And it was like she was in her element once she had the conversation all to herself and didn't have to wait for anybody but me. I was also kind of broody so I left her to it. And boy did she go for the opportunity. I couldn't help thinking about it some more. I'd never heard that dragons talked (all right, "talked") to each other. Old Pete had never mentioned it in any of his journals. And if his dragons had been anything like Lois he would have. In fact he'd've spent his life wearing earplugs. Also usually one of the limitations on animal "speech" is that animal vocal cords and larynxes aren't set up for a lot of variation. Lois had lots of variation. She could do anything but human words. She probably could have done the tentacled blobs from Alpha Centauri, but she was stuck with me.

Her humming had like expanded. At first it was just kind of a bumpy mutant purring — what I've been calling purring, although if any cat made that noise I'd recommend you call the vet fast — and then after a lot of time practicing with the shower it got pretty, well, hummy. Almost, like I said, like a human might hum. (Emphasis on the almost.) But after she caught on it wasn't only with the shower any more. And whatever it was, it went more up and more down, jiggedy jaggedy, more like a, well, musical scale than her other noises.

I had brought my old player from the Institute when I moved in with Billy and Grace, but I decided pretty much all by myself that arena rock probably wasn't a good thing for your infant dragon, and besides, I'd been reading up (a little wildly) on parenting and about how Mozart is soothing to fidgety kids, so mostly I played Mozart, and even got to kind of like it myself. (Except the operas.) And I sang to her sometimes the way all of us (even Eric) sang to our zoo orphans; once you've been caught saying the standard "Theeeeeere, isn't that gooooood?" a few times you have no shame left. Shamelessness is required if you sing like me. But humans are just so voice oriented, you want to say things, and you get bored with "Theeeeeere isn't that gooooood?" after a while. Singing is the obvious alternative to moronic monologue. You think you're being soothing, but does a raccoon or a robin think "Barbara Allen" or "The Ash Grove" is soothing? I think we're soothing ourselves. But there wasn't any music, soothing or otherwise, at Westcamp so maybe Lois was reinventing it for us.

We went for a lot of walks after Kit left. Away from Westcamp I didn't feel quite so alone. Or rather, it was okay to feel alone away from the camp — away from the human place. And I took my notebook with me, and my marker sticks, and sometimes I brought a few scales back to the camp and labeled them and bagged them up like I was getting ready to take them back to the Institute, like this "project" was real.

The project was one more legitimate reason to keep me outdoors as much as possible — indoors at the camp my voice echoed. Of course the main thing keeping me outdoors as much as possible was Lois — but the dragon-scale-counting project suggested that I was still a part of the Institute. That I still had something like a normal place — and future — at the Institute. My security blanket. I don't think moms are supposed to need security blankets. Two or three nights after Kit left I dreamed that I was wrapped up in the holey old blankets Snark and I had watched TV on a few centuries ago, leaning up against Lois' mom's side in one of those flickery red caves, and my own mom was singing to me. At least it was her voice, although I couldn't see her. When she sang "Barbara Allen" you knew what it was.

It was a gorgeous summer that year. That helped. I'd brought rain gear of course as well as long underwear and a goosedown vest and wool socks and stuff. Even in August you can get a frost in Smokehill, and Westcamp wasn't in one of the milder bits of Smokehill either, and the Bonelands started just over the Glittering Hills to the north. (They're called hills, but they're mountains really. You'd know this if you tried to climb one.) But I didn't need any of it. The skies stayed blue and it was hot enough at noon to lie down in a meadow and soak it up and warm enough even early and late that if you kept moving you didn't get cold.

Lois had got a lot fitter since we'd left the Institute (well so had I) so i f I wanted to walk really fast for a while she managed to keep up with me, though she still did it in spurts. She'd walk — she'd finally learned to walk, I think because she discovered that you can be more thorough about prying into stuff at a slower speed — till she got far enough behind to make her (and me) nervous and then buzz past me at her funny gallop and then maybe walk again, although sometimes the enthusiasm level was just so high and the world was just so big and exciting she had to have an extensive hurtle. You know those cartoons where animals run by all four legs going forward at once and then all four legs going backward at once. I know no real animal runs like that but Lois sure looked like she was.

I ambled sometimes too so we could walk together. Her walk was me foot at a time, like a normal walk, although looked down at from above . . . you know the way a dog looks surprisingly sinuous, almost snaky — explains why they can curl up in a circle — well, maybe it was just the way the spinal plates waggled along her humpy back that made Lois look like she was coming unhinged.

She never offered to chase — or flame at — any of the wildlife we saw, and despite the amount of noise Lois made, both with her mouth and her feet — and I couldn't walk nearly as quietly as Billy even when I was concentrating, but there was no point trying with Lois around, we saw a lot. They'd stand there and stare at us like they couldn't believe their eyes. Is that a dragon? Is that a human? Are they together? Some things like raccoons do that anyway — but our four-legged dragon suppers couldn't seem to decide if they had to bother about us or not, and mostly they didn't, although I sometimes expected their eyes to pop out from staring. Once we even saw a lynx and lynx are usually really shy. The times the deer or the sheep or whatever would scatter they didn't seem to be paying attention to us at all. Which was kind of nervous-making in a different way. If those tales about cougar curiosity are true probably the local puma was following us around and maybe sometimes the suppers got wind of him. Or her.

But we still had to go back to camp eventually. I found out the hard way that I wanted to get back in daylight. I wanted to be indoors with the fire lit and one of the lamps burning before it got dark. There were bears around here — as well as the cougar — but that wasn't why. Nor was the fear of getting lost. It was that coming back to a silent dark cabin was too creepy. First time we did it, coming back in twilight, even Lois shut up, and that made it worse. You'd think the sky would get bigger in daytime, when you can see more of it. It doesn't. It gets way bigger at night. And the forest and prairie and desert don't go on for five million acres after dark, they go on forever. I pretty much turned my dragon-scale-counting project into a real project after all, sweating over my charts and graphs in the evenings, studying and noting down the differences from one scale to another to another (long, short, cleanly shed or ragged, color, texture, blah blah), marking where I found them (and the map this made was different from the readings from the other camps) to be doing something. Something that made me pay attention to it, instead of sitting there trying to count up to eternity.

And the rifle helped again, about that, about being alone. Just hanging there in its rack, it made me feel a little less helpless. And in spite of the deer all beautifully smoked and wrapped up in the store I did start setting rabbit snares — the pile of deer parts was going down, and that deer had been nearly the first thing Billy had done, and I (almost) always believe what Billy tells me, even when he doesn't say anything. Also once you get in the habit of counting up to eternity it seems to stretch in a lot of different directions. And after about a week — hey presto — my snares even started catching the occasional rabbit. Weird. Maybe I could learn to hit what I aimed at with the rifle if I had to. (Besides beetles.)