Then there was the fact that dragonlet pee slowly burns holes in almost everything it touches (it didn't burn right through the diapers, but it wore through fast enough that we had to patch them, and needlework is not my thing but Grace let me use pretty much anything in her sewing box, so some of them got kind of artistically interesting over time and repeat mending) and fortunately Billy and Grace's house didn't have any lawn to destroy, but she still almost managed to kill one of Grace's Smokehill-winter-proof, tougher-than-the-French-Foreign-Legion rhododendrons before I figured out how to persuade her — Lois, not Grace — to pee and crap in one sort of general area. Although this still wasn't foolproof. I swear I was always out there with my shovel — to the extent that if a dragon could get neurotic I should have given Lois a complex — and even so half the time when Kit or Jane came round the conversation would begin like this:

Kit or Jane: "Hi, Jake. There's a — "

Me: "Okay." And I go get my shovel. (If it was Whiteoak, he just looked at me. And I'd go get my shovel.) And miss whatever they'd come to say, probably, which may have been the idea.

Lois would always come with me. Far from developing a complex she was delighted for an excuse to go outside and play some more, and as far as she was concerned (evidently) my strange compulsion to bury her leavings was as good an excuse as anything else, and the house was getting smaller and smaller as she got bigger and bigger. (I wonder what she thought about the toilet. I always used to wonder that about Snark. I don't know how good a dragon's sense of smell is, but it would have to be really bad not to draw the correct conclusions about what the toilet is about. And a dog has to know. So isn't it thinking, Hey, why do you get to use that thing when I have to go outdoors even when the wind chill makes it sixty below and the snow is coming in sideways?)

She weighed about thirty pounds when she housebroke herself, but that's still a pretty fair weight to carry around on your shoulders (if you're only a human), especially when it wiggles. The thing I worried about the most — the most after the possibility of someone taking a wrong turn and wandering into Billy and Grace's backyard some day, especially some day when I hadn't got out there with my shovel, or maybe in fact I was out there with my shovel, and with Lois herself — was that she was going to start practicing her fire-throwing. The fact that she was alive proved her igniventator was working, and the skin on my stomach sure believed it. And as well as getting bigger and noisier she was getting livelier and she wanted more action. How do you teach a dragon to come, sit and stay? Fortunately she still had little short legs and couldn't run as fast as I could. (Snark had been able to run faster than me by the time he was twelve weeks old, although I was still pretty little myself then.) But I was pretty sure this wouldn't be true much longer. I was also keeping a sharp, anxious eye on her wing stubs, but they didn't seem to be doing anything much yet either.

But speaking of training a dragon, it was at this stage, when she was beginning to spend significant amounts of time outside her mom's pouch equivalent that I began to realize . . . this is going to sound really stupid . . . that she was trying to, uh, respond to me, I mean aside from the fact that she still got hysterical if I wasn't around for more than about two hours.

I've raised, or helped raise, baby birds and baby raccoons and baby woodchucks and baby porcupines, and watched the Rangers raise baby bears and baby wolves and baby eagles, and some of them even survived to grow up and fly or run or trundle away. But when a baby robin gets all excited and sticks its neck out and opens its mouth and goes "ak kak kak kak kak" at you it's not exactly responding to you. It's responding to the prospect of getting fed. It never thinks about being a robin, and it doesn't care what you are, so long as you're feeding it the right stuff. (Chopped up earthworms rolled in dirt are a favorite. Delicious.) I also know that animals raised by humans tend to grow up funny because they aren't getting socialized by their own kind and don't learn how to do it, but even then I'm not sure that what they're doing is confusing themselves by trying to be human. What they're doing is failing to learn how to be themselves.

And I was a little silly about Lois . . . okay, more than a little. But can you blame me? The point is, when she started spending more time at a little distance, so we could like look at each other — that was another thing, her eyes had suddenly gone all sharp and focused at about five months; I'd begun to think that maybe dragons don't use sight much (and then I'd remember her mom's eye, sharp and clear and focused as anything — and dying — and then I'd remember all the impossible stuff I'd seen in that eye about hope and despair — and then I'd take my mind off it like peeling Snark as a puppy off the shoe he was disemboweling) anyway, when Lois could watch me properly, she started trying to do what I was doing. For a while I could ignore it, put it down to why your cat walks on your keyboard when you're trying to use your computer, why your dog suddenly wants to play fetch when it's your turn to get dinner.

But she wasn't just trying to get my attention. It took me a while to figure this out — dragons and humans are shaped so much different. It's not like baby chimps learning to crack coconuts with stones by picking up a stone and banging with it because that's what Mom's doing. Or maybe it is. When I was typing, if she didn't want a nap, Lois used to dance. I should maybe say I'm kind of a dramatic typist. I had had to practice keeping my legs and feet still when Lois first got out of the sling, so she could lie on them while I typed. If they weren't held down, my feet started tapping all by themselves. (Which wasn't actually such a bad thing, because if she didn't want a nap — and she way too often didn't want a nap — she'd dance with my feet. This was a little distracting I admit, but I usually managed to keep typing.) She made great wheezy inhale noises when I was breathing in something especially wonderful that Grace was taking out of the oven, but that may just have been that she agreed with me. When I'd scratch my head or pull my hair and grunt while I was doing schoolwork I didn't like (which tended to make the Headache worse too) she'd scratch and shake her head — and grunt.

Sometimes it was more complicated than that — or maybe what I mean is it was harder to decide it didn't mean anything. But when I was doing laundry she began to collect whatever small loose stuff she could around the house, shoes, magazines, dropped pencils, wet rain stuff hanging over the radiators, and including snaffling towels off the rails (which in theory were hung too high for her to reach), snuggle them around a while on the kitchen floor (I tried to rescue the towels in time), leave them while the washer ran, and then bring them outdoors and spread them out on the ground (sometimes this was kind of hard on the magazines) when I hung the stuff up to dry.

This really did catch my attention because it seemed to me to say something about her attention span and her, you know, mental processes generally. It was way too complicated, you know? In fact it started making me think scary Dragons Are Intelligent thoughts so I concentrated on trying to prevent her from "washing" anything that would make more work for me. I told myself that baby critters are always getting into other things — especially things you don't want them to get into — it's what they do. It's part of being a baby critter. It's part of growing up. Half-grown raccoons are incredibly creative escape artists and nosy and boy can they get into trouble. It's hardwired. Nothing to get paranoid about. Nope. Nothing at all.