When Mary and I came to examine our ant-lion dragon the day after our
adventures among the Morrowbie Jukes pits, we found him dead in the
bottle of sand. Perhaps his haughty spirit of dragon could not stand
such ignominious bottling up, or perhaps there wasn't enough air.
Anyway, His Fierceness was dead. His cruel curved jaws would seize and
pierce no more foraging ants. His thirsty throat would never again be
laved by the fresh blood of victims. _Vale_ dragon!
But there are more dragons than one in our world. Not only more
ant-lion dragons, but more other kinds of dragons. And this is one of
the great advantages that Mary and I enjoy in our looking about in
the fields and woods for interesting things. If we were looking for
the dragons of fairy stories, we could only expect to find one
kind--if, indeed, we could expect to find any kind at all in these
days when so few fairies are left. If we _could_ find it, however, it
would be a monstrous beast in a forest cavern, with scaled body and
clawed feet and great ugly head that breathed fire and smoke from its
gaping mouth. That would be an interesting sort of dragon to see, we
confess, more interesting than the great one, a hundred yards long,
that we saw in a Chinese procession in Oakland, with two excited
Chinamen jumping about in front of its head and jabbing at its eyes
with spears. And more interesting than the one that roars and spits at
Siegfried on the stage while the big orchestra goes off into wild
clamors of O-see-the-dragon music. But we do not expect ever to find a
real fairy-story dragon any more, and so we content ourselves with
trying to find as many different kinds of real dragons as we can in
our world of little folk on the campus. These dragons are rather
small, but they are unusually fierce and voracious, to make up for
their lack of size. And so they serve very well to interest us.
To make up for the death of the ant-lion dragon of the sand-pits, I
promised to take Mary to see the Dragon of Lagunita. Or rather the
dragons, for there are many in Lagunita, and indeed many in several
other places on the campus. Have I explained that Lagunita is a pretty
Spanish word for "little lake," and that our Lagunita is just what its
name means, and besides is as pretty as its name? There is only one
trouble about it. And that is, that every year, in the long, rainless,
sun-filled summer, it dries up to nothing but a shallow, parched
hollow in the ground, and all the dragons have to move. But this
moving is a remarkable performance. For while during the spring the
Lagunita dragons live rather inactively in their lairs under the
water, when summer comes they all transform themselves into great
flying dragons of the air, and swoop and swirl about in a manner very
terrifying to see.
The morning we were to make our journey to Lagunita, I came to Mary's
house with a rake over my shoulder.
"But what are you going to do with the rake?" said Mary.
"One doesn't go to seek a dragon without weapons," I replied with
dignity. "And a rake is a much more formidable weapon in the hands of
a man who knows how to rake than a gun in the hands of a man who
doesn't know how to shoot." I am something of an amateur gardener, but
not at all the holder of a record at clay pigeons nor king of a
_Schuetzen-verein_. So I carried my rake.
"Then what weapon shall I carry?" asks Mary.