Dragonspeak

         My eyes were closed, limbs slack. I needed to get out of bed, but not quite yet.

        Early in the mornings I often contemplated the first time I saw a dragon, just below timberline on a mountain, my head swimming and throbbing due to severe altitude sickness. Had she intended to reveal herself to me, I wondered? My conclusion was that she probably hadn’t.

Perhaps my sputtering and misfiring synapses activated some long-dormant neurons that allowed me to see through her camouflage, I thought. The same parts of the brain that enable children to see ghosts and monsters and “imaginary” friends, but go dim and quiet before the drudgery of adulthood sets in.

Or possibly the rational and reasonable components of my brain were shutting down to reboot. Therefore I could see the dragon, because nothing in my mind insisted that I couldn’t.

Regardless, I pondered, why did she allow me to walk up to her, and even touch her wing and scrub her wound? Why not flee or fight? Clearly dragons were so successful at avoiding humans for so long, we’d ceased to believe they ever existed. So why did this dragon make an exception for me?

Years ago I’d visited east Africa to climb Mt. Kenya and visit several of the game parks. At one of those game parks I witnessed a very peculiar scene. A large herd of zebras peacefully grazed near a lake, with a smaller herd of Thompson gazelles grazing just to the side, everyone minding their own business, the sun a shimmering scorched tangerine as it began its descent toward the horizon through a hazy but cloudless sky. Several clusters of acacia trees dotted the landscape. It was all very serene and mundane.

Then a young male lion sauntered onto the scene. He was on the verge of adulthood, but the faint striping on his limbs betrayed his immaturity. However he was old enough to have been kicked out of his pride. No other lions were nearby. He was alone.

Several of the zebras and gazelles raised their heads, watched the lion for a short time, then casually returned to grazing. The lion tentatively walked right up to a stand of bushes and lay down in the grass not more than 10 meters from the zebras.

The seasoned Kikuyu guides were absolutely astounded. They had never seen anything like it. These two herds of prey animals had evaluated this apex predator, and they’d judged him to be no threat.

But even without the finely honed instincts of zebras or gazelles, we humans could see it too. The lion looked lost, and even afraid. He wasn’t after a meal; what he needed couldn’t be fulfilled by chasing down a zebra.

Honestly I believe the dragon high on the mountain similarly sized me up, found me to be impaired, and judged me to be no threat to her. Also, she may have assumed I’d never survive to get off the mountain and tell the story. I smiled at the idea, but also shuddered. If she indeed had thought that, she’d have been almost accurate.

Pushing the sheets and blankets aside, I got up to get ready for another day of diagnosing and treating dogs and cats and the occasional rabbit or rodent at the veterinary clinic. Whether or not I would need to diagnose and treat a dragon after work, I never knew until it happened; there was never any warning. A dragon would arrive on average every 2 or 3 weeks, but sometimes a month or more might go by between visits. Or sometimes merely days.

Sometimes a colleague would jokingly remark about how “every day is different” in veterinary medicine. The comments are accurate; our days in practice are filled with a variety of patients and conditions and complications, and no two days are ever alike. Now, even after decades of practice, I still occasionally see things that I’ve never encountered before.

However when such remarks came up I was thoroughly amused. Just try practicing veterinary medicine on fire-breathing creatures, anywhere from large to gigantic, after hours, and you never know when they’ll turn up or what might be wrong with them when they do. Oh, and the creatures are supposed to be imaginary. Try THAT for random.

That particular day at the veterinary clinic turned out to be relatively easy. The schedule was light, no one tried to bite me (although one cranky cat undoubtedly considered it), no one yelled at me. My records were finished before the front door was locked. The sun was still several hours from setting when I drove home in the desert heat. If there were any dragons lurking around the clinic, waiting to catch me there under cover of darkness, they’d have to wait for another night.

It was a unicorn of a day, overall.  Which left me with spare time to contemplate other “fantasy” creatures besides unicorns.

Life would be easier if the dragons would make appointments. But that didn’t seem very likely to happen. It made me giggle to think of a dragon calling from a pay phone to schedule, carefully pressing numbers with the points of their talons.

However, I had discovered that some of the dragons were capable of talking! An enormous and imperious great Wyrm that I’d seen late on a winter night 6 or 7 months before spoke to me. I was shocked speechless. For so long I had talked to dragons without a word in return, I wasn’t sure what to say now that I could anticipate a reply.

Actually communicating with the dragon, however, proved difficult. Dragons choose their words carefully and are not prone to endlessly ramble. But the language they offer is filled with nuances and riddles. It’s poetic, perhaps, but not at all straightforward to interpret.

While in “work mode” I was in the habit of asking pet owners succinct questions, hoping for equally succinct answers, trying to obtain the salient points of history, nutrition, symptoms, contributing factors, etc. The goal was to determine a diagnosis and plan for treatment during the short time allotted for an appointment. Or at the very least, determine which diagnostics were needed to get there.

