Maybe because of Lois, but somehow the noises didn't bother me so much, even knowing that I was in the middle of five million acres of them. A lot of what I heard I knew from Billy's teaching me to recognize, say, the crunching noises a pheasant makes when it crashes through the undergrowth (pheasants are amazingly noisy) compared to the noise a deer makes compared to what a cougar makes. (That last is an easy one. A stalking cougar doesn't make noise. I saw the scat a few times, but I never saw our cougar. I knew there was one. Every neighborhood in Smokehill has a cougar.) That was pretty much my limit though.

But most of what I can do by myself is daylight ID. Sometimes I didn't know what the moving-around noises were at night and then I poked the fire to make it crackle or turned up the two-way, or rattled my graph paper. Or all of the above. I did hear bears occasionally nearby, but I buried our garbage a long way from camp and locked up the meat store every night like it was the crown jewels of the supreme commander of the universe, and they never tried to get in. They just snuffled around for a while and went away. Then there are the vocals. Coyotes and wolves are easy, and it's actually kind of reassuring to hear them far away. They never got very close. Since I can only tell a Yukon wolf if I've heard an ordinary gray wolf recently to compare it to I don't know which one I was hearing, and if it was Yukon I'm very glad it was far away.

The fact that I was never sure the radio was working — or, if it was, that it wouldn't suddenly stop working — didn't help me feel comfy and secure and in touch either. Fortunately it mostly was working. I'd only missed one check in by about half an hour while I shook the thing and called it weekly-allowance-eliminating names before it decided I had fulfilled my entertainment function for the day and coughed and hiccupped and kkkkkkahed and glahed into action.

There was a lot of squawking that I couldn't always make out but I kept it on all the time I was indoors after Kit left, partly because I really wanted some remote clue about what was going on, and partly because listening to human voices even if they weren't talking to me or saying anything I wanted to hear was kind of soothing. This made its sudden dramatic dropouts all the more dramatic — the silence would land on you in a deafening wham. Keeping it on like that wasn't good for the batteries, but the generator was working and except for recharge (and maybe a little hot water) I wasn't using it much. (I hadn't brought my laptop — camp solar generator power is a little spasmodic for laptops — although sometimes, those evenings rattling my well-smudged graph paper, I wished I had.) Even the static when the radio was in a semi-bad mood, or the stand-by when no one was using it, was better than nothing.

In the old days, before the poacher proved our fence could be broken through, we'd also believed that no one could hear our two-ways outside the fence. That was maybe still true but it wasn't just Lois we couldn't talk about because (in theory anyway) not all of Smokehill knew about her. Nobody trusted any of the damned hanging-on-and-on investigators-make that priers and nosiers — any farther than they could throw a full-grown dragon, and (Martha said) the grown-ups assumed that the Searles had bought some of the investigators anyway — that the bought ones would find reasons to stick around, and have pieces of legal paper that told Dad he had to let them. So everybody was talking in secret code speak, and sometimes it was so frustrating I stopped listening and pretended it was just white noise — that plus what the radio did to human voices sometimes I felt even more isolated when I was talking to someone.

When I did talk to anybody myself — at least anybody but Martha — we were pretending that everything was still all business as usual except for the flu. They probably didn't want to think about me being out here alone with Lois since it was still our best option, so they didn't, and I didn't tell them I left the two-way on all the time for the sound (well, sort of) of human voices and looked at Billy's rifle a lot. I can tell you I was hair-trigger on the "talk" button though. I didn't want Lois audibly adding anything to the conversation just in case anybody at the Institute end heard something that didn't sound like random static.

My birthday happened while Lois and I were in our Westcamp exile, and only Martha remembered. No, that's not an example of poor neglected Jake, all by his feeble self (aside from the dragonlet) and no one cares. It is an example of just how stressed out of their minds they were back at the Institute. Oh, and I didn't remember it either, till Martha told me happy birthday. I knew it was around there somewhere but I'd stopped trying to keep track of the days, and I wasn't going to bake myself a cake either.

I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone for more than a few minutes, because of needing to keep our teeny bandwidth clear for something more important. We had like no width left, I guess, after the practical-sorcery guys had done their worst on the dragon fence some more. One of the things Martha told me was that airplanes didn't fly over Smokehill any more — whatever the solder-and-sparks (ha ha ha) guys had done made aeronautic radar go berserk, even from thirty thousand feet up. This meant a surprising number of flight paths or what-you-call-'ems had to be changed, which caused some more uproar which was our dragons' fault again and there was too much stuff that was already our dragons' fault. Our conversations usually ended with Martha asking me if I'd seen any lightning.

"Nope," I always said.

After the first few times she asked this she added, "Not even at a distance? There are some big thunderstorms out there especially over the Bonelands, You know, Billy says."

I translated this without difficulty. "No. Not even a — a shooting star."

Martha said, "I can't decide what to hope for, you know? I — you don't really want lightning close up, of course, but it would be — exciting, to see it, like over the Glittering Hills, wouldn't it?"

Exciting. That's one word for it. Since I was out here supposedly counting dragons, if Martha just meant had I seen any dragons, she could've said that. But I had a dragon with me. If I saw any dragons I'd have to wonder if they'd notice Lois. We didn't know diddlysquat about inter-dragon communication — what it might do and how far it might stretch — whether baby dragons smell like that so big dragons can find them — or if that unmistakable flying-dragon shape would mean anything to Lois if she saw it. That was the sort of thing that Martha was thinking about. So was I.

What I called a meadow, that's kind of a euphemism. As the scraggy, stony forest of eastern Smokehill starts breaking up into the Boneland desert and the prairies around it there's some weird in-between stuff. Westcamp was in a weird in-between area. The camp itself was on the edge of some semi-forest, and there was a semi-clearing on two sides of it, partly Ranger — (and lately Jake — ) maintained. Then there was a big pile of stones — say twenty feet high — like a thoughtless giant had left them there for no better reason than he didn't want to carry them any farther, and some tough little saplings had colonized one side of it where a little soil had somehow accumulated, and were trying to turn it into a hillock. Beyond that there was more mixed-clearing-scrub-and-the-occasional-obstinate-tree.

The clearer bits wiggled like some kind of game of follow-the-leader, and there was something nearly like a real clearing not too far from the camp, that Lois and I had found the first week with Billy. It was almost like having our own private playground. There was a series of small heaps of boulders with sand at the bottom as well as the usual local striated stone pocked by scrub underfoot, and several of the standard little eastern-Smokehill rivulets cutting up the stone and going nowhere but making nice noises while they did it, and reminding you what you Were going to be missing if you kept going west.