For two years I had lived with this new tribe, and by now I was no longer an outsider at all. I had settled down and fallen in love with one of the women, and I even had a young child now.

But I never forgot about what had happened in those two fateful days when I had met the dragon. I kept practicing the small amount of dragonspeak that I had learned, and tried to teach it to the others as well. I needed to protect my new family, and it was always possible for a dragon to come along and take any of them away.

Therefore I had come up with a plan, that everyone else had agreed on once I had explained it to them, that would hopefully protect us if another dragon did come along. I would be taking the most risk myself in this plan, but I was willing to do so because I was the most able to do so.

So when a dragon did arrive one day, I was ready. Even as I yelled for everyone else to run for their lives, I stood firmly out in the open, waiting for it to arrive. I did not run as it slammed into the ground, kicking up dust in my face, and stared at me.

“You are a gurn,” said the dragon. “You will die.”

“I am a human,” I said, “And I speak to dragons.”

“What?” asked the dragon, rearing back. “This human speaks?”

“I speak,” I said quickly. “You and I can be friends. You come here, you don’t eat us humans, we give you this animal to eat.” I pointed to the bison we had tied to a tree. “Animal is bigger than human. Good to eat. We humans live, you dragon get animal when you come here. Good for human, good for dragon. Yes?”

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The dragon just stood there for a long, tense while, blinking at me. I really hoped I had remembered the language well enough that it could understand what I had just said. At length, the dragon walked around me, and to the tree, looking at the bison tied there, which had been struggling at its bonds and squealing since the dragon had arrived. It looked between me and the animal several times.

“Yes,” it finally said. “I will eat the animal, not you. I don’t know…”

The rest of the sentence was a jumble of dragon-words I couldn’t understand, except that it was saying something about “speaking humans”. I didn’t object, or signal confusion. Instead I simply smiled at the dragon, and once it was done, I said “Yes! You and us can be friends!”

“You and us can be friends,” it repeated, slicing at the ropes we had tied with its claws. I had to look away in disgust as the dragon took a big bite out of the bison once it had dislodged the animal from the tree. “You give us food, you and us can be friends,” the dragon said. It said some other things as well that I couldn’t understand. Then it grabbed what was remaining of the carcass, and took off.

And that was that. The plan had worked perfectly, but our worries still continued. I really hoped the dragons wouldn’t come by too often for us to keep offering food to them, and that I could explain to them if we sometimes couldn’t capture another animal in time for their return. Above all I hoped that the dragon would remember the advantage of being friends with our tribe.

The future was uncertain, but more hopeful for peace than it had once been.