Dragonhaven Read Online Free PDF Page A

but they all poop in the same corner most of the time, which makes me like them, as much as I’m going to like any lizard, but sweeping up the snail shells is a pain, because we have to do it really carefully—they won’t eat anything they haven’t peeled themselves so that limits the options. One of them still managed to get an infected foot once from a broken snail shell and wasn’t that a big hassle. There’s a vet in Cheyenne that knew a lot about lizards before she moved to Cheyenne and has learned a lot more since, but it’s expensive to get her here. We don’t have our own regular vet, of course—we can’t afford it. I have to give Eric credit, much as it goes against the grain, he invented his own correspondence course in reptile veterinary, and mostly he copes.
    Then there’s the Madagascar dragon, Draco madagascariensis , with its vestigial wings, but if you were up on your paleontology you would know that it spent a few million years being a bird and then changed its mind and went back into Reptilia, and it hisses because it hisses, not because it used to breathe fire. It eats anything and everything, including very small children and very tottery old people, but it’s no threat to the rest of us and no threat at all as long as it’s got plenty of other stuff to eat—it doesn’t actually like to go to the effort to catch anything.
    My favorite f.l. arguments though are for Draco sylvestris . This is just a big chameleon, and the point is it lives in trees . The thicker the trees the better it likes it. Sounds like a real short evolutionary dead end to me, evolving flame-throwing when you live in a forest. Duh. Because it all comes back to fire, you know. Never mind the size, or even the wings. Dragons are the only animals (besides humans) who habitually eat their food cooked. They don’t like it cooked through, but they like a nice char-broiled effect.
    By the way, sylvestris is the least popular of the zoo exhibits—they’re really hard to see. You don’t believe they can be, because they run up to twenty feet long, but you’d be surprised. They look like branches of trees. Really. Us cage cleaners have to count them to make sure we got them all before we lock them up on the other side and clean their empty cage, or we may find one of the tree branches getting startled and trying to run away. I awfully nearly lost one out the door once, where I’d parked my wheelbarrow, but fortunately it didn’t like the look of the wheelbarrow either and veered away at the last minute. Kit was next door cleaning out madagascariensis that day so he saw what happened, but he didn’t tell Eric.
    I’ve already told you about odoratus , who is at the very end of the other row of Draco houses. It doesn’t usually get much more than six feet long, but it has these huge smelly sulfurous belches that the f.l.s say mean that it used to breathe fire like a real dragon, and that it’s just evolved in the wrong direction for the last million or so years. Please. It evolved into huge smelly sulfurous belches because no one would want to eat anything that smells like that. Which is why our odoratus house costs more than all the rest of the zoo put together, because it’s all glass, to protect the tourists. We need the tourists to keep coming. We need the money. I know I already said that. We say it to each other all the time. It’s the truth. And, okay, I admit it, the zoo is a draw, since you’re not going to see our real dragons, except in the tourist center theater.
    Listen to me now because there will be a test later. There is only one real dragon , and that’s Draco australiensis . They’re extinct in the wild, but there’s a place not far from the Grampians outside Melbourne that’s been made a sanctuary that has quite a few of them—maybe as many as five hundred—although rumor has it the numbers are