CHAPTER SEVEN

Westcamp was in a bit more of a mess than the permanent camps usually are. And I actually helped with some of the clean- and patch-up. It was weirdly exhilarating. It was because we were out in the middle of nowhere and I didn't have to watch Lois every minute. And also because I was doing something that both was not about Lois and was about helping somebody else out for a change. Even my time at the Institute, the last couple of years, had been about Lois really — about pretending everything was normal, to try and keep her safe and secret — even if most of the work I did was also useful that had been almost beside the point.

Of course like a good parent I quickly learned to shift my worries to the present situation so now that we'd got here and weren't immediately leaving again I was afraid she'd eat something that would poison her the third or fourth time she went by it because it had got familiar (or that she'd been snatching mouthfuls right along and the third or fourth time the toxic accumulation would finally get her) or get lost because she hadn't learned where the new edges of her new territory were or blunder into something like a herd of no-nonsense Bighorn that would recognize her as a predator even though she didn't know it yet herself, and stomp her to death. But she stuck pretty close to me just like she usually did (. . . so I started wondering how long that would last before she got used to the idea that I wasn't watching her every minute, and how her next developmental stage would be exploring beyond Mom, and then she would blunder into the Bighorn, etc.), and then after a while it wasn't so exhilarating but we had to do it anyway. Also I couldn't stop myself jumping every time the two-way yammered at us.

A tree had fallen on the roof and poked a window out on its way, in spite of the heavy shutters. Jane climbed up onto the roof to lop branches till we could get the rest of it off without doing any more damage (waste not, want not, I would be cutting it up and stacking it for firewood, but I like chopping wood, so that's okay . . . just so long as a baby dragon doesn't get in the way. Worry worry) while Billy looked to see if there was any spare glass in the store (there was) and if it could be made to fit (yes) and if there was a glass cutter and sealer (yes). And made notes to replace what we were using. Fortunately the tree hadn't taken out the solar panels for the generator — that would have been a disaster. Then all over again for the door frame, where some kind of Arnold-Schwarzenegger-wannabe sapling had managed to crack the door away from the sill. (That was a bit of a mind boggler to me since I believe that the Rangers, you know, rule, and that no mere sapling would dare.)

And the hole that sapling had made, with the window, meant that the indoors had been pretty well colonized, which is why the Rangers are so anal retentive about keeping the permanent camps as invader-proof as poss. It's a lot of remedial work when things go wrong. I did way more than my fair share of the blanket-mending because I was so cheezing good at it from all those months of patching diapers. I did a lot of muttering when I had a needle in my hands. Lois really did pick up that mood — she'd come and mutter too, winding around my legs like a cat except for the fact she wasn't built for winding, and she was tall enough now that my legs would go bumpbumpbumpbump down her spinal plates which did not help, and the blanket would fall or get pulled off my lap when she'd get tangled up in it, and. . . Billy managed not to laugh at this. Jane didn't. Manage not to laugh.

So anyway both Jane and Billy stayed longer than they'd originally meant to because there was all this work to do. Billy also went out hunting one afternoon. I'd noticed he'd bothered to pack in a rifle, which I was kind of surprised about, since we didn't have any investigators with us, ha ha ha. Maybe it was just a Ranger thing for longer hikes, although generally speaking a Ranger would rather sit up a tree for a week than kill something that had a perfect right to be there, and to keep themselves fed on long trips they mostly used snares or bows and arrows — no, I'm serious. I keep telling you our Rangers are good. Jane had her bow with her.

I suppose I must have noticed when Billy left Jane and me replacing shingles with his rifle cracked over his arm, but I didn't think about that either. He came back later and told me to come with him. He'd shot a deer and needed someone to carry the other end of the pole; to get it back to camp.

Lois came too and was very surprised by the deer. She was used to her food coming to her in small pieces in a bowl of soup, or flicked at her. (I'd managed to teach her "Yours!" without having to demonstrate grabbing stuff tossed to me in my mouth, but food is a great motivator to learning.) Dragons don't chew — they have pointy, widely separated teeth, for stabbing, tearing, and holding on — but along with all the other things nobody knows about dragons we didn't know when Lois' infant digestive juices might be up to bigger chunks, so she wasn't getting any yet. (Lois' teeth were one of her trouble-free zones. They just appeared. She never went through a chewing-everything-she-could-get-her-jaws-around-but-particularly-the-things-you-most-mind-being-transformed-to-gloppy-shreds phase the way puppies do. This was actually sort of off-balancing. It's one of the ways you know a puppy is growing up. There were no familiar markers with Lois, except that she kept getting bigger.)

She had a lick at the spilled blood where Billy had gutted it but didn't seem to think much of it. She was a little subdued on the way back like maybe she was thinking about it. I was a little subdued on the way back because why was Billy already laying in a whole deer? I'd seen the store cupboard, which was still about half stocked with usual stuff, plus everything Billy and Jane had brought, which seemed to me enough even for several Loises, or if one Lois put on a tremendous growth spurt, and it wasn't like they were going off and leaving me. Oh well. Maybe he just wanted a break from cabin repair.

The smoker was already there, but I'm the one who kept the fire going. However smoking is smoking so you might as well do more than less so I told myself the deer was fine. Billy made me practice some of the cutting-up too but you could sure see which he'd done and which I had. You'd think all you'd need is a sharp knife and a steady hand. Wrong.

He also tried to make me practice a little with his rifle, but Lois hated the noise so he let it go. He'd taught me to shoot a few years ago and I had been a demon with old beer and soda cans (they recycle just as well with holes in them) pretty much up till Lois arrived, so I still knew the, you know, theory, and my hands still knew the motions, but I was way out of practice and Lois hating it meant I was freezing before I pulled the trigger which ruined my aim and my shoulder. I might not have been able to hit what I was aiming at anyway for thinking about why Billy was suddenly taking it into his head to have me brush up on my gun nonexpertise.

But then Billy merely shifted survival-skill gears and got me brushing up on snare-setting instead. (I'm not exactly hopeless with a bow, but . . . close.) But rabbits are smaller. I could've coped with the idea of the occasional fresh rabbit. Supposing I could set a snare properly. We'd eaten rabbit and pheasant on the hike in. But it didn't really matter because I was never going to be here alone, of course. There was always going to be a Ranger with me, and Rangers can set snares in their sleep (I mean snares that catch something).

We'd just about got everything fixed up so Jane was finally getting ready to go back. There'd been a lot of radio contact including about stuff Kit could bring when he came to take Billy's place. After this there was only going to be one Ranger at a time here with me. So Jane left and then Billy waited for Kit, and Kit turned up on schedule with various small crucial bits and pieces — including one to make the radio work better; it had been dropping in and out a lot in a pretty uncomfortable way and everyone on it sounded like they were being strangled while breathing laughing gas. We'd had a lot more problems with the twoways since the techies had monkeyed with the fence, so we all hoped the monkeying was working — there was no real way to know except backwards, by people not breaking in.