That's not to say I'd never seen any dragons at all. I did, lots of times, maybe as often as twice a year — or I did in the few years I was old enough to do a lot of walking before Mom died — but only at a distance, like across one of Smokehill's rock plains, when one of the rocks is flying. They don't come near the Institute (another sign of their intelligence, I say), so you only are going to see them if you're one of the lucky ones who ever gets farther into the park. And I've smelled 'em more often than that — smelled 'em close, I mean. There's a dragon smell that isn't like anything else. It's a fire smell, and a wild-animal smell — pungent but not rotten or foul like some kinds of musk or a sloppy carnivore's leftovers that can turn your stomach — but it's something else too. Billy says it's because their fire isn't like the fire you make with wood; they burn some sort of weird resinous stuff they secrete for the purpose. Organic fire. And even way damped down, that fire gives off a little invisible smoke, and we can smell it.

The Institute smells of dragon. The tourists here pick it up immediately, as soon as they come through the gate. (I suppose the wall kind of keeps it in too.) You can see them sort of straighten up and get all sparkly-eyed. And it makes them feel that the dragons are close — it makes them feel better about not actually seeing any. And of course they are close, comparatively speaking. I don't notice the smell much at the Institute — I don't really notice it till I get out into the park.

Oh, and every human who walks in the park either carries a squirtgun or has a Ranger with them carrying a squirtgun. This is supposed to be the dragon equivalent of what most animals think about skunks, but I don't know how they think they know. None of our Rangers has ever shot theirs at anything. But the checker-uppers for the squirtguns come round every six months like the other checker-uppers come round to test your fire extinguishers. But even if you happened to have a handy backup antitank gun you're sunk if your squirtgun didn't work, since it's a federal offense to harm a dragon. This is pretty funny when it's also a HUGE messy spectacular federal crime to aid in the preservation of the life of a dragon — in fact one of the hugest and messiest — but that's another story, and I'm getting to it, just shut up and listen.

CHAPTER TWO

Billy must have been working on Dad. Billy misses Mom almost as much as Dad and I do, and I think he knew that Dad barely being able to let me out of his sight any more was starting to make me kind of nuts. (No comments on the "starting to" please.) Dad had offered to get me another dog but I just wasn't ready for that yet. I didn't know how to think about having a new dog; I'd had Snark since almost before I could remember anything. It would be like getting a new mom: no. (I spent some time worrying about this too. If there was ever a man who needed a wife to pry him out of his obsession occasionally, it was Dad. Except I couldn't deal with this either — worrying about Dad or worrying about the idea of a new mom. I can worry about anything, but as an idea it never really got very far because Dad didn't notice women. He'd notice people if he had to, but if any of them was occasionally single and female it didn't register.)

Anyway. I was keeping the homeschooling admin happy (speaking of checker-uppers) but I was spending way too much time blowing up aliens with a lot of other people online who apparently didn't have lives either. But my family had been cut down by fifty percent and there was like a cold wind blowing through that freaking great hole. On a computer you don't have to notice who's missing. I was almost beginning to forget Smokehill, in a way. I hadn't changed my mind about dragons, and I was still going through the motions (most of them), it was more like seeing everything through the wrong end of the telescope. The only stuff up close was just me and the hole, and a dad who only noticed scientific abstracts and problems about the Institute that got in his face and screamed at him, except that at the same time I had to be like the lucky charm he kept in his pocket or something and always there.

So it seemed like it came out of nowhere — I'd stopped asking — when I finally got permission to hike out overnight alone.

This is maybe the single thing I'd been wanting to do all my life. I'd always planned to grow up and study dragons like Mom and Dad, but that was a ways off yet. Presumably I'd get my butt out of the park for a few years to go to college . . . and then I'd think about living somewhere with a lot of other people around . . . all the time? We get to close the gates at night here. So then sometimes I'd think I'd chicken out and just stay here and apprentice to the Rangers. Most of our federal parks make you go to school for that too, but that's one of the things Old Pete set up when he set up Smokehill, our Ranger system. Billy had told me he'd take me if I decided that's what I wanted to do. He's never been away from the park overnight since he was born (both his parents were Rangers). His idea of a holiday is to hike into the park somewhere he hasn't been before, and stay there awhile, beyond the reach of f.l.s. (I admit I'd have to think about it, whether I'd choose hanging around too close to grizzlies and Yukon wolves, or f.l.s. Billy likes the really wild places. But maybe if I was his apprentice I'd feel more competent. I'd rather rather hang out with grizzlies and Yukon wolves, if you follow me.)

When the f.l. percentages were unusually bad I was sure I wanted to be a Ranger, but the rest of the time I wanted to have some PhDs like my parents because it meant more people would listen to me. I still wanted to be able to protect our dragons as well as study them and the head of the Institute is the head of the Rangers, as dumb as that is. And when the congressional subcommittee guys come here to stick their noses in and make stupid remarks, Billy has always left it up to Dad and goes all Son of the Wilderness silent and inscrutable if he's introduced to them. (It's proof of how much he thought of my parents that he would babysit the Institute when Dad and Mom took me and Snark for one of our summer hikes in the park. One of the higher-strung graduate students actually left with a nervous breakdown after one of those holidays. Apparently Billy didn't let her weep on his shoulder the way Mom had. Dad used to call her Fainting in Coils.)

But my PhDs were a long way off. I read a lot but I'm not so bright that any of the big science universities were begging to have me early. But I was a pretty fair woodsman for almost fifteen. I'd had the best teachers — our Rangers — and I grew up here, which is a big advantage, like you're supposed to be able to learn a second language really easily if you start when you're a baby. My French and German are lousy, but I've learned the language of Smokehill — some of it anyway. Before Mom disappeared I was going to have my first overnight solo after my twelfth birthday. Then she disappeared and we sort of stopped breathing for five months and then they found her. After that, as I say, Dad could barely let me out of his sight and he could never get away from the institute himself because he's doing both his and Mom's jobs.

And then one day out of the blue Dad calls me into his office (I go in flexing my hands from joystick Paralysis) and says, "Jake, I'm sorry. I'm not paying the right kind of attention to you and I know it, and I don't know when I'll have time either."

He glanced back at his desk which was a wild tangle of books, notebooks, loose papers, charts, bits of wood and stone and Bonelands fossils, coffee cups and crumbs. The Institute (of course) can't afford a lot of support staff so we do all our own cleaning and cooking. Although we'd shared it when Mom was still around Dad and I stopped doing any about a month after she didn't show up at her checkpoint. We had started to try to do it again but if it weren't for eating with the Rangers sometimes I might have forgotten food ever came in any shape but microwave pouches or that cooking ever involved anything but punching buttons. And cleaning? Forget it. I can run the dishwasher — hey, I can run the washing machine, are you impressed? — but my expertise ends there.