This approach dismally failed on dragons. Even a question as simple as “How old are you?” would elicit a cryptic response.

“I am younger than the mountain that feeds this river. I am older than the first dwelling of your kind in the valley.”

Okay, I’ll just run off to the library to study geology and the history of local human settlements to figure that one out.

Admittedly he had answered my question closely enough. There was a nearby town that had sprouted around a copper mine in the 1800s, perched so precariously on the steep mountainside that someone could step off their back balcony and land on their neighbor’s chimney. And Native Americans had populated the valley long before the copper mine, evidenced by the ruins of their dwellings in the cliffs and pueblos near the river. The great Wyrm was ancient indeed.

I marveled at how much he must have seen and done, how much the world had changed during his time on earth. And he was here, now, alive and well, except for his tail. Amazing. Especially for a creature that wasn’t supposed to exist.

“Please tell me when this injury occurred?”

“At the light of the quarter moon, when the brightest planet in the sky appeared where I would next see the sun.”

Fantastic. I’ll add astronomy and lunar cycles to my study agenda.

Not that I would expect a dragon to answer my questions like a person would. He had gone to the trouble to learn the English language (was he fluent in others, I wondered?), but why bother with the human construct of time? The cycles of the sun and moon, movements of the planets and stars, and geologic events would be far more meaningful to a dragon than minutes, hours, days, or years. Especially considering dragons may apparently live for centuries.

Having patched up the great Wyrm’s tail, I pondered whether there was anything I might ask him that might yield an understandable answer before sending him off into the night. I couldn’t expect him to stick around long enough to teach me all I wanted to know about dragon anatomy and physiology. But perhaps there was something?

“Sir…” The dragon looked at me with contempt. I’ve since learned that dragons of that age prefer lofty titles like “Great One” or “Mighty One.” They really are proud and arrogant creatures.

I pressed on. “If I may ask… I believe I know why the first dragon allowed me to treat her wing that day on the mountain. But… why do dragons continue to come here, to me, for veterinary care?”

It was the plea as old as humanity itself, as old as the history of human suffering: ‘Why me?’

The dragon replied only, “You are known.” And with a flap of his huge wings, he was gone. A cold winter breeze, edged with hot and acrid air from the dragon’s breath, blew in his wake. My hair swirled around my face as the nearby row of palm trees rustled and swayed.

That was it. Nothing about any trust in my skills, nothing about why dragons were seeking veterinary care now, when clearly they’d survived without my help for centuries. Judging by the look of the Wyrm, he’d endured and recovered from far worse injuries than what I had just addressed. So why me, why now? How did they find me?

Definitive answers to those questions have never come to me. Although many years later, I can claim to have partial answers, having filled in the gaps with suspicions and assumptions.

Initially, based on my experience with the Wyrm, I thought that language skills were unique to very old dragons. I was wrong. Two more dragons spoke to me within the next few months, and both of them were much younger. I started to suspect that other dragons likely had the ability to speak but chose not to.

Gradually I learned to decipher some of the dragons’ cryptic sayings. “My sustenance has rebelled” turns out to mean nausea. “The plumpest deer lack appeal” indicates loss of appetite. “Constant whines of the cursed hellhounds ceaselessly haunt me” interprets as tinnitus, I think, although I’ve been unable to confirm that. Anyway, you get the idea.

Since you’re reading my tales about dragons, chances are you’ve seen “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.” The scenes where Smaug converses with Bilbo and the dwarves makes me laugh every time, because his verbiage is so simple (Smaug’s words as told in the book are somewhat more realistic in my opinion). Also, that dragon is absolutely humongous. I’ve never met a Wyrm that large, and I’m not certain dragons of that size actually exist. Anything to make a movie more dramatic and appealing, I suppose. Although who knows? If I’d been asked many years ago, I’d have said there were no such things as dragons.

On multiple occasions I’ve questioned verbal dragons about the source of an injury. Usually I’ll get a huffy response along the lines of “Details matter not.” In other words there was some serious miscalculation on the part of the dragon, and with great intelligence comes the capacity for great embarrassment. However sometimes they will confess to what happened, although it requires “listening between the lines” to figure out what they’re actually saying.

One impetuous adolescent male dragon confessed to his attempt to fly sideways through the uprights of a railroad trestle spanning a river gorge. Apparently he misjudged the opening beneath the trestle and smacked both wings into the uprights, then tumbled into the gorge. The poor guy sustained some nasty wing lacerations, a concussion, a broken horn that refused to stop bleeding for quite some time, and two torn talons. And after all that, he found his way to me. A fall from that height likely would have killed any other animal, but dragons are incredibly tough beings.

The fact that he was concussed and not thinking clearly was likely why he was not at all inhibited from telling me the story. It was thanks to brain swelling that I was uninhibited enough to see a dragon in the first place, so I could empathize.

