But even Billy's incense and me burying everything I found wasn't enough, we needed to add charcoal briquettes to the bouquet. But while Lois getting it that the entire cottage was a no-go area might mean that she was preprogrammed by thousands of years of dragons raising their dragonlets in dens, I wondered if that was all it was. Because Lois was so amazing a mimic. When we were out in the park we all went outdoors so there was a precedent. I'm just grateful I didn't have to teach her to use the toilet. But the mimic stuff gave me an idea about training. Which is how I trained her to fetch sticks — by fetching them myself first. Getting her to pay attention to me and what I was doing was never a problem. (Pity I couldn't teach her to do French, or Latin.) I thought of fetching sticks because it was something I thought would translate — I wasn't sure I could get "sit" across to something shaped like Lois, and while I tried to train her to lie down, she didn't seem to think she had to do this unless I stayed lying down too. That's the thing — I never felt like Lois' owner, or boss. Mom, maybe. But how many little kids actually do what their moms tell them?

So I went to Billy and told him I wanted a project that would take me into the park and let me — us — stay there for a few months. As near to uninterrupted as we could manage. I'd still be under seventeen, but as I put it to Billy (I'd thought this out pretty carefully), the reason we were going to give was that I wanted to be sure that this Ranger thing was what I really wanted to do before I turned seventeen and signed the contract. Between having to stay home and keep Lois company and the rising worry level, I'd gone on acing every test the school guys could throw at me, and they'd been throwing them at me harder because of the early-acceptance Ranger thing that I think they suspected was undue influence or something. Which it was, of course, but not from the direction they were looking in. Also because I kept proving I could, which seemed really unfair. If the rat can learn to find the food at the end of this maze, let's try a harder maze. Like just for laughs. I think school-equivalency bozos have too much time on their hands.

Why I still wanted to take all these stupid languages I was so bad at if I was going to be a Ranger no one ever asked me (if I'd wanted to make myself useful as a foreign tourist guide I should have been choosing Swahili or Catalan, the Rangers've already got most of the big languages covered) — but then I never let on how much I sweated those tests. And I guess it was a way for me (and maybe Dad) to pretend I still might get a PhD some day.

We cooked it up that Lois and I would stay at Westcamp, which was the smallest and the least used of the permanent camps, and study the incidence and patterning of found dragon scales, and any other signs of dragons, in that area. There'd already been dragon tracking studies at South, Limestone and High camps — North and East were too close to the Institute to bother — but nobody had bothered at Westcamp either even though it should have been the right general area. But there were too few dragon sightings there and grant writers had to go for numbers because the money givers tend to understand numbers.

But Dad had actually wanted a dragon survey done at Westcamp for years because what signs and sightings there were were odd, even for dragons, and that was why Westcamp had been built, and Dad might have done the study himself if Mom hadn't died. Maybe that was why he let Billy and me talk him into letting me go. Maybe he'd been trying to get used to the fact that I really wasn't going to be totally answerable to him any more soon enough anyway — and while Dad's a control freak he tries to be a fair control freak, and he would have been thinking about this. And not letting me out of his sight just wasn't an issue after Lois, it no longer existed in the new universe with Lois in it.

Maybe he'd been braced for my asking to do something much worse. I'd thought of worse things, certainly. I'd thought of trying to go to Silver Valley where we all knew there were dragons, and trying to introduce Lois there, like taking your kid to the local playground to meet other kids. I doubted that would work, and I also — selfishly if you like — didn't want to die, which seemed to me a possible side effect. I know I keep saying dragons don't kill people, but don't forget we'd just killed not just any old few dragons but a mom and her babies, and even if this didn't piss them off it could certainly have made them twitchy.

Because the dragons seemed to have noticed the poacher too, or the death of Lois' mother, after all. They're only animals, right? What really would they notice? Everybody dies, even dragons. I might keep telling myself that the dragon dreams were only dreams and what I remembered about Lois' mom was just some side effect of how awful that had been . . . but I kept remembering and I kept having the dreams and they had an effect. So I didn't seem to have the luxury of the old they're-only-animals thing much any more. What I kept thinking instead was stuff like if there'd been any other dragons on the spot, presumably they'd've taken Lois with them before I got there — perhaps if they'd got there soon enough they'd have rescued some of her brothers and sisters too — and all these thoughts brought me back to the pissed-off place. The weird thing, it seemed to me, was that it seemed to have taken almost two years for them to notice.

But the dragon movements that the Rangers could read had changed . . . and then a busload of tourists had been thrilled, almost into seizures, by the sight of a real live dragon flying by. It was so far away it was only just recognizable — but there really isn't anything that looks like a dragon except a dragon, if it's big enough to be even a speck with wings. A weirdly long and humpy speck with fantastically long wings, even as a speck.

And no ordinary tour-bus tourists had ever seen a live dragon before in the history of Smokehill.

It was a headline in our local papers and it made the national wire service. (Martha told me that the Searles tried to insist that we'd faked it somehow to get the public on our side, but this time the public definitely liked our version better.) As a result we got even more tourists, and we were already getting more tourists because of the Searles and their vendetta. But while a bunch of tourists seeing a dragon really made our numbers soar, which we were just about able to deal with and the money was nice, that made it even more urgent that Lois and I get as far away from the tourist area of Smokehill as possible.

I said we were just about able to deal with the latest increase in numbers. Usually we have like one person a year who manages to get away from their guide and start poking around where they're not wanted. In the two months after the tourists saw the dragon we had three escapees, and one of them (from where Nate had found him) must have gone right past our cottage. What if it had been one of the afternoons that Lois and I were outdoors training each other to fetch sticks and roll over and play dead? And talk. It wasn't. But it might have been. It was right after that that I asked Billy to help us think up a project to take us deep into the park.

The last week at the Institute I was jumping at shadows and I had to control myself really hard when I went down to the zoo because Eric knew I was leaving and while I suppose the idea that you're going to be stuck cleaning odorata's cage more often — I was cleaning it twice a week again by then — is enough to put anyone in a bad mood, Eric on a tear makes Krakatoa look like a hibachi. I was having a lot of trouble not giving him any kind of reaction that would please him. At least I could scowl because since I was a teenage boy my face was expected to be paralyzed in a sullen adult-defying expression till my twentieth birthday. But I really wanted to tell him to get the hell off me and then what to do with himself, only he would have enjoyed that. He got on my nerves so much I nearly put a pitchfork through my foot, which would have been really great, since it would have stopped me from taking Lois to Westcamp, and that made me even madder.