I might still have gone stir crazy, trapped in the cabin with increasingly hyperactive Lois and only brief nerve-twangling paroles up at the Institute and the zoo — the dragon dreams, for better or worse, did begin to tail off as Lois started climbing out of the sling more and I started going to the Institute regularly — but then for a while the more active she got the harder it was to leave her because she wouldn't stay buried in her nice smelly sheets any more. For a few days there this looked like it was going to be Jake's Last Straw and one day as I was trying to leave and I'd only just got her buried and (apparently) settled but she'd started to cry before I got to the door, and I don't remember what I said but it was in the "aaaaugh" category.

Grace said mildly, "Children are like that sometimes," and I said, "But she's not a child, she's a dragon, and what if — " And Grace said, "Every mother says, 'But my child. . . .' That's how it works."

"But I'm not her mother," I wailed, hearing in my own voice that I sounded like a baby myself, crying for a toy or an ice cream. "That's the point."

"You're the only mother she's got," Grace said, smiling, "just like Eric was the only mother Julie had." Julie was the first, and only, Yukon wolf cub any human had ever successfully raised and successfully released into the wild — without getting eaten in the process, that is. Even Yukon wolves thought twice about Eric, although Julie had left a few marks. "Go on, Jake," said Grace. "I'm here. Lois will be fine."

I wanted to say, How do you know she'll be fine, but I didn't. I went. And she was fine. Even if that was when I had to start really working at wearing her out so she'd actually sleep while I was gone.

So what is the point of living on the edge of five million acres of wilderness if you spend all your time inside four walls? But Billy took me out with him every chance he could invent, and while as Lois got bigger walking around carrying her got harder, Billy was really clever with his sling making and at the point I really wasn't going to be able to carry her in front any more she hoisted herself up another of those developmental stages, and agreed to ride on my back, and even more exciting, over the T-shirt. I think this must have been the moment when she would have started looking out of her mom's pouch sometimes, if her life had been normal; because she used to look over my shoulder (and snorkel around in my hair, making it stick together with smelly dragon spit) and (except for the spit) that was kind of fun, although it meant Billy had to be even more careful where he took me. Having a large bulgy restless stomach was bad enough, having an obviously exotic animal riding in your backpack is something else. Although I don't believe anyone could have recognized Lois as a dragon yet (she looked more like the Slug That Ate Schenectady, only lumpier), still, she was obviously something pretty strange, and anyone who caught us would have wanted to know what, and why whatever it was wasn't safely at the zoo in a cage being studied.

So anyway that was my life. Meanwhile . . .

The very very first instant thing that had happened after Billy gave the bad news over the two-way from Northcamp, is that our rules for anyone getting normal permission to enter the park to study something, any farther than the usual short, guided tourist treks, suddenly got impossible — even the zoo lizard note-takers got banned. You have a certificate signed by God that you can come in? Sorry. God's not good enough.

At first since as I've told you, I wasn't into the big picture about anything, I just thought "some good out of a whole cheezing lot of bad" that we weren't going to have nosy prying researcher types around at all. But we'd only ever had a few researcher types around at a time, and their nosying and prying was usually pretty focused — and actually some of them were pretty nice too — and instead we had all these investigator people hanging around wanting to, well, investigate, and there were a lot of them, and none of them were nice, and they wanted to investigate EVERYTHING, so we didn't finish ahead after all.

Almost everything. At least they didn't want to investigate the Chief Ranger's house and even the Institute director's nutcase son was mostly only interesting as a side issue, of how living in the wilderness was bad for children, I guess. Because I was a kid — and because of the nightmares and what the cadaver removal guys had said — and Billy had somehow managed to subtract the "solo" out of it so most people kind of thought he'd been there too — they didn't insist on interviewing me all over the place. Some nice-cop type took my statement once and then they left me alone. Maybe I put over "pathetic idiot" really well too and they decided they weren't going to get any more out of me. Although that meant they immediately wanted to take their high-tech magnifying glasses and deerstalker hats (ha ha ha) and stuff into the park where it happened, but they were going to do that anyway.

A long time later I asked Dad if they hadn't thought of pretending not to know anything about the poacher or the dead dragon — Pine Tor is twenty miles from Northcamp, and Billy had only officially scheduled us as far as Northcamp. Dad said that of course they had but had rejected it. In the first place, we don't like lying. You have to work too hard on keeping your story straight if you're lying. (We know.) But the big issue was, as always, PR.

Some of the other big predators bag the occasional human in some of the other wilderness parks, but that's okay or something (except to the bagged guy's friends and family), part of the natural order out in the wild, the risk you take by going there, yatta yatta. Dragons are different. Like those two speleologists who disappeared on their way to the Bonelands twenty years ago — you know about them, right? — are still getting brought up pretty much every time Smokehill gets mentioned in the national press, and the point is they disappeared. Nobody knows what happened to them. Quick — how many people have been taken out by grizzlies — are known to have been taken out by grizzlies — in the last twenty years? You don't know, do you? But it's more than two. Maybe it would be easier if more people did deny that our dragons exist.

We couldn't risk it that the villain hadn't told someone what he was going to do, and then having to arrange our faces in the appropriate expressions of surprise and consternation when someone came to ask where he was. Which in fact he had done — left a record of what he was planning to do, I mean. ("I'm going to break into Smokehill and ruin everything because I'm a sick, greedy bastard.") With his girlfriend. Can you imagine a guy like that having a girlfriend? But our Rangers cover eastern Smokehill pretty thoroughly, and a dead human might have turned up anyway (even if the dragon was ash by then), and it would be major bad press for us if it didn't because nobody but someone who lives there realizes what "wilderness" really means, and, as I keep banging on about, everybody's really jumpy about our wilderness because it has dragons in it.

So anyway we had the investigative police-type people and the investigative scientist-type people and the investigative tech-type people and a few investigative spy-type people, who tried so badly to look like the rest of 'em that even I noticed: I hadn't realized dragons counted as intrigue — and of course the investigative journalists who were a total pain because if it wasn't bad it wasn't good copy.

Especially now that a dragon had killed someone (circumstances irrelevant) there was no way anyone, which is to say investigative creeps, was going to be allowed into the park without an escort, and Dad did manage to prevent our being swamped with the National Guard right away (that came later), which left the Rangers, and then some high-ranking jerk insisted that as a condition to not being swamped by the National Guard, all the escorts carry guns. If anyone had stopped to think about it they would have noticed that the grenade launchers and bazookas and things that the poacher had been carrying hadn't done him any good. . . . Anyway this made even our Rangers cranky, and it takes a lot to make our Rangers cranky, but being investigator-minders meant that they weren't doing any of the stuff they felt was their real job, about keeping an eye on the park. And the dragons. And Rangers only carry guns if they want fresh meat for dinner. Not to mention what a big rifle weighs.