It was getting difficult to hang onto all of these new words in my head. By the time the sun came up, I had heard words for rock, fire, human, dragon, yes, no, mountain, ground, sky, up, down, wood, tree, sun, moon, wings, legs, mouth, eat, speak, food, and animal, and we had even cleared up the initial confusion I’d had around “I” and “you”. But I had a burning thing I needed to say and I finally had the vocabulary to say it, at least mostly.
“I not food,” I told the dragon, or at least that was what I hoped I was telling it. “Human not food!”
“Animal is food,” said the dragon, or at least that’s what I could pick up of its speech. “Human is animal.”
“Animal is food yes,” I said, “Human not animal no! Human is speak! Animal no speak!”
“Human is food,” the dragon repeated. “I eat human, dragon eat human, human eat animal, is reganth.”
I felt like I had to get through to this monster somehow, that I was completely failing to communicate the importance of what I was saying because I didn’t know the language. I tried once again.
“I is human!” I yelled. “You no eat I, you I speak.” I tried to tell it that all humans are like me, that all of them could speak, gesturing desperately to try to show my meaning. “Human speak human. Human speak!”
The dragon tilted its head at me, then walked away, leaving me alone to tend to the fire.
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My head spun with the implications of the things the human had said. It hadn’t seemed particularly bright, despite the tricks it had shown me so far, but this was something very new. Not only had the human learned quickly to attach words to things, it was using those words for its own purposes. It was expressing ideas I hadn’t told to it, rather than just following basic instinct or copying me.
It was hard to tell due to the human’s constant primitive speaking mistakes, but it seemed to be saying that every human could speak, that it wasn’t the only one. But I had never heard another human speak. They all just made animal noises like any other animals I’d catch.
But then I remembered all of the strange sounds the human had made while I was teaching it words. Perhaps it had its own, different way of speaking, with different words, for speaking to other humans? Maybe the humans had been trying to talk to me this whole time and I never noticed because they were using the wrong words?
As much as I had been interested in playing around with the human and seeing how it would behave, I hadn’t been entirely sure before that what my mate had said about it just mindlessly copying me was untrue. But now that it had said something that made some actual sense to me, unprompted…
In any case, the rate at which the human was learning to speak astonished me. Sure its speech was primitive, but how long would it remain primitive, if I kept teaching it to speak? Could it actually fully learn to speak? Could I speak to it in the same way I could speak to other dragons?
I also couldn’t help but be concerned about what it had said. The first thing it had decided to say to me, once it knew how to say anything meaningful at all, was apparently that humans were not food, that humans were not animals, because humans could speak. If the humans believed that they were people just like dragons, who should never be just food, wouldn’t they hate me and all dragons for hunting and eating them?
On the one hand, that idea was ridiculous. It was completely natural for dragons to hunt humans, as I had seen myself, the humans do the same to other animals. They couldn’t reasonably fault me for following my instincts. But then again, maybe they didn’t understand that, and hated me anyway.
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Whatever the case, as curious as I had been before about this strange talking human, I became far more curious. I wanted to know how it thought, and if I could teach it anything else besides just how to talk. Besides, how great would it be if I were the first dragon to learn to talk to animals?
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I sat by the fire I’d made and maintained with my head in my hands. What was I supposed to say to that dragon? I had finally communicated with it for real, rather than just parroting words, but I couldn’t understand what it was actually thinking, and it probably couldn’t understand me either.
Each of us knew that the other was intelligent, and had real thoughts, I supposed, and we were so close and yet so far from true understanding. There were only a few things I could really say, and I couldn’t be sure either of us were really getting the right messages.
At any rate, I supposed, there was nothing I could really do for now except try to learn the dragons’ language, and hope they wouldn’t lose interest and decide to eat me or refuse to let me go once I could talk to them and explain my situation to them.
A short time later, one of the other dragons began walking towards me, and I stood up and gave it my full attention. When it had spoken with the dragon I’d gotten to know, it had seemed comparatively hostile, not speaking to me or trying to use words I could understand, though it had seemed to be saying something about me to the first dragon.
I greeted the dragon the best way I knew how, by trying to say something that would remotely make sense to it. “I is human,” I said. “I and you at mountain. You not eat I! You I speak!”
I couldn’t make much sense of what the dragon said next, but it was hostile, approaching too close to me and growling at me. It seemed to be complaining about me and the fire I had built? Soon it started snapping at me, and I jumped back. “Mur!” I yelled, which was supposed to mean “no”. “Mur! Mur! Mur!” I backed further away from the dragon, unsure of what else I could do to defend myself.
The dragon stepped forward, crushing my fire and putting it out, as I continued backing away. Soon, the other dragons woke up and began walking towards me as well, speaking more words I couldn’t understand. What was going on all of a sudden?
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I quickly arrived at the scene of the conflict, along with my parents. “What’s going on?” I asked my mate, who was currently stalking towards the human and insulting it.
He looked at me, and after a moment his expression softened a bit. “Sorry, it’s just kind of annoying. This creature is staying here, using our wood, and making annoying noises so I can barely sleep! I know you’re curious about it, but it can’t just live here!”
“I didn’t realize it was such a problem,” I replied. I wondered what had caused this anger all of a sudden. Was it the human declaring to me that humans are not food? I disagreed with that, but I didn’t see why he would get so angry.
“OK. If you don’t want it here, I’ll take it somewhere else for the day and figure out what to do with it.”
“Just don’t get too attached to that thing,” he said. “It’s a wild animal. It will cause trouble if it stays here, and it could easily die in the wild. It’s not another person.”
“Okay, I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. This was disturbing, as I’d never had this bad of an argument with my mate before. Why did he have such strong feelings about this?
I turned to the human and told it, “I take you down mountain, to ground. Yes?” The human looked around frantically at all of us, then said “Yes”.
“It doesn’t actually understand you,” said my mate.
“We will have to disagree on that for now,” I said, reaching over to grab the human in my claw. It was strange to see the human just let me pick it up without any surprise or resistance. “I’ll be off figuring this out for today,” I told everyone. “I’m quite full from yesterday’s hunt, so don’t worry about catching anything for me.”
“Be back by nightfall,” said my father. “And don’t bring the human. I don’t personally mind it, but we don’t want any more conflict around it.”
“Alright,” was all I said, before I took off and flew down towards the foothills.
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I nearly threw up again. I really didn’t like flying. But at least this time I was fairly confident I wasn’t about to die, and I was going to end up someplace warmer at least, so it wasn’t as bad as last time. I hoped the dragon would let me go, but I wasn’t sure where I would go if it did. My tribe, or whatever was left of it, would now be far, far away from me, and I probably would not survive the journey or be able to find them, if there was even anything left to find.
I was still in a bad situation, but I held onto hope, because it was not nearly as bad as it had been yesterday.