One of the most important things our Rangers do is keep an eye on the numbers of the dragon dinners, partly because bison and sheep and deer and antelope are so much easier to count than dragons. Dragons are incredibly hard to count. Australia and Kenya say the same, it's not just us. The usual sorts of field surveys just don't work with dragons. Uh-huh, you say, thirty to eighty feet long (plus tail), flies, breathes fire, and you can't find them to count? Yup. That's right. You can't. After Old Pete opened the cages, they didn't just wander off, they disappeared. That's one of the reasons that a few people — Old Pete included — started wondering if dragons were, you know, intelligent.

Well, the mainstream scientists weren't having any of that, of course, humans are humans and animals are animals and anyone who says it's not that simple is a sentimental fool and a Bad Scientist. There is nothing you can say to a scientist that's worse than accusing them of being a Bad Scientist. They'd rather be arrested for bank robbery than for sentimentality. But when somebody found out that all the lichen on Mars get together occasionally and suddenly go from a lot of mindless little symbiotic thingies that eat and excrete and exchange gases and not much else and become a THINKING MACHINE, all kinds of ideas back on Earth blew up into smithereens, including some scientific definitions of sentimentality.

Most of the money has gone into studying lichen — there are getting to be so many information-collecting satellites around Mars it's going to have rings soon, like Saturn — and there's a fair number of new studies of Earth lichen going on too, just in case any of it is getting ideas. But Draco australiensis has come in for a little of it, because of the old question of their intelligence, and we can use all the money-dribbles we can get, even if they come attached to obnoxious, know-it-all-already scientists who have to be told no seventy-nine times in a row before they begin to believe that if they want to study our dragons they have to follow our rules.

That's one of the reasons dragons attract so many tourists — and so many fruit loops — the creepy pull of dragon intelligence. It's a thrill, so long as dragons are safely on the endangered list and only exist behind walls in a few parks, to have something that could not only eat you, but think about it. Although the fact that dragons have never seemed very interested in eating humans means that we have the slack to be cute about it.

But it's interesting that the f.l.s mostly only ever wanted to argue about what dragons are. Not many want to argue about whether australiensis is intelligent. They come here because they're fascinated but they get here and they kind of back off. Too scary maybe. I shied away from thinking about it much myself although as a kind of cool distant concept I always liked the idea — dragons are intelligent — right, okay, got it, now stop.

It's a big thing with tree-huggers that dolphins might be intelligent, but you can go have mystic experiences dancing with phosphorescent dolphins in the eternal sea at dawn and come back transmuted into your higher self. Not an option with dragons. The guys with sixty-seven PhDs who submit study projects to investigate dragon intelligence — or rather the very, very occasional ones who actually pass Dad's thermonuclear screening and assessment process — usually give up and go home early. If our dragons were hard even to count were they going to come out and play mind games with academic chuckleheads? I kept thinking there ought to be a good cartoon in it somewhere something like Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. I leave it to you who plays what.

Dorks and villains have been trying to get in here without permission since before Pete got national park status. It just got a little harder after that, not that many of them care about laws, but they have to care about the fence. That fence, which is the single biggest reason why we're so poor. Most of what to Congress probably does look like a multi-whale pod-supporting ocean of money goes to maintaining that fence. But it does keep our dragons in, in the popular imagination — I told you that dragons don't move around much, but try to convince Mr. Normal of that. The fence would also keep the fruit loops out, except — damn! there's a gate.

I learned to read so I could read Pete's memoirs. Mom used to worry that I was growing up strange because I wasn't interested in the usual kids' books. Goodnight Moon, baaaaarf. I didn't even like Where the Wild Things Are because none of them looked enough like dragons. But I still remember the first time Dad read me "Jabberwocky." It's probably my earliest memory; I think I was three. Mom — who was busy worrying that The Cat in the Hat didn't move me — said, "Oh, Frank, you'll only confuse him. It's not even in English," but Dad was having one of his manic fits. He'd done amateur theater when he was younger, and he could still turn that crazy public thing on when he wanted to. He doesn't do it much any more — except for congressional subcommittees — but he still did it when I was little. I don't know whether I was confused by "Jabberwocky" or not, but I was riveted by it, as my dad shouted and danced and snicker-snacked across my bedroom. I'd've named Snark Jabberwock if it hadn't been too hard to say ("Jabberwock, sit! Jabberwock, stay!") so I settled for Snark.

It was shortly after that Dad started reading parts of Pete's memoirs to me — while Mom shook her head. But it made me want to learn the alphabet. Once I could read there was no stopping me. Dad said once, "Mad, do you really think any child of ours wouldn't be spellbound by dragons?" It was always Dad's little joke to call her Mad; her name was Madeline. Mom laughed a sort of grim non-laugh and said, "I suppose it's either that or he couldn't stand them." I couldn't imagine what she meant.

So I grew up on Lewis Carroll — and Old Pete — and Saint George, and Fafnir and Nidhogg, and Smaug and Yofune-Nushi, and all the others, famous, infamous, and totally obscure. Mom in particular has had — well Dad and I still have it — this amazing collection of literary dragons and the myths pretending to be science about the evolutionary forebears of the Chinese dragon and the smelly dragon and all of the other fake dragons, trying to justify that Draco label.

Because the real problem with Draco australiensis is that it raises its kids in a pouch, like a kangaroo or a koala. Things with pouches just aren't romantic. Saint George or Siegfried slaying a critter with a pouch? No way. Even the Australians have never quite taken their Draco seriously as a real live dragon — even if it is the biggest of the land animals on this planet — and still manages to fly — and breathes fire — and, you know, looks like a dragon. It's not like the pouch shows. Humans are perverse. You may have noticed. But here we've got thousands of years of pretty much every culture on the planet coming up with stories about big scaly things that breathe fire . . . and then, hey presto, we've got them. They freaking exist. You'd think we've have been dancing in the streets and slinging daisy chains across the borders from Ulan Bator to Minsk. But noooo.

Maybe if dragons had eaten more people when they had the chance humans wouldn't have been so offhand. (Although if they had they might have been made extinct before anybody thought to preserve them.) You're looking to design the real, true, only dragon, and what more can you want than big and flying and breathing fire? No pouch nonsense is what you want. Hence the attraction of all the silly little lizards like russo and chinensis.

Because, I hear you say, not only is there the pouch problem, but kangaroos and koalas are mammals. True. But nobody ever told reptiles they couldn't evolve a pouch to carry their babies in, did they? You've heard the phrase "parallel evolution"? And mammals and reptiles are cousins anyway, if you go back far enough, like maybe 250 million years or so, which gives you a lot of room to mutate in. The biology of dragons — and from here on let's get it straight that when I say dragon, I mean our one and only real dragon, Draco australiensis — is still pretty much one big blank space in the biology books.