There was no field into which the men of the College of Lucidity did not make their inquiries. They watched the motions of the heavens and judged the composition of the earth. They corresponded with botanists throughout the Colonies, sending them bulbs and shoots when illustrations would not do. The banister of the rear staircase was hung with drying leaves and stalks sent from the frontier.
These specimens were delivered by a fellow named Druggett, who traveled the western forests, trading and purchasing furs from the savages of the Iroquois Nations. He was a shrewd naturalist in his own right, and often brought back samples of flora or fauna for pay. He had seen many wonders in the forests, and was responsible for many of the passing freaks of my academicians: their scheme to domesticate the moose for transport and milk, their commitment to edible lichen.
As Pliny the Naturalist saith, “No man is wise in every hour.”
Druggett was a frightening man to me, his clothes always covered in burns and smears, his head wound in a bandage that, he claimed, fastened his brain. He had in his pocket a collection of broken clay pipes, being unwilling to purchase new ones, and he would stand in our parlor with his hands in his pockets, smoking and telling us tales of narrow escapes that even I, in my infancy, could tell were embroidered for our pleasure.
When I was four, he and six other men brought a dragon’s skull which had been found far to the west. It was brown, and its teeth were terrible.
I gazed at it in wonder (I am told), and fingered its nostrils.
“Guaranteed before the flood,” said Druggett. “Guaranteed old. Ancienter than Noah’s lips and beard.”
“In what situation was it discovered?” asked Mr. 03-01.
Druggett answered, “By a soap-boiler. He was jumping off a cliff in despair.”
“In what attitude was it found? What layer of the sediment?”
“Aye.” Druggett nodded knowledgeably and closed one eye. “The sentiment was love. Had a young maiden he was fond of, or a particular baboon or some such, and it run off.”
I hardly recall their words. I remember my first sight of the dragon, though, its vacant sockets and knuckled teeth, and the murmur of their conversation; and I have been told by my mother that when they looked down, after some minutes speaking of the skull, they found my body lain out behind it, and my head within the monster’s flat head, my arms against my sides, my chin on the floor, my eyes glaring out at 03-01 as if my tiny body belonged to the beast and I had always inhabited it.
And though I never spoke except when bidden to speak, in this one instance I cried and sobbed until they allowed me to sleep in the room with the monster, my head in its long-rotted cranium, my body curled behind it as if it and I were some nightmare tadpole waiting to burst from the murk and reinstate its reign upon the genteel fields of Earth.