I might as well be writing this as working on my dictionary because my dictionary is getting nowhere fast. Not that in some ways we aren't — getting somewhere — or I hope we are. It's pretty funny watching Lois — often now with Martha — giving Gulp her talking lessons, for example. I've told you that dragons mostly don't seem to talk out loud — or anyway what we'd call words are only maybe a quarter of dragon language and it's a support quarter, not a leading quarter. It seems to me there's a fifth fifth or sixth sixth in there somewhere that I don't even know what it is, and I think there's some kind of layers action too. . . . But meanwhile Gulp is learning to burble. What we're going to do with the burble — or the cheep, chortle, peep and whatever else — I don't know yet. But you know, why do dragons have the vocal cords and the larynxes if they don't use them? Maybe they fell out of the habit of talking out loud as they got good at the head stuff. Or maybe they stopped talking out loud after the Australian "war" with chatty, deadly humans. So we're going to begin a new habit. I hope.

But the stuff that is the most translatable into human word facsimiles is surface stuff, like where the food is, and bees go back to the hive and tell each other that, you know? And nobody gets into screaming contests about how intelligent bees are. If you were only using your ears and eyes, a dragon sentence like "There is a valley north of that hill that you can see from here, and then west of the hill beyond that which you can't see from here, but you could if you flew up a few [tree lengths? Dragon lengths? I still don't have much grip on dragon measurement and yes this is another problem] which has a good spring at the bottom of it" would come out something like "There is beyond [something] and beyond [something else] [something] of [something] good [something]." And they don't "speak" in "sentence" shapes anyway. You see why I keep getting mixed up.

I'm guessing that Bud and Gulp are still the only ones on the dragon side who are working more or less from the same page (of the dictionary, ha ha) that I am — we're the ones who had our little/big epiphanies, that first day aboveground after Gulp had brought us to Dragon Central. We're the ones who thought "Right. Here's the starting line. . . . Uh, where's the track?" Gulp is learning to talk out loud. Bud watches over my shoulder a lot when I'm using my laptop, and he's seen that graphics program. Maybe it's just as well I don't know what a dragon laugh is. And speaking of intelligence, I think that the dragons, as we go on yattering and yammering at them (and squeezing our skulls and saying "ow ow ow"), are beginning to feel about us kind of the way we feel about dogs. (And when your dog goes "roooaaaaoooow" at you don't you sometimes go "roooaaaaoooow" at him back?) And we've been living with dogs for forty thousand years and are still arguing about how best to get our point across to them.

Dad, by the way, doesn't disagree when — usually I've just come away from a particularly frustrating session with some member or members of the white coat brigade, which tends to put me in a ranting sort of mood anyway — when I say that dragons are more intelligent than humans. He says I'm prejudiced, but he doesn't disagree. He just says we don't know yet. He likes not knowing. He likes the process of finding out. It makes him happy. It's the first time since Mom died he's been happy.

And we're actually talking about her for the first time. Or not talking about her so much as just letting her be part of the conversation. Mom said this, Mom said that. (And I wish I had more of her humor when the white coats start sticking me with their specimen-impaling pins, which is what it feels like sometimes. The scientists who can't stand the headaches but don't give up easily study me.) But it's like she's part of our family again. The door's been opened. It was like nailed shut for six years but it's open now. I knew something important had happened when I heard him call her Mad, one evening, at dinner with Billy and Grace. Up till then if he mentioned her at all he called her Madeline, which he'd never used when she was alive.

It makes both of us miss her more in some ways but . . . well, it's the way it is. Somebody you loved dying isn't something you get over, you know? You get used to it because you have to. You carry it around with you — because you have to. And even after I stopped scratching my cheeks and playing Annihilate all the time and became something more like normal again from the outside, missing Mom was still in there doing stuff to me.

Since Dad and I started talking about her again I've stopped dreaming about her. This is mostly a relief, but I miss it a little bit too. And since Lois has dragons to teach her how to be a dragon I don't dream about Lois' mom either. I miss those dreams a little too. I just don't like people dying, you know? And Snark would have been way jealous of Lois, but he'd've got over it. And at least Snark was old, for a dog. It wasn't exactly okay that he died, but it so wasn't okay in any way that my mom and Lois' mom died.

So the short answer to that question I asked way back at the beginning is . . . yes. If Mom had still been alive and I'd still been more or less, you know, sane, I probably wouldn't have noticed the dying dragon's eye, not the momness of it. I would have been horrified and sorry — and I'd've got on the two-way as soon as I got clear of the remains of the poacher, and called Billy, and the story would have been a lot different because there would have been no Lois. Even if I'd noticed that one of Mom dragon's babies wasn't quite dead yet, that would have just been one of the horrible things, that it took a little while to die, that I had to watch the last one die while I waited for Billy. It would never have occurred to me to do anything about it — what could I possibly do? Eric's got incubators, but a fetal squodge wouldn't anything like make the journey back — and of course an incubator would never have worked on a dragonlet anyway.

Or back up a little farther yet — if I hadn't been a jerk about my first overnight alone in the park — if I hadn't been determined to make that twenty miles — I would never have seen the dying dragon in the first place. But why was I so determined? What was Mom dragon putting out on the airwaves as she lay there dying — about being a mom and dying and leaving her babies behind? And why was it me that picked it up instead of another dragon? And I wouldn't want to bet against it that it was partly frenzy that helped keep Lois alive — that I COULDN'T BEAR her dying — because of what her and her mom reminded me of.

So is Lois, and just maybe the entire future of Draco australiensis, worth Mom's life? I don't have to answer that. It's what happened. Anyway. I pick up some of the head stuff. Yeah. It's there, I'm not imagining it, and I'm not going to argue about it any more. But I think the only reason I pick up even as much as I do is because I'm picking up some of the dragonness of it, and I can do that because of Lois — and her mom. Which isn't something I call pass on to anybody else. Yet. But the possibility that there's some kind of osmosis going on also gives me the best excuse to go on living with dragons, which I do, a lot of the time now, although even I have to take a break sometimes. Also the weather sometimes has something to say about where you are and where you stay in Smokehill.

There are fancy new premises (built by more Dragon Squadron money) out near where the dragon caves are — the dragon caves I stayed in, that is, since I (and Dad) aren't making any statements about whether they're the only dragon-inhabited caves in Smokehill or not — we're pretty sure not. It's still hard, counting dragons — and those caves go on and on and they all have spooky gremlin things-moving-around-in-the-dark noises. Now that we're meeting our dragons face-to-face it should get easier though, shouldn't it? Well, we still never see more than a few of them at a time, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only human who's ever seen more than the same half dozen that are the human liaison committee (sorry, little joke here — dragons do not do bureaucrat language).