The main thing I was thinking was, It's been two years. Almost three. And a little thing like Katie being the wrong kind of sympathetic at the wrong moment and I'm going to pieces.

At last I managed to say, "The gate money wasn't much. They'd've got a school discount."

Katie took this as a joke, and laughed, and the danger was over. I went back to scrubbing, although I probably took some of the floor with it.

When I was younger I used to say that I didn't understand why so many nuts had to be crazy over dragons. What about Yukon wolves, cougars, grizzly bears, ichthyosauruses, griffins, several kinds of shark, lions, tigers, and Caspian walruses, any of which will eat human when it's available, and every one of which is on the next-step-extinction super-endangered list, partly, of course, because of their eating habits? But no. The biggest, fruitiest fruit loops go for dragons. Enter "dragon" at your favorite search site, and stand back. In fact, go make yourself a cup of coffee, because it'll still be churning out hits by the time you get back. None of the rest of the critters comes close. Well, Nessie does pretty well, especially since they found her a couple of boyfriends in one of those Scandinavian lochs. Now everyone's standing around waiting for her to reproduce. She hasn't though. Maybe she's a he after all, or the he's are she's too. It's not only dragons we don't know enough about.

For some reason I used to like to bring this up at breakfast, about dragons and fruit loops. Mom would say, "Yes, dear." Or, "Eat your oatmeal, dear." Or, "Have you done your homework, dear?" This last was a trick question because I'm homeschooled. If I wanted to spend my life on a bus I could've just about made it in to Wilsonville and back every day, to their crummy little primary school, but I'd've had to go to boarding school once I graduated from sixth grade and there was no way. And never mind being the freak who would have to have special transportation out to Smokehill. Mom had tried to get me to go to Wilsonville at first but she gave up.

(That made a precedent then, so when it was time for Martha to go to school she said she wanted to stay at Smokehill with me. Katie did some wavering and I know she and Mom talked about it a lot, using phrases like "social development" and "peer group." But Martha in her quiet way can be pretty stubborn, and then it turned out she could already read — of course she could read, I taught her — so they were going to have to jump her a year, and where's your social developmental peer group then? Especially because Martha was small for her age. At six you could like barely see her. So they let her stay home and it was pretty interesting because that's when Katie and Mom came up with the bright idea of getting some of the Smokehill staff to teach us stuff, now there were two of us, so it was a "class." So it wasn't just Mom, Dad, the computer, and the boring out-of-date textbooks from Wilsonville we barely pretended to use.

I suppose we learned more about the geology and ecology of Smokehill than we'd've got at Wilsonville, and we never got to the exports of Brazil and the national debt of Taiwan at all, but we learned what our Rangers taught us and how many kids learn the exports of Brazil and the national debt of Taiwan? Then it was Eleanor's turn, and as it happens, there were some other kids at Smokehill then, and they were going to Wilsonville, but then they had been going to normal school when they lived in a normal place and they were so freaked out by Smokehill that being on a bus all day didn't bother them, at least not in comparison to staying here all the time. But Eleanor wasn't having any of that. Of course she could read by then too — she wasn't a big reader, like Martha or me, but it was clear to her that one of the ways to be older was to learn to read, so she learned — but that was just a way of making it easier for the grown-ups to cave. I don't think turning Eleanor loose in a regular school would have been good for her social development anyway. I think if she'd got a taste for playground domination at an early age the world wouldn't be safe by the time she was a teenager.)

But at least Mom would answer me, even at 7 A.M. Dad was always buried in his latest conference abstract or the forty thousand pages of fax I'd lain awake the night before listening to churn through the machine, usually from somebody from some country that Dad only half knew the language of, so the table would be covered with grammars and dictionaries too. Mom readjust as much as Dad did, but she never forgot there was a world outside Smokehill. Outside dragons. In some ways I take after my dad. But it was nice to have someone who'd talk to me at breakfast.

Dad has tried to learn to talk at breakfast. It was pretty awful till I hit on the brilliant plan of trying to read some of the stuff he reads. I don't get most of it (even when it's in English — have you ever tried to read a professional monograph from some thumping big scientific conference? You're lucky if you can get past the title) but it gave us something to pretend to have a conversation about. And I got credit for trying. (See: extra slack for when I screw up elsewhere.)

But too many of these people who get hung up on dragons don't know what a dragon is. A Yukon wolf is a Yukon wolf, which is to say two hundred odd pounds of tawny hair and long teeth, and you're not going to mix it up with a chipmunk. Calling Draco odoratus a dragon just because of the Draco is as stupid as arguing that a chipmunk is a small striped wolf that eats acorns.

But you can't say that, and there's only so many ways to say "that's a very interesting theory" before even an f.l. catches on that you're blowing 'em off. And when a fruit loop decides he or she hasn't been treated with due respect and consideration by the staff of the Makepeace Institute of Integrated Dragon Studies, the f.l. writes to his or her congressperson and says our weeny miserable funding should be cut because we're not doing what we're paid to do with their, the taxpayers', money, which is study dragons, and they can prove this because we don't agree with them.

And we live here, Dad and me, right here in the Institute, like I told you — the rest of the staff are either in the Rangers' barracks or they have their own little houses, there's a sort of little compound set back behind a lot of spruce and aspen, away from the tourist sprawl. (A few commute from Wilsonville but mostly only part-timers.) Sometimes I go hide out with Martha and Eleanor — at least Eleanor has some sense, even if she's not real open to negotiation with alternative points of view about things she doesn't agree with, like bedtime for seven-year-olds. (I'm a useless babysitter, but that doesn't stop Katie using me when she's got an evening meeting. Admin usually has evening meetings because during the day everyone is chasing tourists.) Actually I can't wait till she gets old enough to tackle the f.l.s on their own ground but that's still a little in the future. No matter how good at arguing you are it's easier if you're taller than the other guy's belt buckle.

Most of the f.l. crap lands on Dad now — a few of 'em talk to the Rangers, but most of 'em want someone they can call "Doctor" — and Dad tries to keep me out of the way because since I'm a kid I have to be even more polite to them. When Mom was around it was different — at our best we'd had Dad, Mom, and three graduate students, two of whom already had their first PhDs and therefore also answered to "Doctor" — but that was a long time ago. Dad's the only real scientist we've got now and he shouldn't have to waste his time.

The ones who think that the peculiarities of dragon biology and natural history can be explained by the fact that dragons are an alien species dropped off by a passing spaceship a few million years ago are so far out there themselves that sometimes they're kind of interesting. I've had good conversations with some of them. I've had a lot of good conversations with ordinary tourists, people who just think dragons are really cool and get a bit gabbly when they're actually here at Smokehill and want to talk to somebody, which I perfectly understand. The f.l.s that are a pain are the ones who want to drone on about all the Dracos that AREN'T DRAGONS. You could say it's our own fault because of the "Integrated" in our name, but that's nothing to do with us. The director before Dad and Mom almost went under, taking Smokehill with him, and the only way he'd managed to dig himself out was by agreeing to have a sort of zoo of all the other Dracos, and call the institute Integrated: But there is only one real dragon; there's nothing to integrate, not really.