In the Labyrinth of Drakes: A Memoir by Lady Trent (A Natural History of Dragons)

Author:Marie Brennan [Brennan, Marie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466856981
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2016-04-05T07:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Observing a clutch—Umm Azali—Suhail’s youth—The poem—Young drakes hunting—Plans for return

As Tom predicted, there were other flights. We developed quite a good system for observing them, too, stationing ourselves and Andrew at various points and dividing up the terrain so that we need not all race to watch. And very few of the dragons were as inconvenient as our first; most laid their eggs in more accessible locations.

I had an especially splendid chance to observe one of these, by dint of scrambling to the top of a large, rocky outcropping and peering down on the drake from above. She dug a shallow pit, scraping the earth sideways with her claws, rather than between her hind legs as a dog does. This done, she crouched over it and laid her eggs—six of them in total. Then she tossed sand back over them, and lowered her head to the ground to blow across it, blurring the marks of her activity. (They do not breathe fire over their eggs, whatever legend says. Doing so would vitrify the sand, and the resulting plate of rough glass would tell any interested predator that tasty treats lie below, ready to be tunneled out.)

We marked the spot and came back the next day, when we were sure the drake had gone. She would, we were told, revisit her clutch periodically, and rebury the eggs if necessary; but desert drakes do not brood, which gave us leisure to examine the site. Careful excavation netted us a great deal of data, from the depth at which the eggs are buried (fifteen centimeters or so: enough to keep them covered if the wind is not too fierce, but not so deep as to be entirely insulated) to the temperature of the ground (easily thirty degrees at the surface during the hottest part of the day; perhaps ten degrees cooler where the eggs lie). Standing by the egg pit, I could feel for myself how well the drake had chosen her spot. It lay in a shallow bowl, reasonably protected from the wind, but fully exposed to the sun. If our guesses about the role of heat were correct, then such conditions were vital to the successful incubation of the eggs.

“Do you want to take them?” Haidar asked when we were done, gesturing at the pit.

“No, definitely not,” I said. “By all means remember the location—but if we take them now, we will likely have nothing to show for our efforts but dead eggs. We do not know nearly enough yet to interfere so early in the process.”

Tom did take one egg, not to incubate, but to dissect. We had only rudimentary chemical equipment with us, but he analyzed the albumen and yolk as best as he could, and I packed the pieces of shell carefully in sand for later study. Their texture was very different from that of mature eggs, and the comparison might tell us something.

“Even if we can’t breed them,” he said to me one night, over the last scraps of our supper, “at least we’ll have learned a good deal about them.

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