Smokehill was supposed to have dragons. And I checked in every day! Leave me alone!

That morning, while we waited for Gulp to show up (I'd never waited for Gulp before, merely steeled myself for her arrival), I tried to teach Lois the idea of stay or go with or go that way. She already knew a kind of stay because we used it to make our races after the stick more interesting. She found my jogging along beside or behind her kind of a snore, if we started even, and I'm sure she knew I was faster than she was. So she'd learned to wait – stay somewhere while I went a little distance from her and threw so that the stick was nearer her than me, and then we could both tear after it. It was more fun for me too. It only occurred to me that morning that maybe the reason it was more fun was because I was putting out more, fun vibes as I hurtled after her trying to catch up.

I wasn't putting out any kind of fun vibes that morning, which is probably why my attempt to teach her something new was a total disaster. It was a great big drooling object lesson in "I'm not going to do what you say when what you're doing is way big-time something else." Also to the extent that anything I taught her — or she taught me — was based on vibes, it was doomed. Any kind of teaching, you have to keep your mind on business, and maybe she could even pick it up that I was worrying about her safety, and her safety had always and only ever meant one thing to her: me. She wouldn't stay in one place at all but glued herself to my leg and wouldn't listen to anything I was saying and that began to make me angry, except it wasn't her fault.

When Gulp showed up I was lying on the ground with Lois draped over my legs, humming. This time it was one of her own hums. (Very Winnie-the-Pooh-ish. Similar waistlines too, although Lois was built that way. She was also growing too fast to have any slack to get fat.) Lois would have been sitting on my chest while she hummed only I couldn't breathe if she sat on my chest for more than a minute any more, so I'd shoved her farther down.

I had an arm flung over my eyes so I didn't see Gulp land but I felt her. I felt — and smelled — the wind of her coming, and the faint — tinily faint — tremor of her landing. Maybe it was because I was lying down that I felt it this time. And I felt the shadow — and the wash of heat — when she . . .

My eyes shot open and I moved my arm. She was standing right over us. She'd never done that before. An adult dragon is big enough that when you're lying down you might as well be a beetle. My first instinct was to get up and run like hell . . . but if she'd been going to eat me, she'd've done it weeks ago. I didn't think my lying down was likely to be some kind of irresistible come-on. Dragons aren't carrion eaters if they have a choice.

And then she lay down beside us, like she had that first day, when she was apologizing, if that was what she was doing, and seeming to make an even greater effort to make herself as small (yowzah) as she could. She'd never put all of herself down next to us before, if you follow me, she'd like tried to leave most of herself at the other end of the meadow. But then we'd never been lying down when she landed either.

She curved her ridiculously long neck in an arc, so that while her body was already really close to us (really close), her head was too. (Well, comparatively. There was still fifty-feet-plus of her relative to six-feet plus of me.) Once she got herself settled, Lois and I were the center of a spiral, and the spiral was all dragon. Maybe it was just as well I was preoccupied with Dad's check-in because if I'd panicked and tried to run, there wasn't anywhere to run to, except into the dragon. The hump of her body, especially with the spinal ridge plates, pretty well shut out the sun. It had started to get chilly lying on the ground (except where Lois was on my legs), but being that close to her body heat was something else — although adrenaline surges kind of warm you up too. I had noticed her being hot before, of course, but this was another something or other. Degree. Dimension. I noticed Lois' body heat because she was usually pressed up against me. I know, why would dragons waste their fire heating their surroundings? But Gulp was close. I could hear her breathing. It sounded like wind in a cave, and one in-and-out breath took several minutes.

On a whim — a whim I didn't dare even recognize as a whim — I stretched out an arm. I did it quickly so I wouldn't lose my nerve, which is never a good idea with a wild animal — doing something quickly I mean — but I did it anyway. Besides, what was she going to be afraid of? It would be like having a toothpick attack you. I wasn't quite close enough, so I hitched myself over a little closer to her, trying not to dislodge Lois (still humming). I put my hand on Gulp's jaw. I could touch my baby dragon without gloves (except on her belly), as long as I was careful that only the palm stayed in contact. I assumed I could keep my hand against Gulp's greater heat — and probably her thicker skin helped.

The hot part went okay. The hot part and the Gulp not moving her head with a dragon equivalent of "ugh" part. It was still a sensationally stupid thing to do. Like maybe telepathy works better with a conductor, like those tin-can telephones you maybe made (if you were poor, or lived out in the middle of nowhere, or both) when you were a kid. They don't really work very well, but that they work at all is weirdly exciting (if you're pathetic enough to have made them, then you'll probably find them exciting, okay?). I started thinking at her. I guess I started out thinking words, as if I was talking to her, but words aren't really all that good, you know, one picture is worth a thousand, etc., and especially if you don't speak the same language, and while maybe dragons had been keeping up their English since they spent all that time with Old Pete (and he says in his journals he used to talk to his dragons, although his never talked back), there's a limit, I guess, to what an insane whim will stretch to.

And there are so many times when words are nowhere near enough even when you're talking to an ordinary human person who speaks the same language. And that's even when you're talking to someone who knows you well and knows almost everything about you, like Dad or Billy or Kit or Katie or Martha knows me. I didn't deliberately shift over to pictures, talking (or whatever) to Gulp, but I did, since I was in my head anyway and could do what I liked and it was all either crazy or imaginary so who cared.

And then it really started getting weird. The pictures started like going through my head faster than I was thinking them, like they were getting sucked out of me; but as they went they were getting all distorted. Not like Dad suddenly had six legs or Billy was eight feet tall and green, just . . . I don't know. But you know how sometimes when two of you who were there start to tell a story to a third person who wasn't, and you keep laughing because it's like you're telling two different stories and one of you is crazy? It was a little like that. And if I wasn't imagining it, well, a dragon's point of view and attitude would be a lot different from a human's, wouldn't it?

But what was the dragon perspective doing to my story?

By the time I got to the guys in black with the machine guns and the helicopter — and why I was imagining guys in black with machine guns I don't know, too many TV shows at too young an age I suppose — I had a headache so bad I could hardly bear to keep thinking at all, and the pictures I was making seemed to rip at me as they were pulled away — a little like skinning a sunburned arm, only worse — and with every picture the Headache got even worse and worse and worse. I suppose that's why I didn't hear the two-way immediately. I might not have heard it at all except that I noticed that Lois had stopped humming. My brain (or my Headache) was thundering in my ears so hard I couldn't hear her either, but my legs had stopped vibrating — and my hip had started (vibrating). Even Gulp shifted her head very slightly — not enough to shake my tentative hand though. And there was the hiccupping brrrr that was the two-way asking for me to answer it.