Raising Dragons by Bryan Davis

Author:Bryan Davis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: AMG Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2010-06-10T22:00:00+00:00

Walter Foley loved the city’s fall festival. For him, next to Christmas, it was the most fun day of the year. As was his custom, he arrived at the park early to help with setting up the Boy Scouts’ dunking booth. Being a high-ranking scout in the local troop, it was his duty to help manage the festivities, but it was also his pleasure. Where else could he play carnival barker and poke fun at the various teachers who had bravely volunteered to become the objects of ridicule and the victims of an icy dip in a big washtub? But they knew the risks, and Walter had assured them that there were enough volunteers to make each chilly turn on the dunking platform a short one.

Walter grabbed one of the softballs out of a wicker basket and repeatedly tossed it a foot or two in the air, catching it in the same bare hand. Each smack of leather on flesh stung a bit in the chilling late afternoon, but it was a good sting, one that promised lots of fun.

As usual, the city council had timed the festival to coincide with the approach of Thanksgiving. Long ago, the founders of the city designated a community feast two Fridays before Thanksgiving; nobody alive today knew why for sure, but local legend tells the story of an early settler who fell off his horse on this very weekend over a hundred years earlier. He slid into a deep pit, and for six days he sat at the bottom eating nuts and berries that sympathetic chipmunks dropped in. Finally, a passing hunter noticed a gathering of chipmunks around the hole and investigated, finding the settler at the bottom, covered with berry stains, but very much alive.

The town celebrated the weekend of his rescue every year, hauling out a three-foot-high bronze chipmunk and placing it at the park entrance for six days. Everyone patted it on the head as they passed by or placed acorns at its feet in memory of the friendly chipmunks that kept the poor settler from starving so long ago.

This year, cold air dominated the weather, but not unusually cold for West Virginia in November, just chilly enough to give the festival its late autumn flavor. Somehow the sight of everyone bundled up made the evening more like a family get-together. Ladies in double-thick sweaters and men in lined jackets strolled from booth to booth, sometimes attached glove-in-glove and trailed by prancing children in knit ski caps carrying corndogs or half-eaten plumes of cotton candy. White puffs streamed out of red noses, laughter became contagious, and people ate, talked, and played together late into the evening.

Walter’s enthusiasm this year, however, was tempered by the worries of the day. With the strange bat creature at school that morning, and with Billy’s house burning down, people seemed on edge. Gossip buzzed around town. The police had interviewed Walter right after the firefighters finished saving what was left of the house, and they talked to everyone at school who knew Billy.

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