Avram Davidson - Rogue Dragon

“After the drag comes in, why, you can move all you like. Maybe — if you’re lucky — if you move fast enough…” He shrugged.

Jon-Joras half-turned, watched them walking back at a brisk pace in the direction they’d come from. Then he swung back to watch the woods ahead of him. His legs twitched, but he beat down the impulse to flee. After a long while, or so it seemed, the cow-call came again from behind him, was answered by the bull in the forest ahead.

A tree moved in the wind that blew from the west, from behind, then another. His heart swelled and his head snapped as he saw that the second moving thing was no tree. The long neck swung from side to side, the faceted eyes gleamed yellow and green. And then the body moved out into the open. The great mouth parted, sounded its immemorial question.

And then the utterly unexpected happened. A dragon call from behind… but not the submissive one of a cow-dragon as before. This was a bull, another bull, a defiant and challenging bull; instantly, along with it, came the strong and bitter reek of bull-scent. Jon-Joras felt his bowels turn. Trapped! Before and behind him! Trapped—

The visible dragon bellowed its vexation. And Jon-Joras saw it all.

There was no bull-dragon behind him, just as there was no cow-dragon behind him. The call came from the same source — a small instrument of bark and wood. And the odor of dragon-suint had come from the bottle in the same kit-bag. Trapped? Tricked! He and the dragon, both. Only — Only the dragon would not know that, could not know that. His tiny and now-troubled brain served chiefly as a clearinghouse for instinctual responses. Female dragon: Go to her. Male dragon: Will want her, too: Slay him.

The bull in the woods now left the woods behind him and began to cross down the clearing at a lumbering trot, shooting forth his bifurcated tongue, tasting the air… air in which Jon-Joras’s own scent was mingled with that of the “other”… man-scent now inextricably identified in the brute mind with that of its sexual rival and enemy.

The dragon did not know the trick, but the man did.

And the man reasoned and the man remembered, the man remembered what Hue had told him in the Kar-chee castle — that the dull brain of the great beast was mastered by misdirection alone. Aëlorix and his toadies now had none of the apparatus of the hunt except the single huntgun. They had no beaters, no musics, no archers, no banner-men. They were making up for all that now by using the artificial call-horn and the scent drawn from the musk-glands of some dead bull-dragon. These they had.

Jon-Joras had nothing but his mind.

Again the wind from behind brought the ugly reek and the male call. The dragon ahead paused for a slow second, a shiver of rage moving the powerful muscles beneath the green-black hide. His cheek-nodules began to puff with mindless rage. He bellowed, he hissed, he began to run. Run?

That was what they hoped Jon-Joras would do: panic. Run. “Maybe, if you’re lucky — if you move fast enough—”

But no man could move fast enough against a frenzied dragon. Long before he would have a chance to make the dubious safety of the woods (and behind, the great engine of the pounding dragon-body crashing the trees aside like reeds), the dragon would have seen him running, would have known him by his scent for enemy, and would have run him down, seized him, worried him, torn and trampled him.

Thus, the trick. And, thus, the game.

But Jon-Joras wasn’t playing according to those rules. His legs still twitched and trembled and he let them. His arms, it was, that moved now, moved swiftly. Arms and upper body slipped out of the loose hospital shirt which was still his only garment; arms reached up to the low branches of the low tree, little more, really, than a large sapling, and tied the shirt to them by its sleeves. The innocent wind at once caught at it and it flapped and flew about and danced.

If the shining eyes saw it, facets flashing yellow, flashing green, Jon-Joras could not say for certain sure. But the dragon roared at the same second, and at that same second.

Jon-Joras stooped into the grass which had been as high as his naked breast and now closed over his naked head. He still did not run.

He walked. Knees trembling, body sweating, he folded his arms upon his swift and fearful heart and walked away into the grass at right angles to the dragon’s path. He did not look up even when the earth shook and the noise grew nearer, grew louder. Dependent on the meagerness of the animal’s mind, hopeful of its not swerving from its path, trusting to its being for the moment intent upon the telltale shirt, Jon-Joras walked on.

To the men hiding in the woods it might have seemed that he had fainted after tying the shirt to the tree. Would they realize why he had tied it there? Or suspect in which direction he had gone if he had not fainted? Likely they would imagine that, if he were not now huddled at the foot of the tree, he would be surely taking the shortest way out of the clearing — the one he was, in fact, now taking.

In which case, they might well divide their numbers and, by circling around, try to head him off. They could not move fast, for they would not dare to expose themselves in the clearing, and it would be slow going in the woods.

The sun was now high enough for him to feel its rays on the side exposed to it. Without lifting his head or shoulders or increasing his pace, he began to turn, turned, and walked in towards the sun. He could not see, he could feel the dragon as it passed, bellowing, to his left. He kept on walking.

It had not noticed him! It had not noticed him!

That it had noticed the shirt was almost certain, for it had paused in its rushing and he could hear the snapping of the tree and (so he thought) the ripping and the tearing of the cloth.

He kept on walking, the sun warmed his naked shoulders, and presently the sun ceased to do so and the grass fell away from him and underneath it was mossy and overhead it was shady. Slowly and cautiously, but still stooping, he turned around. He saw that he had entered the forest… and safety.

Farther off a dragon called and sounded, but he could not tell if it were real or false.

Once he had been lost in the woods after a dragon had been busy in a clearing, and he was worse off now than then in that he was now naked. But in everything else he was, he reflected, hopefully, better off. For one thing, he was only a foot-journey away from the town instead of a flight-journey. For another, should he find himself again among Doghunters, he could count on aid instead of capture.

But most of all he was better off now because he had already had the experience. And he was where he now was — and how he now was — not because he had fled in numbness from a scene in no way of his own making, but because he had brought himself out of danger into safety. He was mother-naked and alone, there was a wild beast to one side of him and men who sought his life to another. But — he found to his astonished and his marveling delight — he was no longer afraid.

The clean sweet smell of the woods was all around him. A tiny gray creature for which he had no name paused on its way up the side of a leaning tree and regarded him curiously.

“When in doubt,” Jon-Joras said aloud, “do as the natives do.”

He followed the gray one up the tree and looked all around him.

The trees here on Prime World — at least, in this particular area of Prime World — were not as tall as he had seen elsewhere. On Dondonoluc, for one example, or on its mirror-twin-world, Tiran-lou, with their incredible depths of top-soil, the mastadonic trees towered several hundred feet high. But, as though in keeping with the foliage, if Prime World’s trees were not tall, neither were Prime World’s buildings. How far he might be from the nearest settlement, Jon-Joras did not know. The oozy green gum of this one, rank and odorous but by no means offensive, ebbed out onto his flesh as he pressed against the bole and craned, and mingled with the hair. A breeze met his inquiring face, a little wind rich with the smell of sap and earth and plants. But all he could see, whichever way he looked, were more trees, and yet trees.