Alas for my curiosity, the Nying would not hear of any experimentation that might cause them to lose more of their stores to the little dragons. I understood their reluctance, for they often walked too close to the edge of starvation to gamble with their future in such fashion; and we certainly could not squander any of our own food, for we were saving as much of that as possible for our autumnal expedition. In the meanwhile, Chendley, Suhail, and Thu (when we could spare him) lent their aid to the herdsmen, and hunted as much as they could. Our continued residence in Hlamtse Rong depended heavily on our not becoming a burden to them.
Tom and I spent some time with the herdsmen as well, watching the diving behaviour of the mews. Suhail had devoted long hours to improving his own command of Tser-zhag, and put his growing skill to use in questioning the men about the little dragons. He said, “They all agree that mews eat the fat out of the yaks’ humps, but I’ve taken a look at the beasts, and I haven’t found a single one with scars or any other sign of chewing.”
“It might be an old wives’ tale,” Tom said. “On Niddey, the grannies all agree that cats have to be kept away from infants, because they’ll suck their breath away. I’ve seen a cat sniff a baby’s face, but no more—and certainly we’ve seen mews dive at yaks, which could be exaggerated in the same way.”
“But why on earth do they do that in the first place?” I tapped my fingers against my elbows, musing. The day was a bright one, and the alpine meadow around me dotted with flowers; at moments like this, it was hard to believe that bad weather was keeping us from our goal. The typical Anthiopean concept of the monsoon is a period in which it rains twenty-four hours a day, but even in the wettest regions, this is not the case. We had sunshine on an intermittent basis—along with enough rain to transform the hard-packed trail through the center of the village into a river of mud. I had only to look up at the wall of the high peaks, though, to be reminded of why we were passing the time with mews.
Tom was still pondering my question, rather than the weather. “Scavenging?” he said doubtfully. “Do they ever drive yaks into stampeding over a cliff edge? They might be hoping to feast on carrion.”
Suhail asked on our behalf, but turned up no reports of such a thing. “Which could be due to the vigilance of the herdsmen,” he said. “They do seem to be concerned that the mews will frighten a beast into injuring itself, if not falling to its death.”
After another week spent in observations, we had no better answers. “Perhaps it is a kind of play behaviour,” I said. “Like a cat toying with a mouse. The mews may simply find it entertaining to make a yak run.”
We had greater luck in our other endeavour, which was the trapping of a mew—not to kill it, as the locals do, but for study. Even this was not so easily done; as I have said, mews are quite clever about learning to avoid traps. We caught one the second night we tried, but made the error of going to sleep rather than sitting up in watch, fearing that our presence might frighten the mews away. We realized our mistake when we awoke the next morning to find the thin wooden bars of the cage chewed clean through. Tom swore colourfully in the several languages we had acquired in our journeys and built a new cage. With the mews forewarned, it took us several more nights before we met with success again, but at last we had a mew—and, having seen the fate of the first cage, we made certain to incarcerate our new captive in a much sturdier prison.
Honeyseekers and desert drakes were the only dragons I had kept in captivity before then. In size the mew more closely resembled the former breed, but whereas a honeyseeker is relatively mild unless provoked (whereupon it will spit toxic saliva at the source of its annoyance), a mew is much less cooperative. Watching it pace the boundaries of its new cage, gnawing speculatively at the joins, I said to Tom, “It does remind me just a little of a cat, beyond the coincidence of its call. Andrew once caged a stray he found in the village, and it behaved much the same way.”
“It’s a pity the Nying can’t set them after rats and shrews. It would do wonders for the grain situation here.”
Much to the bemusement of not only the Nying but also our companions, Tom and I did make some efforts to see whether the mew could be trained. Suhail was a great deal of help in this, although he found the entire enterprise hilarious. During his fosterage among the Aritat nomads, his “desert father” Abu Azali had taught him the noble art of falconry, which Suhail had continued to practice after we purchased the estate of Casselthwaite in Linshire. He was able to show us how to fashion jesses and a hood, and then teach our captive mew to fly to a glove. He did this by placing tidbits of food on the glove and whistling in a particular manner, so that the dragon would come to associate him, the glove, and the sound with reward. This stage of the process went well enough, but Suhail was less than convinced. Watching the mew, he said, “I think it’s cleverer than most falcons—too clever, even. You can almost certainly teach it to fly to a lure … but the first time you set it loose in the open air, it will be gone.” He pondered for a time, then said, “I wonder if they would imprint, as an eyass does. Raising a bird from the shell requires a great deal of effort, and I cannot imagine that a mew would be any easier; but it does offer the best results.”
We did not want to risk losing our mew by setting it after a lure, as capturing a replacement would be more trouble than it was worth. It therefore reigned alone in the shed we built for it—“the mews,” as Suhail insisted on calling the structure, grinning every time he did so. (This is of course the proper name for the place where trained falcons are kept … but the pun entertained him far too much.)
Tom did contemplate a second capture, though not for the purpose of training. “It would be interesting to see if they exhibit developmental lability, too. We’ve got evidence of that in a few breeds now, but we’ll need more before we can say for certain that it’s a broad characteristic.”
His phrasing was conservative. In truth, he and I had begun to formulate a theory which did away with the six criteria Sir Richard Edgeworth had used to distinguish “true dragons” from mere “draconic cousins,” and put in their place only one: developmental lability. We did not yet have a good understanding of how the different breeds related to one another—indeed, this is a question that continues to vex dragon naturalists to this day—but we had long since begun to suspect that whatever the anwer was, lability played a large role in the diversity we see today. As it is not a characteristic anyone has documented outside the draconic family, it might serve as an admirably simple means of differentiating that family from unrelated creatures.