Amazingly though there was also a pretty good meadowy sort of meadow, mostly at the southeastern end but kind of snaking through the stony bits too, and surprisingly large — well, I'm an Eastern-Smokehill boy, it was surprising to me — which meant we saw a lot of sheep and deer there. They'd leave if we got too close, but usually a few of them just kept an eye on us while the rest grazed and did deer and sheep things. After the first week or so we even saw some of this year's babies, which were old enough to be getting serious about grazing too but still had to have regular outbreaks of rushing around and jumping over things that didn't exist. I suppose the old ones couldn't afford to ignore the grazing but they weren't entirely happy about us. Lois used to watch them watching us, and when she did her cheeps and burbles they sounded more tentative, like she was trying for a definition of what she was looking at. (Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Would it leap tall buildings at a single bound if there were buildings?)

After we'd been at Westcamp a while and fallen into some kind of schedule, going to the meadow and just kind of hanging out there became part of it. And I guess she was getting enough exercise elsewhere because sometimes she'd actually be quiet and still for a while without being asleep. (Although as I've said she was neither a quiet nor a still sleeper either.) And she was now watching the grazing critters silently, which in something (or someone) who was never silent and was always in motion (even when asleep), was interesting.

I started thinking again about what could happen when sonic thing of her size found out that she had a fire-stomach with fire in ii I doubted a dragon had perfect aim without practice. But Smokehill had no more fires than any other big park, so presumably there was an answer to baby-dragon target practice. Maybe dragon moms had a fire-extinguisher organ, tucked away like under the spleen (if dragons have spleens). . . . Westcamp had a fire extinguisher, of course, but I wasn't going to lug it around with us. Also you have to be conscious and have your arms working to use it. . .. But once we were alone at Westcamp, Lois really started growing — like if you stared at her long enough you could see the next scale spring into being to cover the stretching-out skin. Six weeks after we left the institute she wouldn't've fit into her baby-dragon backpack any more even with all the straps let out, and I probably wouldn't have been able to lift her even if she did. And the deer meat was going down fast, even supplemented by snared rabbits.

I've already said we were training each other to do tricks. I haven't told you a lot about this because . . . well, because. I'm not a Good Scientist who knows that animals are animals and humans are humans, and I think the situation on Mars is really funny and anyone that is freaked out by it needs to calm down and get a grip, but there are limits. Particularly when something with a face like a small rockpile and little bulgy, beady eyes is staring at you and going, Weeeeeeeerrrrrrup? And you know she's not just doing the large scaly version of the parakeet thing. How do you know it? There are little old ladies who swear their parakeets know what they're saying. I'm not going to say they're wrong either. But the little old ladies probably aren't getting any other weird signals at the same time as their parakeet is saying "Give me a peanut or I'll peck you to death." Although this may be because the parakeet is clearly saying "peanut" and I needed help understanding Lois', uh, words.

So we were training each other to do tricks. It seemed the obvious way to . . . well, create a language. I don't want to get into exactly what I mean by a language. About three years before this when I was looking for more creative reasons to get out of doing Latin I read a lot about the history of language and how us humans are hardwired to learn it blah blah blah and also a lot about whether or not animals have it. I had a kind of crisis of faith there about wanting to grow up to be a scientist because while I knew my parents made jokes about Good Scientists and Bad Scientists I thought they were jokes. I couldn't get my head around these bozos who were so dead set against believing that animals have anything but like an autonomic nervous system to keep their hearts beating and so on and a lot of instincts saying things like "eat grass" or "bite that rabbit." Okay, a boy loves his dog, but I couldn't see this at all. Of course animals think and feel. Any moron who's ever met a dog or a cat should know that, and how many people have never met a dog or a cat? Even scientists were little kids growing up once even if they haven't come out of their labs for the last sixty years.

Anyway. Getting pissed off had made me think more about how Snark and I talked to each other, and I'm not even going to put quote marks around talked, although I never did construct a good argument against Latin. So maybe I was a little more set up for talking to Lois than some people might have been. So let's say that when you teach your dog to come and sit and not pee in the house, that's part of a language.

But when you get a dog you have some clue about dogs. About what they're good at, about how they respond to people. And the stuff you don't know, or get wrong, you can order a book from the library that will tell you. And if you don't live some place like Smokehill you can go to a dog-training class. Lois and I only had each other. Sometimes I felt like Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, and I was afraid that Lois was playing Annie.

She seemed to like it that I talked to her. Well, that's not strange, dogs like to be talked to, although they don't talk back so much usually. So I kept talking, although even my decision that she "liked" it seemed to me dubious when I was in a gloomy mood. Maybe frolicking around and thwumping her tail and flapping her wing nubs and cheeping was an expression of frustration and despair, not pleasure. I tried to keep all open mind. She couldn't be too miserable, could she? How could I tell? She was still eating and still growing. And curiosity about her world had to be a good sign, didn't it? It was also hard to be in a had mood myself, when she was dancing around apparently, by irrelevant human standards, being as happy as a kid on the first day of school vacation (even us homeschooled exiles know about this), which she usually was, so why fight it?

Gestures are a huge amount of language. Aren't they? But most gestures out of context are silly. I had started out trying to "teach" her to wave — this was back a long time ago at the Institute, after I'd had my uncomfortable little jolt about her trying to say "Hey, Lois" back at me — but she didn't get it with me sitting on a chair, I guess, and as soon as I sat on the floor or ground she got too excited, and I sort of lost conviction about the idea anyway because why did I want a dragon that waved? That's when I hit on teaching her to fetch sticks. Like a dog. And the good reason for that would be that it would help use some of her endless energy. That was the first time I'd tried to train her to do anything, as opposed to just hovering over her in a universally paranoid 100 percent way and worrying about keeping her alive. Except that I taught her by throwing the stick, going after it, and bringing it back to where I'd been when I threw it. I told you she was always more interested in me than she was in anything else, so keeping her attention was easy.

This had been a while back, as I say, really when Lois was only just getting big enough to like experiment with, including that she'd be willing to go far enough away from Mom to fetch a stick. So I got a stick, waved it at her a moment so she'd notice it instead of me, said, "Fetch!" in a firm, no-nonsense manner, and then I threw it. First time I went after it she went after me because that's what she always did. Second time you could see her thinking about it. Please feel free to insert a verb you like better than "thinking." Third time I threw it and yelled "Fetch!" she came with me when I went after it like she was still thinking about it but hadn't reached any conclusions. Fourth time I hesitated a little bit at the end so she got there first. She sort of pawed at the stick for a moment and looked at me inquiringly. So far so dog really. The fifth time I went after it a little more slowly yet, just to see what would happen and this time she positively shot in front of me (those legs a blur and her panting a little harsh grunting noise with breathless I'm-sure-explanatory peeps in it), and started to pick it up. . ..