Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Jane Yolen Read Free Book Online

there’s not.
    Sometimes it’s better to rise up out of the ashes, singing.

Sea Dragon of Fife
    WE FOUND the monster near McBridey’s well on Sunday, after the long kirk service in which Reverend Dougal preached against the dangers of the sea. He preaches that one at least twice a year, and most parishioners never tire of it.

    The monster wasn’t much, as monsters go. A couple of horns, a snubbed snout, nine stubby talons—one was missing, probably torn off in a fight—and a tail with three barbs, all quite worn. But as it was the only monster discovered in Fife this spring, we had to track him.
    He died early Monday morning, not from his wounds but from the lack of a blood meal. We had tracked him to his lair by the trail of ichor, but we did not dare go in. We just waited him out, knowing that a hungry monster goes quite quickly. One minute snarling and swearing in his monster tongue, and the next minute dead. It’s never pretty, but it’s lucky for us; otherwise we’d be overrun with monsters. When we heard the thud in his cave, we waited another hour just to be sure. Then McBridey himself crawled in and stuck a good stout Anster hook in the beast. We towed him out to sea, trawling for a certain sea dragon.
    It was Angus McLeod’s wife, Annie, who baited the lines for us, sitting on the stone stairs in front of their house and smoking her day pipe. A braw woman, that, not a bit afraid of any land monster, though even dead it was quite a fright. Most of the women in the titles would have run screaming from it. But Annie was a fisherman’s wife and had seen a lot in her life. Besides, she’d just that spring lost her two oldest sons to a great sea dragon, one of the ferocious deep-sea meat-eaters. They’d been plucked off their father’s Zulu in front of his disbelieving eyes. Annie was not about to lose Robert, her twelve-year-old, who was next off to sea. She wanted that dragon caught and cooked. So she baited the hook with as much ease as she baited the sma’ lines with mussels for her husband’s boat. Not a blink out of her, not over the monster’s horns or snout or talons or barbed tail. All the while the smoke from her pipe curled about her head like a halo.
    "Done,” Annie said, standing and stretching. Like all the McLeods, she was never one for excess conversation.
    We loaded the bait monster into McLeod’s own Zulu and the little boat wallowed a bit under the weight, but it was no heavier than a load of haddock, I suppose. And then we were off, the red sails floating nicely on a flanny wind, with its soft and unexpected breezes. Annie waved to us from shore, her other hand tight on young Robert. He was pulling away from her a bit. Twelve is big enough for a man, but she was not about to let him go till that dragon was dead.
    It was a mackerel sky, so we didn’t need much sail. Still, a Zulu’s red sail can look like a banner, and so we flew it to signal that dragon we were coming. It looked a bit like the old clan banners the Highland men hoisted when they went off to fight at Sterling and at Bannockburn. Lord, we were sure of ourselves. Besides, we’d our guns with us, and a couple of harpoons as well. And a barrel of gunpowder. We would not be snatched up, like McLeod’s two boys, without a fight.
    But we had to come home early, the bait taken—snubbed snout, nine talons, and all. And not so much as a dragon’s claw to show for it. McLeod was in a foul mood, for the dragon had taken not only the bait but a bit of his red sail as well. He was as “thrawn as a wulf,” so his wife said when we landed, meaning he was contrary and angry and not to be fooled with. He snapped at her and she threw a bit of netting at him. So he took himself off to the pub and did not come home until the wee hours of the morning.
    Annie knew better than to wait up for him. But she should have stayed awake on account of Robert. That