is so beautiful. His wings are like hammered copper! The dragons are messengers of the gods, you know.”
Tyler wasn’t certain what to say to that, but he was definitely interested in hearing more. “Do you see him in the same place all the time?”
Pema shook her head. “He flies past sometimes on his way out to the east.” She pointed out over the gardens toward the distant hills. “Sometimes he also flies over the garden, looking for things to catch-rabbits, other animals. But for some reason he does not like to fly above the garden this summer… ”
Tyler wrote everything down. Pema was a careful observer, and the fact that she considered every sighting of Alamu to be a good omen meant she had plenty of information to share.
On his way out of the kitchen Tyler met Colin Needle. Colin was looking for extra blankets to help his mother prepare Gideon’s new bed in the snake parlor, where she could nurse him and still keep an eye on everything else in her domain. Tyler was delighted to see that Colin was being kept on a short leash.
“Staying busy, are we?” he asked.
Colin glared at him. “You better not be going anywhere, Jenkins. Everyone’s supposed to stay around the house and help.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Tyler said. “I am helping… in my own way.” He was enjoying Colin’s discomfort. “In fact, I’d better get going-and so should you. Don’t want to keep your mother waiting.”
“You’d better not leave the house,” Colin almost hissed. “You can’t afford to get into any more trouble!”
“And who’s going to stop me? You?” Tyler stepped around him. “Run along now. Help your mother. Be a good boy.”
Colin just stared, as if he couldn’t believe that Tyler would dare to talk back to him. “You… you have quite a big mouth, Jenkins, and one of these days… ”
“Colin!” Mrs. Needle shouted from the Snake Parlor. “Where are you?”
Tyler waved as he walked away. “Enjoy your afternoon!” He made a point of sauntering out the front door in case Colin had doubled back to watch. It would drive him crazy to think that Tyler might already be going out in search of the nest.
Dude, this is crazy, Tyler thought. Who would ever believe I’d ever be glad I took math?
But his teacher Ms. Shah had taught him how to make a Cartesian Plane, which was basically a piece of graph paper with a big cross in the middle of it and a zero at the center point with numbers going off in each direction so that they made a cross. Each number then became half of a coordinate, so Tyler drew the whole thing in pencil on a copy of an Ordinary Farm map from the Yokuts County Assessor’s Office he’d found in the library and then began marking in everything the farm workers had told him about where they usually saw Alamu. When he’d finished with that he spread his newly marked map over his bed and studied it.
Tyler needed to find the place the male dragon went back to every time-that would probably be his nest. So if he marked every position where the dragon had been sighted, then drew a big circle around every mark, the place where the most circles overlapped should be a good central place to start looking for a nest… and in fact, Tyler thought he’d spotted a likely area: all of the dragon’s favorite hang-outs seemed about the same distance away from the high hills on the western edge of the farm, an isolated area far from neighbors and roads.
So let’s have a look for that nest of yours, dragon-dude, Tyler thought, -and all your shiny treasures. But not tonight-no way. The idea of hunting for a dragon’s nest in the dark frightened even Tyler the Impulsive. No, I’ll go tomorrow, when the sun’s up and you’re out making your rounds…
The next day he raced through his chores so quickly that even Mr. Walkwell (who himself hardly ever slept or even took a break) suggested he might be working too hard. When he had finished he made himself a sack lunch, then waited to set out until Colin Needle was upstairs being lectured by his mother.
It took Tyler a good part of an hour to cross the farm and reach the hills where most of the Alamu reports seemed to overlap. According to his marked-up county map the tallest hill was called Miners Mountain; he decided that would be the best place to start looking, because even if he didn’t find anything on the hill itself he’d have a good view from the top.
The late-morning sun was already baking the ground and the dry grasses were buzzing with insect noises. By the time Tyler reached the top (and had found no sign of Alamu’s nest) he’d emptied half his canteen; by the time he’d eaten the sandwich he brought along he’d drunk most of the rest. The scrubby trees on the hillside didn’t provide much shade, either.