Since treating the railroad trestle victim, I’ve always wondered whether dragons engage in dares or bets with each other, or perhaps show off for a potential mate. He very much reminded me of a teenage boy.

And speaking of teenagers, it was thanks to another talkative adolescent dragon that a mystery was solved for me. For many years, usually sometime around mid-September, I’d start seeing adolescent dragons with indigestion. There would be a rash of these over several weeks, then none at all until the next year. The affected dragons would invariably respond well to antacid and anti-gas medications. Sometimes they required anti-nausea medication too. Whatever was causing this, I had no idea, but every year I’d brace myself for the onslaught. This was always in adolescent dragons, never hatchlings, young juveniles, or adults.

The vast majority of these dragons never spoke, and a stomach ache can’t be seen on exam, but the problem was obvious enough based on the symptoms of belching (occasionally with flame emissions!), horrid flatulence, and a hunched posture consistent with abdominal pain. Straightforward enough, but what on earth was the source?

As a side note, flatulence in fire-breathing species is no joke. Not only is the odor intolerable to an eye-watering degree, but the flammability is rather problematic.

Finally a young female spilled the beans, or corn, as it were. She informed me that adolescent dragons, typically in pairs or small groups, often frequent corn fields (which are grown in several parts of Arizona despite the heat) once the corn has ripened. Their favorite, I was told, is to find dried corn stalks left standing in the fields for corn mazes. The dragons will take a large mouthful of corn, then breathe fire, mouth closed, to make the corn pop.

And you thought cruising Main Street with your friends was an entertaining pastime in high school. Try popping popcorn in your own mouth.

The trouble with this habit is that the dragons then often eat the popcorn they’ve created (truthfully, who could blame them?). And dragons’ gastrointestinal tracts, well-suited for fresh prey or even carrion, do not tolerate corn well. Thus the indigestion. Despite the sometimes significant discomfort, adolescent dragons seem to find this quite amusing. Admittedly, I have to appreciate the appeal and admire their creativity.

Since then I’ve learned that popcorn indigestion, which I informally dubbed “popcorn-itis,” is quite common in areas of the United States and other countries where corn is a common crop. A colleague in Iowa tells me she encounters it constantly (yes, I’ve since connected with other dragon veterinarians! So great to have a small community of colleagues in the dragon medicine world). Apparently this is a popular and far-reaching trend, not simply the passing fancy of teenage dragons in the American Southwest.

The dragons, whether they were verbal or not, had taught me so much over the years I’d known them. When I encountered the first dragon on the mountain I was a relatively new graduate, still gaining skills and confidence in practice. And I was miserably, inexorably shaken when these “imaginary” creatures started showing up ill or injured at my clinic. But now, years later, practically nothing could rattle me.

Even the fiercest house cat (you may laugh, but just try taking a rectal temperature and vaccinating one) or most aggressive dog wouldn’t raise my blood pressure. I was calm and collected through seizures, hemorrhage, heatstroke, and rattlesnake bites; and I prevailed over surgical complications without imploring colleagues for help. Meanwhile I sleuthed pathways through complicated internal medicine and endocrinology cases, vaccinated and snuggled puppies and kittens, and at the other end of life, held paws and comforted owners as their beloved pets took their last breaths. The hours were routinely exhausting, often difficult, and sometimes heartbreaking, but I had settled into my role. And finally loved it… most of the time, anyway.

Through all of this, I never knew when a sick or injured dragon would show up and require my time and skills. And the dragons required infinitely more ingenuity and courage than my small animal patients ever did. I simply learned to roll with this surreal, grueling “routine” filled with unpredictability, stealth, and risk.

But this “routine” was about to undergo major upheaval. My husband and I were planning to move to Idaho.

Although the dragon on the mountain had tracked me down over 60 miles from where I first encountered her, I was certain that the dragons would not have the ability nor the interest to follow me across two states. So while I said goodbye to the red rocks of the desert, to my dear colleagues and coworkers, and to many dedicated clients and beloved patients, I was convinced that I was saying goodbye to my clandestine dragon patients as well. 

While I was looking forward to the move, I was also sad to leave. Leaving the dragons behind left me with mixed feelings as well. Surely they would be fine, having survived without veterinary care for millennia. As for the thrill and challenge of seeing them, that I would miss. But as for the danger and the mess, the property damage and occasional personal injury, the stealth and stress of keeping them secret… the idea of leaving all that behind was honestly refreshing.

Once the move was assured, I informed any dragon I saw that I’d be gone in several months time. How dragons communicate to each other over long distances is something I’ve never entirely understood, but I was hoping that the word would get around. No use having dragons lurking around the veterinary clinic and risking discovery when I was no longer there.

However I didn’t tell them where I was going. No reason to, I surmised, since I was positively certain that once I’d left Arizona behind, I would never see another dragon again.

About that, I was absolutely wrong. ?