Page 49

“Mmm hmm. Can’t you eat some more fish?”

“Icould…if we saw another lake. But I’d rather have something else to eat.”

“Quinn is right. I’ve spoiled you!” I pulled out my communicator to call Quinn, but I couldn’t get a signal, and I began to feel the first little bit of panic. These mountains were seemingly endless, and they all looked pretty much the same. Just vast stretches of green trees and rolling hills with no landmarks anywhere except for lakes. So many lakes. Talon was right. Neither of us had been paying close enough attention when we came this way the first time, and I shouldn’t have left it mostly up to him.

I remembered from when I was a child, and I got lost one time when my friend Kareb and I went for a hike in the woods. We had tried for hours to find the trail again, until we finally heard Kareb’s father calling for us. He had scolded us when he caught up to us and told us he’d walked around for hours searching.

“If you ever get lost again,” he’d told us. “Just sit down where you are and stay put.Wandering around aimlessly like you did can waste your energy, make it harder for the rescuers to find you, and even lead you into more dangerous situations.Somebody will find you if you don’t keep wandering around.”

I told that to Talon, and he agreed. Mostly.

“But what do I do about dinner? If we stay here, we can’t find me anything to eat. I could die, Rylie.”

“You’re not going to die because you miss one meal. And besides, I don’t know if there is anything up here for you to eat.”

He seemed to think about it a minute or two and then said, “Maybe goral.”

“What?”

“Goral. I’m pretty sure that’s its name. It’s a wild bov-something. Quinn told me.”

“A wild bovid?”

“Maybe. They have hooves and big horns, and they live in the high mountains. Maybe we could fly around a little and look for one. If we see one, I can get it for my dinner.”

“Maybe. But we might get even more lost.”

“If we don’t feed me soon, I could get sick and weak and then we couldn’t fly at all.”

“Oh, all right. Let’s do it then, but we need to be strategic about this.”

“How do we do that?”

“We need to make a plan. Do you see any big trees we could use as a starting point? Then you can fly around it in a wide circle, and let the circle get a little wider each time you go around.”

“Oh, I see. I’ll try. This tree is pretty tall, but it looks like all the others. Do you have anything you could drop down on top of it to show us it’s the right one?”

“Maybe the netting that’s attached to the harness? Can we pull that off?”

I scrambled around to tug at it and got enough of it loose so that Talon could reach it with his teeth. He pulled off a big piece of it with a loud ripping noise.

“Okay, fly up and I’ll drop this netting on top of a high branch.”

It worked like a charm, and I managed to drape the torn piece of netting over the highest tree branch I could find.

I called down to him. “Okay, fly out a little way and then start turning so we can circle the tree in a wide loop. I’ll look out for any goral I can see.”

We flew in a big circle like that until it began to get too dim for either of us to see very much, and I had to make him go back. We hadn’t seen any sign of goral or any other kind of animal, but I told Talon we had to land before it got any darker.

He was still grumbling about it as he landed back under our tree. It was getting colder, but I decided to do what Kareb’s father had said years ago and just stay put. We could shelter under these trees, and I could huddle close into Talon’s body to stay warmer. It didn’t work that well with cold-blooded dragons, but it was all I had.

Then suddenly as we huddled there together, I saw the shadow of ahuge object passing over us. I looked up and it was glowing in the fading sunlight, just like Talon was to a lesser degree. I urged Talon farther back into the shadows with me until we could see who or what it was.

“Oh look, Riley,” Talon said. “It could be Quinn coming to save us.”

“Shh…it isn’t Quinn. That’s another golden dragon like you. Only a really big one. Stay back—those golden scales of yours are shiny, and they might see us. I don’t know who that is, so let’s find out first before we show ourselves. You go farther back in the shadows and be as quiet as you can. I’ll peek out.”

He moved back as far as his growing bulk would allow him to, and I crept over as close as I could to the edge of the shadows under the tree and looked up, keeping my body under cover as much as I could in case someone happened to glance down. A big part of me still held out a sliver of hope that it was someone I knew coming to look for us, but no one I knew would be coming on a Golden dragon.