Of course I was worried about everybody, and I was also missing the human bond to balance the growing dragon bond, like I was getting too dragony myself (Lois hammering away at me during the day and the dreams hammering away at me at night and the Headache hammering away all the time). But it was also impossible not to be a little bit pleased just to let the dragon bond happen without having to second-guess it or you or us all the time because some other human would be coming back soon. Soon I'd have to figure out what to tell (or show) the people who did know about her, because someone would eventually come back out here and see what we were up to . . . but not yet. People had stopped getting the flu and the first ones who'd had it were getting over it and Dad was beginning to say things like "We should be able to think about sending someone out there soon" . . . but not yet.
It was the end of the fifth week Lois and I were at Westcamp alone that I almost died.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lois and I were sitting facing each other in one of the little sandpits in our meadow. I'd been trying to teach her to count. What we were really good at is what I called mirror-dancing, which was using Lois' fantastic mimic ability in three dimensions — and my idea for it had begun with the stick-fetching. But Lois was actually better at it than I was — she could remember a longer series of steps / hops / rolls forward and back and sideways and around trees and so on than I could — which was pretty embarrassing, and I was looking for a way to reestablish my superiority. Parents can be like that with uppity children. So I'd thought of counting — nice low numbers you can handle in pebbles, it's just another little easy three-dimensional sport, no big deal. At least that's how I was explaining it to myself. I have no idea what she thought we were doing, but she was always up for a game.
I had an especially big buzzy headache growing that morning too, but maybe that was just because I was proving to be such a useless teacher. Maybe my basic attitude toward arithmetic ("yecch") was breaking through. Lois was certainly trying to pay attention, but she kept wanting to rearrange the pebbles. I'm not sure that her heaps were more interesting than mine anyway. When things got discouraging we reverted to stick throwing. Since we'd had that big breakthrough about being-the-same-but-different over fetching sticks, it always seemed to cheer us up — and when I had a useless-teacher headache (this wasn't the first time) sometimes it eased off a little too.
Out here she'd learned to throw sticks for me by dragging one — her special favorite for this activity was one she was barely big enough to drag, but she insisted I carry it properly when I fetched it, but then once I wrestled the thing up I could put it over my shoulder, which wasn't an option for sloping, low-slung Lois — but mostly I threw and we both fetched. Usually she took off the moment it left my hand — and she never, ever got fooled by a fake throw the way Snark used to, but then she didn't love running just to run the way Snark did either. And I was a little tired that morning too — she'd kicked in her sleep more than usual the night before — so she was well ahead of me after I threw the first one. But we both noticed the sudden black shadow over the meadow. And the noise. And the smell.
Lois saved my life, although I don't think that was what was in her mind. She was terrified, and she spun around and hurtled back toward me, shrieking, and knocked me down, trying to get back into the sling I hadn't worn in more than a year, trying to hide in her mom's pouch from the gigantic greeny-black demon out of nowhere that had landed on the far side of the meadow . . .
. . . And shot a long musky-spicy-smelling stream of fire over us, where my head had been two seconds before, before Lois knocked me down. My skull felt like it was bursting, but that was probably just that I was terrified too, and it may have been the terror rather than having had the breath knocked out of me that was why my lungs felt paralyzed. The heat of the fire that had almost killed me seemed to sort of hang around and stick to my skin, like mist drops when you walk in heavy fog. It dripped off my hair. I shuddered. More like a convulsion. With that film on me I wasn't quite me; I belonged to the dragon.
You don't always react sensibly in an emergency, especially when it's an emergency there is no sensible reaction to. There was a fifty foot dragon sitting on its haunches on the far side of the meadow and I didn't have a grenade launcher at hand. I yanked my T-shirt up and stretched it down over as much of Lois as it could reach, crossed my legs, tucked her tail into the circle of my legs to the extent that it would go, wrapped my arms around her, and waited for the second blast.
It didn't come. Oh. The dragon probably didn't want to kill Lois too. I tried to peel my T-shirt back up over her again — if I was going to die I wanted it over soon, so I didn't have to keep thinking about it — but she shrieked again, and started trying to claw her way into my stomach,, which made me do some shrieking too, and then the dragon raised its head and let out another blast of fire, but straight up this time, and the roar that went with it really made my head want to burst, and I could feel the dragon's rage and confusion, as well as the throbbing scratches on my stomach.
Lois went strangely still when the dragon roared. Then it stopped, and there was a dreadful pause, and then Lois jerked herself out from under my shirt, scrambled over my legs, and set off toward the dragon. I just sat there. Stupidly, I suppose, but intelligently wasn't going to save me either. I'd never seen Lois like this. She stomped along, her tail trailing and her neck stuck stiffly out in front of her, and her spinal plates like straining with erectness . . . for a moment I half saw the dragon she was going to become.
She gave a gag or cough, stopped, opened her mouth, and produced a thin but unmistakable thread of fire. At the dragon.
The tumult in my head changed, like changing gear, like putting one book back on the shelf and taking another one down — or more like having one of the muggers stop kicking you and another one start. It's impossible to describe, but it was so definite a sensation that I rocked where I sat, as if I really was being kicked. I put my hands to my head as if literally trying to keep it from exploding. Sometimes if you squeeze in the right place it does help a headache. I squeezed.
The dragon dropped down to all fours. (Good thing it was a big meadow.) It stretched its own neck till its enormous snout was way too close to Lois, but Lois stood her ground. Indeed she danced up and down a few times — and while I'd never seen her have a tantrum, she somehow looked like someone getting ready to have a tantrum — then spread all four legs out like she was bracing herself, snapped her neck down and her head out, and . . . shot out some more fire.
This second go was pretty impressive for something that looked like a short-legged overweight wolfhound with really bizarre mange. The big dragon actually drew its head back a few feet to avoid getting burned? Maybe the nose is a sensitive area. I somehow hadn't thought to look if the dragon pulled its lips back carefully before it fired. I know there's supposed to be a gland that produces fireproof mucus that lines the throat, blah blah blah, which is why a dragon coughs before the fire comes out. There are stories from what the humans have the nerve to call the "dragon war" in Australia, about guys who survived by throwing themselves down immediately or diving to one side or something when they heard that dragon cough. But you need really good reflexes. I have to say I hadn't noticed the warning cough when the big dragon tried to kill me.