Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley Read Free Book Online Page A

with—and the poachers—killed a lot of dragons, and the rest of them pretty much disappeared. Again.
    But there was about half a century of the australiensis golden age when everybody was fascinated by them, and you could study them all right, so long as the poachers didn’t get there first. Well, you still didn’t see them get born. But you could see them flying, for example. Something the size of a dragon is pretty damn visible , flying. And there are lots and lots of records of all those sober scientists streaming out to Australia to see for themselves. I was really jealous of the guys who could write about seeing dragons flying nearby, the hot smell of them—like fire but not like fire—the way their underparts tend to be paler and mottled—but you can’t see a lot of their bellies because of the way they tuck their tails back under their bodies, like a dog tucking its tail between its legs. Birds use their tails as rudders. Dragons have some other system…but that’s only one of a thousand things we don’t know about dragons. We started killing them too soon.
    When it was too late some of the politer scientists went round to the aborigines and said, Hey, can we talk to you about your dragon stories? It was those stories that first told the rest of us that australiensis had pouches. Maybe by then we were looking for a reason not to like them, since we were busy making them extinct. The really interesting thing about all the old aboriginal tales though is that there isn’t a single one about a dragon eating a human. Oh well those are just tales , said the guys with the guns. And it’s true that a few ranchers got fried in the nonwar, but a rattlesnake won’t bite you unless you worry it, and the ranchers were going after the dragons—there was no live-and-let-live policy or acceptable sheep loss rate.
    I’d never seen a dragon flying—not up close. And I live here. And five million acres isn’t big enough to hide (maybe) two hundred flying dragons. So, I hear you say, maybe our figures are wrong? Maybe we don’t have two hundred dragons? Then what’s eating the deer, the sheep, and the bison? We can count our bears and our cougars and our bobcats and our coyotes and our wolves well enough, and they aren’t doing it by themselves. And our Rangers really do cover most of the park slowly, over a period of years. They said there were quite a few dragons out there, and Dad and I believed them.
    Billy knows what goes on in this park better than any other human alive, and he’d only seen flying dragons a few times. There’s a big valley sort of northwest of the center of Smokehill, one of the friendlier edges of the Bonelands, where he’d seen most of ’em, and he’d say he’d take me there when I was older—which was to say when Dad would let me. I didn’t know when that was going to happen, because he’d been a little crazy about keeping me safe since Mom died. He’d barely let me out of the Institute, and the summer before the one I’m talking about we never did take our summer hike, which is three or four weeks backpacking through the park, having left Billy in charge of dealing with the f.l.s. It’s true that it wouldn’t have been the same without Mom and Snark, but I still wanted to go. The summer before that—no. But that summer—yes. I wanted to go. I wanted to find out what it would be like. Like after a major accident and months in the hospital and six operations and all that physical therapy—so, does the leg work again, or doesn’t it? But Dad wouldn’t even discuss it, so we didn’t go.
    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