for her. Sometimes the humans would hunt her for years before cornering her. Usually she fled as soon as she knew that they were aware of her, but occasionally she would be surprised and caught before she could leave. Her tattered wing membranes bore the traces of many battles: pitchfork stabs, arrow holes, tears, and nicks; and all over her body were faded scars from torch burns and various cuts and gashes. She had missing scales, a twisted claw on one foot, part of a spine on her head cut off, and two of her ribs had been broken by a club and had mended awkwardly.
All of these had healed, eventually. But the dragon knew that she was hated. And that was the deepest scar of all to bear.
Somewhere deep in her dragon’s heart, a voice would wonder, What is the point of living? She was no use to anyone. No one valued her, except perhaps as a trophy.
There were no other dragons. The humans had done away with them all. Someday they would do away with her, too.
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As the dragon’s wound grew more and more painful, life for Jack continued as normal. He cleaned out the pig-sties, helped to pick apples and plough fields. Every night he slept on straw in the barn, just as he had done every night since the house had become too full of his cousins to accommodate him also; and, since Jack was one of the eldest children in the household, and since he was an orphan, he was the one to sleep in the barn. Jack did not mind. It was peaceful in the barn, and he liked being with the animals: five brown cows and their calves, the black cart-horse, and a flock of hens that roosted in the barn. Their quiet noises would soothe him to sleep every night.
As the dragon on the mountainside lay halfway in a pool in the forest, trying to cool her burning leg in the water, and staring up at the crescent moon, the orphan called Jack lay in the barn, not thinking about anything in particular except the work that was to be done tomorrow. That was what he thought most about – the work he was doing. But occasionally one other thought would tap him on the shoulder …
Every now and then, Jack would pause in his tasks and gaze up at the mountains behind the village. He wondered what it was like on their high slopes, how far one could see from their peaks, and what was on the other side of them. He had never asked, so no one had ever told him. Jack didn’t want merely to be told. He wanted to know because he had been there.
As the dragon gave a fretful, dismal shudder that sent chilly Autumn ripples through the moon’s watery mirror-self where it lay encircled by the dragon’s crimson tail, the thought of the mountains came to Jack and again filled his mind with their blue-greenness. As Jack drifted off to sleep, the dragon flexed the claws of her left foot slightly, laid her head down on the bank, and gave a deep, deep sigh.
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In her wanderings, the dragon had come close to the village – closer than she would have gone if she had realised where she was. But a creature in pain and hunger does not think clearly all the time. As the moon moved through the sky, and its other self in the pool left the circle of the dragon’s tail to follow it, a breeze brought a smell to the dragon: the smell of ripe apples. The dragon’s stomach gaped like a cavern in response, and her tongue flowed with water. She swallowed. They smelt so near!
The water swirled silver and black as the dragon left the pool.
Where were they? The sweet, ripe apples! The smell was strong – there must be many of them. The dragon crawled downhill, weaving through the trees and carrying her left hind leg so that it scarcely touched the leaf litter. When these trees were bare in Winter, what would hide a crimson dragon then?
Almost at the edge of the forest, the dragon halted. She should have smelt the village before! There it sat, about a hundred paces away down the slope. So intent as she had been on the smell of the apples in the storerooms, she had disregarded the other scents of the village. Disappointed, the dragon looked at the human-made buildings of wood and stone. She could see them clearly in the dim moonlight, her slit-shaped pupils dilated like a cat’s. It was not worth the risk. She turned, her stomach blopping and gurgling emptily in protest.
She struggled back uphill, digging in her foreclaws and heaving herself up, straining with her working hind leg, pushing against tree trunks with her tail. She knew that she was leaving an obvious trail, but she could get up the slope and back into hiding no other way. After she had slept she would have to move on, far away from the village so that the humans would not find her.
Her progress grew painfully slow. At last she could not move any further. She lay exhausted in the leaf litter, hoping that she was far enough from the village to avoid detection for a few hours …
Within seconds, she was sleeping like a stone.