Dragonhaven Read Online Free PDF

dropping and it hasn’t been as many as even four hundred in years, but it’s not a rumor I want to believe, so I don’t. Australia’s nearly the only place that has enough space left to give some to dragons. I suppose they also have guilty consciences because it’s mostly their own poachers that killed them off, although when dragon endocrine extract became the fashionable aphrodisiac about a hundred years ago a lot of foreign poachers came to help, aided and abetted by the local sheep farmers because dragons love toasted sheep.
    The only other two places with dragons now are the park in Kenya where Mom died, and us, Smokehill. We think we have maybe two hundred here, and nobody knows why; the weather should’ve killed ’em off long ago. We’ve actually got more acres than the Australian place, but dragons are native to Australia so it’s not surprising they can live there okay if nobody murders them.
    Smokehill as a dragon preserve is an accident. Almost ninety years ago Peter Makepeace brought four dragons here because the Cleveland Zoo couldn’t cope any more and nobody else would have them. That was during the era when most people thought the sooner Draco australiensis went extinct the better, although no one said it out loud because there were environmentalists even in those days. Old Pete knocked together a few cages (dragons hate cages, which is why zoos had such trouble with them—nobody ever built a cage that didn’t feel like a cage to a dragon, and, of course, dragons are large , and experiments in dragon keeping are very expensive), and prepared to try to nurse them through their first winter. He always said later he didn’t expect to succeed but somebody had to give it a try and he didn’t see anybody else with a few thousand acres to spare in a better climate making an offer.
    Smokehill was really wild then. It’s like suburbia now in comparison. A few of the old cages are still sort of standing, and they’re part of the bus tour. They are not in themselves very interesting, maybe, but they are huge which kind of reminds you about how big dragons are, and it also gives you a clue about how really creative Old Pete had had to be, to do what he did, to do it at all. I’m sorry his old cabin isn’t still around. We’ve got some grainy old photos but that’s all. It was where the Center is now. (Think, if you dare, about using an outhouse in our winters, where a bad January never gets above twenty below, and where a blizzard can arrive in less time than it takes to pee.)
    Well, they didn’t die. In fact they thrived, in spite of the cages, and the weather. Maybe they just liked Old Pete. From his journals, he didn’t have a clue what he was doing, but he found them really interesting and although they had to live in cages they didn’t have a lot of gawkers gawking which would sure be enough to put me off my toasted sheep. Whereupon he found himself the latest unwanted-dragon dumping ground. By the next winter he had twenty dragons and was running out of plausible places to put cages—besides how expensive building dragon pens was. And Pete didn’t like gawkers either, so kept delaying turning his charity rescue project into a business. But he had to do it finally and eventually it became Smokehill National Park.
    Old Pete’s dad had bought up the Smokehill territory because he got the whiff of “gold” slightly before the government did, so when a few people started finding gold, the gov had to deal with old Mr. Makepeace. Old Mr. Makepeace senior was more devious than his son and a lot more aggressive, so the gov found itself between a rock and a hard place, the Native Americans on one hand who believed that the little piece of paper they’d got from the gov a while back meant that they owned the territory, and Mr. Makepeace, who had another little piece of paper that said he owned the territory, and