An hour later he had finished the rest of his water, had watched the sun move all the way across the valley like someone wiping a window clean, and had stared through his binoculars until his eyes hurt, but still hadn’t located anything that looked the least bit like a dragon’s nest. He had also discovered that some of the bugs singing in the dry grass liked to bite people-liked it quite a lot, in fact. He was beginning to rethink the entire expedition when he noticed something glimmering in a fold of a hill near Miners Mountain.
Even with the binoculars he couldn’t make out much more than a glint in the undergrowth, so he didn’t leap up: he had already been fooled a couple of times by other shining things, discarded bottles, glass insulators from power lines. But though he stared and stared through the expensive binoculars his father had given him as a guilty late-birthday gift, this particular bright spot remained stubbornly mysterious.
Tyler finally decided that although it was mid-afternoon already, he wanted to go down Miners Mountain and go climb the other hill. Who knew when he’d get this much free time again?
Tyler didn’t know the name of this second hill, but discovered quickly that although it was not as tall as Miners Mountain it was actually a much more difficult climb, with no obvious trail and the way up blocked tangled undergrowth and by outcrops of layered stone that looked like haphazard piles of books. Each outcropping had to be either climbed or avoided, and by the time Tyler had got near the top even more of the afternoon had slid away and the sun was hurrying down the sky like an animal going to ground. For the first time Tyler started to worry. He didn’t want to have to climb down rocky, dangerous slope in darkness, and he had left the house so early he hadn’t even thought of bringing a flashlight.
Lucinda’s right-I really do stupid things sometimes, he told himself angrily.
He clambered up over the last large bulge of pale stone and into the shade of a tangle of oak and madrone trees where he crouched to catch his breath. He forced himself to get up again after only a couple of minutes and climbed the last hundred feet of the uneven slope, then stepped out onto the flat, windswept summit of the hill. And there it lay in front of him-not just a single object, but a shining, sparkling line several feet long snaking through a trail of trampled grass. He’d found it!
Tyler’s heart sped in triumph. He hurried toward the glittering track, then slowed, looking high and low to make sure that no one, scaly or otherwise, was watching him. Heart pounding, he paused beside his discovery…
… And found that it was nothing but a few dozen bottle caps strewn across the hilltop like confetti.
“Huh?” Tyler stared, disbelief rapidly turning into fury. What was this crap? Was this it? The thing he’d been searching for all day-the thing that he had climbed two high, hot hillsides to find?
“Crap,” he said, kicking at one of the shiny things. “Look at me,” he shouted in disgust, “Oh, yeah, I’m a hero! I’ve found the famous hoard of ancient bottle caps! ”
And they weren’t even that ancient-most of them looked like they were from regular modern pop bottles. So they weren’t even worth anything.
Tyler reached for his canteen, then remembered it was empty. Was this pathetic scatter really Alamu’s horde of stolen shiny things? Bottle caps, a couple of shiny pennies and a few bits of foil? Disgusted and very tired, Tyler was about to admit defeat and head down the hill when he noticed the bottle caps weren’t just scattered, or at least they didn’t look completely random, but lay in a rough line. In places the line stopped completely, but as he squinted his eyes against the afternoon light he could see that they did form a kind of trail across the hilltop, as if something had dropped them from a clumsy, toothy mouth…
On the way to where…?
He squinted his eyes, doing his best to follow the almost invisible line, which petered out at the top of the slope which faced away from the distant farmhouse. He looked down and saw another flash of reflected light in a clump of undergrowth about twenty yards down the steep slope-something very much larger than any bottle cap. He almost lost his balance several times as he hurried down the slope, racing the dying afternoon. As he drew nearer he saw that it was not an aimless growth of shrubs and small trees but a pile of trees and sticks and branches almost fifty feet wide, the sticks covered with brown leaves and the whole mass propped between the twisted trunks of several madrone trees growing at an angle on the hillside.
