Dragon Haven by Robin McKinley

Author:Robin McKinley
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2007-09-09T04:00:00+00:00

What I called a meadow, that’s kind of a euphemism. As the scraggy, stony forest of eastern Smokehill starts breaking up into the Boneland desert and the prairies around it there’s some weird in-between stuff. Westcamp was in a weird in-between area. The camp itself was on the edge of some semi-forest, and there was a semi-clearing on two sides of it, partly Ranger-(and lately Jake-) maintained. Then there was a big pile of stones—say twenty feet high—like a thoughtless giant had left them there for no better reason than he didn’t want to carry them any farther, and some tough little saplings had colonized one side of it where a little soil had somehow accumulated, and were trying to turn it into a hillock. Beyond that there was more mixed-clearing-scrub-and-the-occasional-obstinate-tree.

The clearer bits wiggled like some kind of game of follow-the-leader, and there was something nearly like a real clearing not too far from the camp, that Lois and I had found the first week with Billy. It was almost like having our own private playground. There was a series of small heaps of boulders with sand at the bottom as well as the usual local striated stone pocked by scrub underfoot, and several of the standard little eastern-Smokehill rivulets cutting up the stone and going nowhere but making nice noises while they did it, and reminding you what you were going to be missing if you kept going west.

Amazingly though there was also a pretty good meadowy sort of meadow, mostly at the southeastern end but kind of snaking through the stony bits too, and surprisingly large—well, I’m an Eastern-Smokehill boy, it was surprising to me—which meant we saw a lot of sheep and deer there. They’d leave if we got too close, but usually a few of them just kept an eye on us while the rest grazed and did deer and sheep things. After the first week or so we even saw some of this year’s babies, which were old enough to be getting serious about grazing too but still had to have regular outbreaks of rushing around and jumping over things that didn’t exist. I suppose the old ones couldn’t afford to ignore the grazing but they weren’t entirely happy about us. Lois used to watch them watching us, and when she did her cheeps and burbles they sounded more tentative, like she was trying for a definition of what she was looking at. (Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Would it leap tall buildings at a single bound if there were buildings?)

After we’d been at Westcamp a while and fallen into some kind of schedule, going to the meadow and just kind of hanging out there became part of it. And I guess she was getting enough exercise elsewhere because sometimes she’d actually be quiet and still for a while without being asleep. (Although as I’ve said she was neither a quiet nor a still sleeper either.) And she was now watching the

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