Dad tried to explain it to me once, that it's about non-interference-like the way big parks (including this one) let lightning-started fires go ahead and burn everything up because it's part of the natural cycle. Okay. Maybe. But people get bent about dragons in ways they don't get bent about other natural cycle stuff. Apparently the witless wonder who was pushing for the dragon legislation got so bent about the anti-harming-a-dragon part of the bill that he pulled all the stops out getting really vicious language into the anti-preserving-a-dragon's-life part of the bill. The result is that trying to raise a baby dragon would be like the most illegal thing you could possibly do, next to assassinating the president maybe, and is probably one of the extra reasons the Institute has to beg for money, because we might do something illegal with it, like learn how to save dragons.

Well it would all be over soon and it would be dead and I would be crazy and Dad would have to put my gross baby-dragon-yucky clothes through the washing machine because I would be in a padded cell and couldn't do it myself.

I rebuttoned my shirt except for one button over the belt, muttering to myself, or to it, and tucked the dragonlet back in, tail first and belly up, with its head near the opening. It stopped struggling and lay there like it was peering out through the gap and looking at me. Its eyes were open — unlike a puppy or a kitten's — but they were blurry like they didn't see much, like a baby bird's. They were also a funny purplish color. It was really ugly all over, not just the eyes, sort of bruise colored, not just purplish but also yellowish and greenish, as well as smushed-looking and crusty with dried whatever.

"You are the ugliest damn thing I have ever seen in my entire life," I said to it, clearly, like I wanted it on the record what I thought, and I swear its blurry purple eyes tried to track where the sound was coming from and it made a little grunt like an acknowledgment.

Have you ever tried to raise a baby bird or a raccoon or something? Something, you know, easy. They die a lot. We're way too good at raccoons — that's Eric again — since our successes are now bringing their great-great-great-grandkids for evening handouts behind the institute — but we all still sweat when the Rangers bring in new orphans. And even with Eric's voodoo and all the info every bird society or raccoon society or beetle society (that's a joke) can give us (actually we wrote some of it), so you know exactly what to do and you do it . . . they still die. A lot. And it hurts. And that's when you even know what they eat and for stuff that is at least already, you know, born. Which a new dragonlet isn't, not really.

I locked open my camping spoon and dipped up some of the meat broth, gave the dragonlet my finger to suck again, which it was happy to do, and poured some broth in the gap between its mouth and my finger. You'd think I'd know better, but remember I was pretty deranged.

Of course most of the broth went all over me and the dragonlet, but some of it must have gone down its throat because it choked and gargled and then I knew I had killed it. I whipped it out of my shirt again and held it up head down in the air and it gacked and gagged and then started mewing again and trying to get back in my shirt. Poor awful little monster. I'd be crying here again in a minute. This time I unbuttoned my sleeve and stuck it in tail first (against the thin skin on the underside of my forearm and let me tell you its body heat hurt) till only its face was showing, and I cupped my hand around its head and it subsided, and I swear it looked traumatized, ugly and weird as it was.

I was still muttering. Now I was saying things like "it's okay, stupid, relax." I'm not sure if I was talking to myself this time, or the dragonlet. I stuck a finger from my cupping hand in sort of the side of its mouth to give it something to suck on and tipped just a drop or two of broth into its mouth. (This was way more awkward than I'm telling you.) It went gulp and went on sucking. Oh hurrah. A lot of your orphans just won't try to eat and that's that. So the dragonlet wasn't going to die of starvation, it was going to die of being poisoned or of not getting enough of some kind of vitamin because deer broth isn't anything like close enough to dragon milk. As I say, no one knows what goes on in those pouches.

I fed it broth till its belly was stretching my sleeve. It was almost beginning to look kind of cute to me. I was in a bad way. But you do get like this with your orphans. If they eat you feel all . . . mothery. (Mom had been really good with the orphans — maybe almost as good as Eric. I remember getting old enough to ask her, kind of anxiously, if taking care of me had been as bad as the stuff at Eric's orphanage. She'd laughed and said oh no, I was much, much worse.) I slid the dragonlet out of my sleeve again and it was either falling asleep because it was full and happy or slipping into its final coma, but it didn't struggle so much this time. I pulled my shirt off and wrapped it up in that because I had a clean shirt in my backpack, and if one of us was going to have the clean shirt I'd rather it was me, and then I put it as near the fire as I thought I could without making dragonlet toast, or anyway setting my shirt on fire.

I looked at the inside of my wrist where it had been lying. The skin there is even thinner than on your stomach, and it was actually burned. Jeez. So I got the wound salve out that is part of the basic kit Billy makes you carry, like waterproof matches and a hatchet to make kindling and a pot to boil water, and put some on, and then I had dinner, which took about three minutes because I was so hungry and tired and shaky.

But by the time I'd finished eating, make that bolting, the wretched dragonlet was mewing again, and trying to get out of the shirt. "Oh, give me a break," I said. I thought maybe I'd put it too close to the fire, so I picked it up, and it went floppy instantly, but then the moment I put it down again it was mewing and thrashing, to the extent that something the size of your hand and with legs an inch and a half long and is maybe three or six hours old can thrash. "You're ugly and you smell," I said.

So fatalistically I put it back inside my clean shirt and it scuffled a little like you might thump your pillow with your fist, and then went to sleep. Which made one of us. It had managed to relieve itself on my old shirt, so that was really delightful, and I got my jackknife out and hacked off the dirtiest bits and then sort of tucked the rest of the old shirt around its rear end where it was asleep inside my new shirt and leaving fresh red marks on my stomach. I lay down gingerly on my side clutching it with my other hand so that the old shirt around its rear end wouldn't fall off and wondering if I'd get any sleep at all because what if I rolled over on it? Not merely squished dragonlet but squished full-of-deer-broth dragonlet. By then I was probably a little hysterical.

I did sleep but I didn't sleep much. Every time it moved I woke up, and I suppose my brain had been working in my sleep or something because by the first time it woke me up I'd figured that a dragonlet probably had to be fed every ten minutes or something because if it was in its mom's pouch it would probably be permanently stuck on a nipple for the first six months or so, which is what happens with the ordinary true-mammal marsupials we know about and makes sense. And a lot of ordinary orphans you do have to feed round the clock. (Maybe Eric's personality was just the result of chronic sleep shortage, although all of the-human-adults took turns for the middle of the night, and Mom and Katie and Jane never got anything like Eric gets, even on no sleep. Although Dad got a little scratchy.) I was trying to remember how long they think the full-time pouch span is for a dragon, but if I'd ever known I'd forgotten and it didn't really matter at the moment since this was only the first night.