At first, nobody said anything about it. Leastways, not much, anyhow. We’re practical folk, and it weren’t hardly a practical situation. So we done our best to ignore it for the first few days, but the kids had to go to school, and of course they was reluctant, what with it curled up in a tree right outside the school door. It wasn’t very big, far as any of us could tell, but then, we didn’t have nothing to compare it to, there never having been a dragon seen anywhere in the history of Floyd County, Kentucky.

I know folks other places think we’re illiterate - that not a blessed one of us can read or write, we marry our cousins ‘cause we can’t catch our sisters and we don’t take kindly to strangers to the point of killing ‘em on sight. If I ever meet the feller who made that movie, he’d better run fast, ‘cause it ain’t gonna be a banjo I be dueling him with.

Where was I? Oh, right. We ain’t hardly illiterate, not since President Johnson built the community college down to Prestonsburg, anyway, giving folks in Eastern Kentucky access to quality higher education. So we were all pretty sure there’d never been a dragon around.

Like I said, it was smaller than you’d’ve thought, maybe the size of a collie dog, and it was just setting there, curled around a branch of that big old oak tree outside the school. We all went around our business, hoping it would go away. It didn’t, though. It seemed to like that there tree. Started eating the birds. It done ate a whole family of robins the young’uns had been watching to see when they’d fly. It did move around in the tree, and it ate other birds, and squirrels and anything that weren’t cautious enough of something it didn’t recognize. Every now and then, the dragon would burp a little gout of flame, but it didn’t set anything afire.

On the fifth day, we decided we needed outside help. That is to say, Jeb Thornton decided. He ain’t the Mayor, Phyllis Newsome is, but he still thinks he knows what’s best for everyone, even if she’s been clear to Lexington for a four year degree, and he don’t even got a two year one from Prestonsburg. Guess every town has one like him, though. Ain’t no reason to think otherwise. So Jeb, in the spirit of civic-mindedness, of course, called a professor from Prestonsburg to come and look at our dragon.

After he done that, I don’t know whether we was more nervous that it’d go away before she got there, or hopeful it would. She’d asked Jeb to catch it, but needless to say, he wasn’t hardly interested in that.

Still, she come up to take a look at it in its natural habitat, so to speak. She sure enough admitted it wasn’t like nothing she’d every seen before. She did say she’d been thinking it were some kid’s escaped iguana, well, except for the part about breathing flame - she hadn’t known what to think of that - but now that she’d done seen it, she felt it was a sure-enough bona fide dragon.

So we had a town meeting - in the Baptist church, on account of no one much wanting to go into the school - about it and had the professor talk to us.

What she said was kind of a surprise. This might be the only dragon in Floyd County, but apparently there were stories. We all knew about the one over to Scotland, but she said there were also stories about Lake Champlain, up in New York State, having some kind of dragon living in it. She said there was stories about lots of lakes. Another thing she said was that there were tales told about dragons - or creatures so similar that someone almost had to have seem ‘em - in near every culture in the world. I knew about the English dragons, and I sure like the look of the dragons at the China Pearl over to Paintsville, but I didn’t know folks everywhere told the same tales.

It was Steve Elders as asked why would a dragon show up now, when there weren’t no what you might call confirmed sightings of dragons for as long as people had had cameras. Linda Singer said longer, even, when you considered that Benjamin Franklin hadn’t had no camera, but if he’d ever of seen a dragon, you can bet he wouldn’t have suggested the turkey as the national symbol. Except, Phyllis said, that the dragon was already the national symbol of China, even way back then. As I already done said, Phyllis had gone clear to Lexington to the University, so we reckoned she knew what she was talking about.

That professor said she reckoned that there always had been dragons in the world, but that they were shy, and the only ones left maybe were in places that was real isolated. This one had probably come out on account of there was all the new building that was going on up to the State Road.

Jeb, he asked why didn’t the dragons come out away back when Peabody Coal dug up half the state in them strip mines.

Florie Eamon said it didn’t -- [End of Preview.]