to four-hour stretches a day by herself . . . and dragons do grow up . . . it ought to be possible. The idea wasn't entirely new, you know? It was just an extension of what we were already doing. But . . .

But it wasn't that, or maybe that was the beginning of what it really was. Which was that everything was changing. Whatever happened now  -  even if some big-deal fairy waved her magic wand and suddenly Lois was okay and we didn't have to hide her any more  -  this was the end of something. And the beginning of something too, but I knew what it used to be, and I had no idea what it was going to be. It might be worse.

While I was whizzing around this stupid little circle of useless thought and only half paying attention to Lois, who seemed to be trying to teach me to balance a stick on the end of my nose (very evolutionarily important in dragons I'm sure), Martha turned up. Occasionally she  -  very occasionally Eleanor  -  managed to sneak over to see Lois. I kind of suspect that Billy and Grace knew about this, but they weren't making any trouble for us about knowing it officially, so it had gone on happening.

Martha didn't have much to say, but she wasn't a big chatter, and besides, if she was going to mess with my head like she did about Eric, I was glad she didn't do it any more often. I wanted to tell her about talking to Eric that afternoon, but I was too embarrassed. So I just stood there leaning against the kitchen door and having idiotically nostalgic thoughts about the claw marks on the sill, and watching her petting Lois  -  with gloves on. It had turned out Lois liked this, despite my attempts to be rational and assume she wouldn't because her skin was too thick (a Warning against Rationality) and would roll over and offer her tummy almost like a dog, although since her tummy is even hotter than the rest of her, the gloves are really necessary, and the spinal plates prevent her from really rolling onto her back either. I had been a little bit jealous of this at first. It was the first time anyone but me had ever figured anything out about Lois, I mean anything interesting, not like Grace putting vegetables into baby Lois' broth.

There was a funny noise and I realized Martha was crying. I started to say, "Oh, shi - " but I stopped, because I really do try not to say shi - , unless Eleanor is driving me nuts, even when Dad isn't around to make a scene about it. I went over to them and patted her on the shoulder and she stood up and turned around and put her arms around me and sobbed into my shirt. Two years ago this would have horrified me so much I probably would have said "oh, shi - " while I shook her off and jumped back about a mile, but that was before Lois, and a salty wet spot and maybe a little snot down my shirt is nothing to me now. And nor is  -  er  -  someone leaning on me, you know? But I was still pretty embarrassed. For one thing she was almost fifteen and had breasts. The only breasts I was used to being hugged up against were Grace's. Grace was a good hugger. And this was Martha. Martha had always been special (breasts or no breasts).

But mainly I was just surprised. It was that extra empathy, or whatever it was, that Martha had. The kind that could get someone like Eric to tell her about his childhood. (That he'd had a childhood was revelation enough.) Her record keeping orphans alive was better than mine. I was never much good with the ones that wanted to give up, I just got really upset and frustrated. Martha could sometimes like make the ones who didn't want to live want to live after all. It was the same empathy that made her try petting Lois with gloves.

I did wonder, wistfully, if maybe Martha was worrying a little about me. And maybe even going to miss me. I mean, she had to like me, it was just her and me and Eleanor, like I keep saying. But there's missing and missing.

"Sorry," muttered Martha, letting go. I was relieved (except maybe about the breasts).

"We can talk on the two-way," I said. "I'll let you know how she gets on."

Martha tried to smile. "We'll have to make up a code."

"We'll need a lot of words. We'll need a lot of words just for Lois."

"We can pretend she's a crow and her family, like Eric's Zelda." Martha looked thoughtful. "If her wings start growing you can tell me about your fledgling." Lois had lately started flapping her wing-nubs when she got excited. If she was still doing this and her wings started growing properly I'd probably be talking about my scars.

"If she breathes any fire I'll tell you about the lightning strike," I said, hoping I wasn't being too literal there either.

"If she's being a pest you can tell me to say hi to Eleanor for you," Martha said, and now she was smiling.

"What if I just want to say hi to Eleanor?"

"It's the same thing. Lois is always a pest. Like Eleanor. We love her anyway."

The next morning Billy and Jane and Lois and I set off for Westcamp. I didn't really start to breathe easier till about the fourth night out. We weren't going very fast because twenty-three-month-old dragons are not built for walking but they're way too heavy to carry very far. You try carrying a big German Shepherd, even in a tailor-made backpack, for more than a mile or two, on top of all your gear. I still carried her a little, but that was more for comfort than covering ground. We had thought about making a litter for her, but she would have hated that; she'd been pretty much into everything since she first started climbing out of her sling, but she was in some kind of extreme toddler stage lately of wanting to poke her nose into EVERYTHING (fortunately if there were any skunks around they saw us before we saw them) although she was better natured about keeping up (so long as you never went much faster than an amble) and not having tantrums than most of the human toddlers I saw at the Institute tourist center.

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 (well: 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

lands sucked up most of the west, although beyond them it began to get a little friendlier again; where we were the landscape was still mostly a mixture of patchy forest and meadow with the occasional sudden startling burst of hill and rockface. You wouldn't think it possible that something a couple hundred feet tall and vertical could jump at you from nowhere, but sometimes it did, and you'd have to swerve aside, like not walking into a wall, with it looming over you. But the moments when you had the best view and might have wanted to stand still a minute looking around and saying "gosh wow" I was mostly looking around for Lois and her Interesting Things; the farther we got in too the more wildlife, and I couldn't guarantee that everything was going to get out of Lois' way. And ours of course.

