Smell is kind of underrated generally. Other than how evocative it is and like you don't taste your food right when you've got a head cold, and you open the window if you've made a really bad stink stink in the bathroom, we don't really think about or live with smells much. I mean we try not to live with smells much. Except stuff like perfume and aftershave. Rangers — and anybody who helps out at the zoo and orphanage — are forbidden to wear it, but sometimes the front hall at the Institute is so full of tourist perfume and gunk smells — this in spite of the fact that the roof of the dome is thirty feet overhead — that I want to run away. It used to make Snark sneeze. I'll take baby-dragon smell, thanks.

But once we both had our first bath after she was born it wasn't really awful. It was just strong, and it really hung around. It got sort of the edges worn off as she got older, or maybe it was our edges that got worn off instead, because it's also true that Lois was kind of, uh, smeary, for kind of a long time. Some of it was that I had to keep slapping salve on her because she started to crack at the corners if I didn't, but some of it she produced her own self. I helped poor Grace hang plastic sheeting over the bottom half of the walls and doors all over her house, as soon as Lois started climbing out of her sling occasionally — and caroming off things, things besides me. That started really early — at about three months — which is also to say I'm so glad because it was not early from my viewpoint, and if I'm going to be honest it's the dragon dreams that had kept me going even that long, they provided a sort of alternate non-reality since the reality I was living in had got pretty non- in other ways.

I slept a lot, those first three months, partly because getting up four times and then three and then twice a night still left me pretty tired and partly because when I did sleep I got to dream about dragons. You don't normally know where you're going to be when you go to sleep, you only know where you're going to be when you wake up. But those first few months, the stronger the panicky sense of being trapped by this little live thing that was utterly dependent on me and only me got, the stronger the dreams got. And if I slept I dreamed of dragons. In the dreams it was like they were responsible for me, and this was such a relief it even weirdly carried over a little into being awake and being RESPONSIBLE for Lois.

In the in-between bits, falling asleep and coming awake, I thought/dreamed of Mom, and how much I'd've liked to have her there, making me laugh with her stories of diapers and 2 A.M. feedings — I knew she'd've even been able to make me laugh about that awful scary imprisoning dependency. I could have really used a laugh. I could've asked Grace — and I did later on, about other things — but it didn't occur to me. It was like I was too far away and holding on by too skinny a thread.

I might have been just holding on myself but only three pouch months has to 've been way early from dragonlet perspective, it's just that there was a limit to the size of sling you could hang on me, and it's not so much that Lois grew out of it but that she gyrated out of it. There was about a week when you kept seeing baby dragon butt or nose or foot sticking out briefly from under my shirt . . . and then not so briefly, and when it was the nose it was more and more nose till it included eyes and . . . I remember Snark as a puppy being a perpetual motion machine but he had nothing on Lois. Fortunately she didn't have the needle puppy teeth and the habit of cruising with her mouth open, looking for things to chomp. She gunked them instead. You know how in someone's house you can tell the furniture that the dog or cat sits on most — either it's completely trashed or there's a blanket or something over it and the blanket's really trashed. (Snark's and my TV sofa was about three layers deep in semi-trashed blankets: we moved 'em around so none of the holes went all the way through to the sofa.) Grace kept their bedroom door closed all the time and everything else in the house was wrapped up in old blankets and oilcloth. Even table legs.

For something with no legs to speak of Lois just-out-of-the-sling sure liked to climb. Maybe it was being short when everything else was so tall (Eleanor liked to stand on chairs). Maybe it was the complicated process of getting in and out of the sling which had kind of a lot of up and down to it. Anyway, Lois climbed. Or tried to climb. At first she was too tottery to do anything but totter and then for a while when she'd come to something in her way she'd just stop, like it was the end of the universe. Then later she tried to climb. Going around appears to be a very late developing concept in dragonlets.

After a while she stopped trying to climb on anything she'd found out wasn't very dragon-shaped — the kitchen chairs for example — and I sat on the floor a lot to make life easier when she was first starting to explore life outside the sling, since at first she'd go two steps and then rim hark to Mom and then she'd take three steps and run back, and the house was small enough that when she got up to four steps she started bumping into things. At first this was just The End, as I said. But then it was like . . . sometimes I imagined she bumped into them almost kind of thoughtfully, because I don't think she ever tried to climb on anything if she hadn't bumped it thoroughly first.

I don't know if her eyes didn't focus right to begin with (which would be my fault for raising her wrong, guilt guilt guilt) or maybe were built to focus in different light (the light in the dragon caves in my dreams was always weird) or on something very different from human house stuff (duh) — or if baby dragons just do bump into things a lot, like instead of having whiskers, which dragons don't, telling them about how much space there is or what the shapes of the solid parts in it are. But she was a big bumper, and she did a lot of bumping into things sidelong; she didn't necessarily lead with her nose, the way something with whiskers does. But it was like she didn't know what it was till she'd bumped into it a few times. Which was harder (or at least gunkier) on the things than whiskers would have been.

I didn't mind sitting on the floor, I'm mostly not big on soft squashy furniture and certainly no cold draft had a chance to bother me with Lois nearby, and also I found watching her so interesting. (Proud Mom. Obsessed Mom. Silly with relief for even a few feet and a few minutes of semi-freedom Mom.) For example, not only did she do a lot of her bumping from a funny angle, bumping into things to learn what they were seemed to depend on the thing rather than where it was. She'd bump into some things no matter where they were and some things after the first few times she never bumped into them again, also no matter where they were either. Go figure.

Even when she was no longer using her sling she still didn't want to be more than a few feet away from me if she could help it, and she preferred some kind of contact. She was hopeless as a lapdog — the wrong shape, and she was too thick-bodied to curl properly — but she'd lie pretty contentedly on my bare feet, or behind my ankles — that's when she was willing to stop exploring, and lie down at all. She went on wanting skin, and she still spent the nights lying against my stomach.

Fortunately Ranger cottages don't run to wall-to-wall carpeting — I don't even want to think about wall-to-wall carpeting with a greasy, low-slung dragonlet in residence. Grace rolled up their few little rugs and stashed them, and I helped her mop the floors, except that Lois usually wanted to play with the mop. And if you held it steady for her, in the developmental stage between Too Small and Too Big, she could climb up onto the top of the broomy part of a broom and sway there for a minute, like a high-wire act.