CHAPTER 10
It was like a scene out of an adventurous child’s dream or a cautious one’s nightmare: Everywhere we looked, we saw dinosaurs. These were creatures I had only heard about, or maybe had seen some pictures of in books, which Albert had shown me.
There was some sort of Tiger with buck teeth, whose apparent ferocity made Stripes look like Tigger by comparison (although I hadn’t seen Bambi, I did know Winnie the Pooh characters pretty well). We even saw creatures of such enormous dimensions that they made Tubthumper (even at her natural size) look like a baby. Drako, though, was the one who seemed to be the most closely related of any of us to many of these creatures—except for one salient feature: most of them were tens or hundreds of times larger than she was.
We heard the soft lapping of the water; the occasional slap of a fish on the water’s surface after they propelled themselves up out of the marsh to get a look at us, then succumbed to gravity and fell back into their accustomed element; the whistle of the birds; and the occasional screech or rumbling roar of the bigger dinosaurs. We heard and felt the light breeze, too, and smelled some wind-borne aromas—many of them pleasant, but others downright stenchy.
“All right, Drako, you want a Pterodactyl,” Albert said. “How do you propose to capture one?”
“Capture? No, not that. I will persuade him—or her—to come along with us.”
“What do they look like, again?” Tubthumper asked.
“They are exquisitely beautiful. Just look for the most beautiful flying Lizard you can find,” Drako answered.
“Can you be a little more specific?” I asked, unable to envision a creature that was both “a flying Lizard” and “beautiful.”
“It’ll be a gorgeous auburn color, with wings like a Bat, legs like a Rooster, and the head of a . . . say, kind of like a Pelican, at that,” Drako answered. “Oh! And it’s about six feet tall and has a wingspan of about twice that.”
“Get out the shrinking wand, Albert,” I said. “Here comes one now!”
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