So the short answer to that question I asked way back at the beginning is . . . yes. If Mom had still been alive and I'd still been more or less, you know, sane, I probably wouldn't have noticed the dying dragon's eye, not the momness of it. I would have been horrified and sorry — and I'd've got on the two-way as soon as I got clear of the remains of the poacher, and called Billy, and the story would have been a lot different because there would have been no Lois. Even if I'd noticed that one of Mom dragon's babies wasn't quite dead yet, that would have just been one of the horrible things, that it took a little while to die, that I had to watch the last one die while I waited for Billy. It would never have occurred to me to do anything about it — what could I possibly do? Eric's got incubators, but a fetal squodge wouldn't anything like make the journey back — and of course an incubator would never have worked on a dragonlet anyway.
Or back up a little farther yet — if I hadn't been a jerk about my first overnight alone in the park — if I hadn't been determined to make that twenty miles — I would never have seen the dying dragon in the first place. But why was I so determined? What was Mom dragon putting out on the airwaves as she lay there dying — about being a mom and dying and leaving her babies behind? And why was it me that picked it up instead of another dragon? And I wouldn't want to bet against it that it was partly frenzy that helped keep Lois alive — that I COULDN'T BEAR her dying — because of what her and her mom reminded me of.
So is Lois, and just maybe the entire future of Draco australiensis, worth Mom's life? I don't have to answer that. It's what happened. Anyway. I pick up some of the head stuff. Yeah. It's there, I'm not imagining it, and I'm not going to argue about it any more. But I think the only reason I pick up even as much as I do is because I'm picking up some of the dragonness of it, and I can do that because of Lois — and her mom. Which isn't something I call pass on to anybody else. Yet. But the possibility that there's some kind of osmosis going on also gives me the best excuse to go on living with dragons, which I do, a lot of the time now, although even I have to take a break sometimes. Also the weather sometimes has something to say about where you are and where you stay in Smokehill.
There are fancy new premises (built by more Dragon Squadron money) out near where the dragon caves are — the dragon caves I stayed in, that is, since I (and Dad) aren't making any statements about whether they're the only dragon-inhabited caves in Smokehill or not — we're pretty sure not. It's still hard, counting dragons — and those caves go on and on and they all have spooky gremlin things-moving-around-in-the-dark noises. Now that we're meeting our dragons face-to-face it should get easier though, shouldn't it? Well, we still never see more than a few of them at a time, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only human who's ever seen more than the same half dozen that are the human liaison committee (sorry, little joke here — dragons do not do bureaucrat language).
I'm pretty sure now that Billy was worried that the caves up by the Institute we were going to open to the public had dragons in them somewhere, or were connected to caves that had dragons in them somewhere, or at least spooky gremlin noises in the dark. Although he's never said so. And part of that fear would be the suspicion he and Dad both had that we weren't going to go on stopping australiensis from going extinct for much longer, and what if the tiny little additional pressure of lopping off the tailest tail end of the Smokehill cave network was the tiny little additional pressure too far?
And somehow once the money started pouring in, the plans for the Institute caves changed. Only the first couple of caverns got opened to the public after all — and all the ways out of them have been very, very, very, very, very, very thoroughly sealed off although it's like having won the main issue, there was a kind of hands-washing-of, right okay, now go ahead and do your worst declaration and the pointy-head designer from Manhattan or Baltimore did, and those two caves, which are good big ones, are a kind of Madame Tussaud's of dragons with a little Disneyland thrown in. I can't bear the place myself but tourists cram in there in their gazillions.
But it makes me wonder what the Arkholas know that they still aren't telling us. There were always a lot more of them and only one of Old Pete — and he's the only one who wrote anything down, and while he couldn't be bothered most of the time talking about humans, he did often write about how he couldn't have done what he did without Arkhola help, and how much he admired them. What the Arkholas do instead of keeping journals is make songs. There's one I think I haven't told you about, about dragons flying. And the most interesting thing about it is that it's really old — long before Old Pete brought any dragons here. I'm so horrible at learning languages. But I'm going to have to try to learn Arkhola. Billy says Whiteoak would teach me. Uh-oh.
Anyway. We've got these fancy new premises pretty near Dragon Central — that's Bud's caves — which we call Farcamp. We had some trouble deciding where to put it. I didn't want the dragons to feel that we were harrying them by getting too close to where they lived, but as Dad and Billy pointed out, us feeble little humans can't actually commute very far in a day, and we need to be somewhere close enough to get there and back, especially in less-than-optimal weather (in bad weather you don't go anywhere) since except me nobody's ever been invited to stay, if you want to call what Gulp did inviting. I said that if the dragons wanted to talk to us, they could do the commuting. We finally compromised on a place near a biggish opening aboveground of a series of caves not too far for feeble humans, which are some kind of wing of Dragon Central, but not dead close to where the helicopter found me standing on Bud's head and screaming.
There was a lot of grumbling when the plans for Farcamp were presented because of all the tactical problems (see: no more roads and limited helicopter usage and they still haven't got anywhere with the pack ponies, but we've now got college kids and off-season athletes doing two-legged bearer stuff which is a hoot, like something out of an ancient Stewart Granger movie about Darkest Africa) and then when they get there, there still aren't any dragons??, but Dad and Billy and our ecoloony Friends had worked up some heavy environmental impact stuff that made it necessary not to be any closer to Dragon Central, and since we were now the hottest topic around nobody grumbled too loudly for fear of not getting clearance to visit.
But the dragons do come, to us, to the Farcamp caves. There's always at least a couple of members of the human liaison committee waiting for us politely at the cave entrance — which I call Nearcamp, another of my feeble human jokes. Although the whole business of working this out really made me want to go "neener neener and who says dragons aren't intelligent?" I also saw the caves before the dragons started using them a lot, and I've seen them now that they do use them a lot, and I can tell you that they've put in a latrine. And I can't actually swear to this, but I think the rock is getting blacker and redder and shinier and silver-threadier too. And the gremlin noises get more resonant.
But I'm the only human who's got in that far — to see the latrine, or listen to the gremlins in the corridors. This makes more of the white coats nuts, but they can't do anything about it. In the first place, most of them, the headaches make 'em so sick they have to flee back to Farcamp, in the second place, it's in the new dragon-contact rules (and guess who helped write them), and in the third place, who is going to get around a dragon lying across the entrance of his or her cave? Even if you had the nerve to tiptoe up to one and maybe pretend you didn't want to disturb it and would just creep past, the moment it turns that eye on you, and it will. . .