Most things will give humans a wide berth if they have the chance, and I assume they feel the same about dragons. And Lois made a lot of noise. She talked to herself  -  and to me  -  and she crashed and lolloped through everything. Going around was mostly not in her vocabulary. (I was reminded of how late she figured out "going around" in Grace's kitchen, when she was first experimenting with leaving the sling.) I did occasionally see her doing her sideways investigative bumping-into trick, but not very often. Mostly it was just plunge and thunder. As we got into more open territory I told myself that any self-respecting rattlesnake would have got out of the way long before she arrived  -  and I'm not sure a rattlesnake's fangs would get through even a twenty-three-month-old dragonlet's skin, which is already pretty horny. Fortunately I never had to find out. (Or whether skunk musk will stick ditto.) But there was so much birdsong (and bird warning-screech) sometimes I couldn't hear Lois burbling and crashing and then I really had to look round for her. I had reason to be tired by the time we stopped for the night: Nobody else was twisting themselves into pretzels keeping an eye on their hyperactive dragonlet.

By the seventh day I was carrying all my own gear again       and I'd noticed, when Lois scrabbled around at night, that the bottoms of her feet had got rougher and grittier, like when you take your shoes off for the first time that year, when you're (probably) not going to get frostbite from going barefoot. First few days you wonder if it's worth it and then suddenly you're okay, except the noise your feet make on the kitchen lino is suddenly less of a slap and more of a scritch. I was used to sleeping with an overheated self-maintaining turbine going nowhere fast so this comparatively minor alteration for the worse didn't really wake me up . . . but then I was awake already.

The dreams about the dragons' cave were getting worse, or more vivid, again, out here deeper and deeper in the park, and about a week in the Headache seemed to be trying to change shape again, and it pissed me off in this fretty, oh-go-away useless way. The dragon dreams were enough  -  and the way they had too many moms in them, Lois' and mine. Can't stick reality, and this time imagination is no comfort either. Well, damn. So much for relaxation. It had been a nice idea. Although also in a strange, freaky, not-going-to-admit-it-even-to-myself way I was kind of glad to see the caves again, it was like going back to somewhere you used to know really well and haven't been in a long time. Oh, yeah, remember that tunnel, with the long pink streak in the rock overhead, it always used to catch my eye like it might turn out to be a sort of monster Cthulhu earthworm, and it still does . . . I even recognized several of the dragons, not just Lois' mom.

But last time I was seeing the caves this clearly and graphically I was spending up to twenty hours a day asleep, wrapped around a small sticky dragonlet. There wasn't enough of me to have two lives, you know? The sleeping and the waking. And I had a life (of sorts) when I was awake, now.

But I must have been sleeping pretty okay in spite of Lois' feet and the dreams and the Headache. Because I really enjoyed the last few days of the hike in a way I couldn't remember enjoying anything. The nearest I could think of was from when I was like ten and Snark and Mom were still alive. Pretty sad really. (But it made me think of one of Martha's and my favorite jokes: You need to get out more! It applied to almost anything about life at Smokehill. And then we'd laugh like we were going to break a rib. So that cheered me up again.) But it was like time out, in a way. We weren't there, wherever there was. We were leaving one there and going to another one. (We're farther in than we've ever been.) But at the moment we were suspended in between. Footloose and carefree, except for the thousand pounds of backpack and the baby dragon.

The other thing that messed me up sometimes was in the evenings when we called in to the Institute. We called in every day just like everyone who walks in our park has to. I always talked to Dad and since we couldn't talk about Lois over the air we had a nice fresh valid reason not to have anything to say to each other. He found different ways to make jokes about not talking about her though, which was brighter than I was. He'd say things like "Hope your pack isn't too heavy" or "Hope you aren't sleeping too close to the fire and waking up toasted." And then I'd laugh and then we'd agree that he and I were both fine and then I'd give him back to Billy for the grown-up debriefing.

No grown-up had still ever mentioned the Searles to me, or the Human Preservation Society. Sometimes it was hard to remember I didn't know anything. Occasionally Billy actually had the chutzpah to send me off to collect firewood while he was talking to Dad. Oh come on. Second time he did it I said, afterward, after I'd brought some more firewood and Billy was off the two-way, as blandly as I could, "What's going on?"

Billy never looked sheepish. He knew well enough what I meant. He gave me one of his almost-smiles and said, "Nothing you have to worry about." From Billy this isn't the put-down it would have been from almost anyone else. When Billy said it he meant, "You've got the dragon. It's up to us to do the rest of it." He'd been totally like this from the beginning, you know? Billy was big on focus. He'd understood a lot more a lot sooner than I had  -  from when we'd had that first awful bath at Northcamp and Lois hadn't wanted to be put down his shirt. But I still couldn't help wanting to know something.

Martha and I had figured out a code about some of it. I got to talk to her a couple of times on the hike in, and I'd say, "Anything good on TV?" And if she said, "No, just stupid science fiction," it was okay. But if she said, "There's a new cop show, and it's kind of scary," then it was not okay. The second time I got to talk to her was after Billy had sent me to pick up firewood the second night in a row while he talked to Dad, and when I asked her about TV she hesitated and said, "There's supposed to be a new cop show starting soon and it sounds pretty scary." Oh great. "Well, try not to lose any sleep over it," I said.

"I'll try," said Martha. "But I'll probably watch it anyway, you know?" I knew.