A Skydragon.

Rav's hands shook as he tried to shield the creature. He threw a terrified look over his shoulder. The captain could be just over the curve of the hill. He could be watching, hidden in the bushes or the fog. The dragonette's poking nose was soft like new leather, but its baby scales would never harden into armour like most dragon species' did. It was what had made Skydragons so easy to kill.

"You have to hide!" whispered Rav. "He'll kill you if he sees you!"

The creature looked at him, then returned its nose to his hand. Rav tried to shuttle it back to the plants. Kill? No, worse. The man would sell it, or keep it himself until it was big enough to slaughter. Or he would cage it forever and make people pay for a glimpse. A horrifying thought chilled Rav to the bone. What if this baby wasn't even the last? What if the island had more? What if the captain caught them all?

A trill of what Rav imagined was annoyance escaped the dragonette as he put both hands on its body and tried to push it back into the plants. It was warm. Warmer even than most dragons. He had read in a book that it was an adaptation to living so high in the clouds, cruising for weeks on end without touching land. Nobody had ever figured out where they landed to nest.

No, no, no, no, no.

"Please!"

He could have run ten laps of Dreamcatcher's deck for how fast his heart raced. The dragonette was not biting, so he took hold of its body with both hands and tried to shove it back into hiding. It wrapped around his arm. It must have liked the warmth there, because it shuffled further so its whole tail could find purchase. Its chin rested contentedly on Rav's nonexistent bicep.

Rav stared helplessly at his new sleeve. The dragonette was a female, her scales cut more rounded than triangular. She headbutted him. How old was she? The last adult had been shot ten years ago, when Rav was eight. It was not uncommon for dragon eggs to take months to hatch, but that could extend to years when their mothers laid them with the biological time delay that swept dragon populations in times of stress or drought. He could only assume Skydragons were the same.

Gingerly, Rav lifted his free hand. As he touched her head, the dragonette closed her eyes and started to purr. Her baby velvet thickened between her horns, so soft he understood why Skydragon young were hunted for luxury purses and gloves. Something jabbed his hand as it moved down her nose. On top of her muzzle-tip was a nub of a spike, harder than her scales. An egg tooth.

"You just hatched."

No more than a month ago. Rav's heart ached. She would have broken out of her leathery shell to find herself without a mother to feed or protect her. No wonder she was so skinny.

Rav cast about for bugs. There were none nearby, so he navigated three-limbed to the next bush. Here he found two crickets and a large moth, which escaped as he tried to grab it. He pulled back a bubble-root to discover long, pale millipedes in the dead plants below. The dragonette sniffed these and turned up her nose, but she was amenable to the flat, speedy insects that scooted around the millipedes when their cover shifted. They had long tails that they dropped when grabbed, a fact Rav found out the hard way.

The dragonette devoured everything else that he caught. Rav did not realize how late it was getting until a whistle drifted hazily over the island's top. His whole body chilled. Sanjay was calling him for dinner, and he had found nothing for the captain.

Rav shuffled the dragonette's coils from his arm. She was sleepy now, and did not latch onto him again as he found a cave in the ground large enough to accommodate her floppy wings. She curled up in it obediently. Rav wondered with another tug on his throat if this was what a mother dragon would have done.

Something for the captain.

He was scrambling now, hands shaky like he had just been chastised. He had been out here all afternoon, told to find something interesting, and he had nothing to show for it. He pulled a dead bubble-root from the ground and slashed it free with his pocketknife. It floated into the air. He grabbed it back and cut a slit in it. Into its hollow interior he stuffed anything he could find: millipedes, a bright blue beetle, a cricket, scraps of liverwort and handfuls of flowers and grass. It was enough samples to keep a biologist happy for hours, but he wondered if it would have the same effect on the captain.

Sanjay whistled again. Rav clutched the bubble-root to his chest and slipped and stumbled around the hill. By the time he reached Dreamcatcher again, the deck was empty, but the rope ladder had been left over the side. Rav stood at the bottom, helpless. He couldn't climb one-handed, but he had a bubble the size and shape of a miniature airship to carry. Should he stay here until someone wondered where he was? They would get mad, then, or maybe nobody would come. Or should he call? 

Something rustled behind him. Rav spun around and gasped as something white moved in the bushes. He scrambled over the plants, ready to pull the shirt off his back to hide it. A large, white moth untangled itself from the grass and flapped away.

Rav sank down in relief, then leaped up again. He had left behind the bubble-root. No. No!

In his rush, his footing went out under him. He fell hard and began to slide, down the hill towards the precipice into the sky. His body bounced over roots and stems. By some miracle, his hands met a hold, and Rav gripped it so hard the stem beneath his fingers began to bruise. His deadly tumble stopped.

The world was spinning. Rav held onto the root and took deep breaths until he could see again. His limbs would no longer support him, so he lay on the plants and looked at anything but the shore only meters away. The ladder was a thousand miles farther. When he could loosen one hand, Rav found a new grip and pulled himself towards it. His foot found purchase on a root. Inch by inch, he crawled back up the slope, quaking, exhausted, and covered in the slime of rotting plants. He reached the ladder and wrapped both arms into its coarse, lifesaving ropes. He rested his forehead on a rung.

Something bumped his head gently. Rav looked up to find his root-bubble of collected samples suspended above him. With the weight inside and its slowly leaking gas, it now sank at a snail's crawl. The insects inside it were dead. Asphyxiated. Rav's body crawled in a nasty shudder. He pulled himself to his feet and almost sank down again as he remembered that the captain had wanted a bubble-root plant, too.

That at least he didn't have to leave the ladder for. It took some effort to pry a small specimen from the rest, but his tumble had loosened a trail of them, and one soon submitted. Rav jammed one of its roots in his root-bubble. He placed the bubble above him and climbed the ladder after it, bumping it along as he went.

Never had he been so happy to find himself back on Dreamcatcher's deck. He must have looked a fright: scraped, bleeding, and smeared with revolting green goop. He fetched clean clothes and snuck through the ship to the washroom by the cabin's quarters. The bucket of water left for him there had gone cold. Rav stripped down with knees knocking and sluiced the grime from his body, shifting from foot to foot on the freezing, perforated metal floor. When he felt physically clean, at least, he scrubbed himself dry with a poor excuse for a towel and struggled back into clothing. His hands stung.

He was shivering too hard to hold anything, so Rav tucked the root-bubble under one arm and took a deep breath to steady himself. He stepped out into the ship to find the captain.