The Dragon Hunter

Harsh sun glinted off brown bone, almost sparkling from the fossilization. Exchanging a coarse brush for a finer tipped, redwood paintbrush, Dr. Pandora Lermand worked on removing the last bit of sediment between two rib bones. The surface area of the brush, with hairs totaling the size of an unsharpened pencil, seemed woefully unprepared to handle the sheer amount of dirt that needed to be brushed off, but Lermand preferred prudence to progress. 

            After all, skeletons existed on a time scale of millions of years. Why risk damage for minutes? To minimize sun exposure, a logical voice in the back of her head retorted, you’re getting sunburned. Lermand rolled her eyes at herself. Her conscience was always focused on the wrong thing, more concerned with con than science.

            The rest of the ribs and the spine curved up over the red clay of the dig. Her grad students had begun uncovering the finer details toward the tail of the skeleton, moving on from the larger, torso portion. Lermand herself would unearth the skull—assuming they had a fully intact beast. Sometimes unexpected errors happened in the fossilization process, which was already biologically rare. Those errors might result in an incomplete skeleton: a body without a head. It wouldn’t be surprising, but Lermand wanted a big find. 

            Her brush skimmed over a divot in the bone. Strange. Lermand hoped she hadn’t damaged it in the mining process. From the top of her head, she pulled down a pair of magnifying spectacles, lenses that fit snuggly over her polarized, prescription sunglasses. She leaned in. 

            The divot was unmistakable. A small notch right above where the top of the rib cage intersected the nearby vertebrae. Positionally, it was just where an arm might be if it came out of one’s back. 

            Lermand sat back on her knees, crawling up from all fours. As she thought, she readjusted the baseball cap of her alma mater, William and Mary, which sat just above a curly black ponytail. She never used the ponytail hole, preferring a low pouf to a higher style. Now, she felt like she needed her neck bare, like it might help her think better. At the very least, it might help her cool off from the Burkina Faso heat.

            “Pete,” she called, addressing her favorite grad student. “Come here a minute.”

            Dressed all in beige, from his hair, to his vest, to his golden skin, to his pocket-studded khakis, Pete jogged over. He was about her height standing, but as he approached Lermand on her knees, she found herself looking up at him for the first time. 

            Like any good paleontologist, she noticed his nasal passages first, indicating sinus structure. Nice and wide. She nodded to herself. 

            “Take a look at this,” she gestured to the divot, then explained, “Are we thinking break or structural?”

            He blinked, took a deep breath, then put his hands on his knees and collapsed into the dirt next to Lermand. His fingers skimmed the air above the small half circle, half hidden by dirt. 

            “It looks too smooth to be damage.” He turned to meet her interested gaze. “Can I grab a brush and work from the other side?”

            In response, Lermand waved with her free hand, palm up, travelling up and over the skeleton as invitation. Pete whipped a two-and-a-half incher from one of his thigh pockets and took a seat across from Lermand. 

            “Music?” He was already pulling his phone and Bluetooth speaker from yet another pocket.

            “Go for it, your call.”

            Lermand preferred working in silence, hearing the texture of the dirt she worked with, but she knew many geologists and paleontologists found the long hours of near silence unbearable. 

Once some alt punk bands began playing songs Lermand didn’t recognize, Pete began sifting the top layer of sediment, eyes only for the dirt. 

            “Careful,” Lermand warned. 

            Pete looked up sharply and scowled. For two seconds, Lermand schooled her face flat. Then she broke, grinning. 

            Catching on to the joke, he retorted, “You’re the one who trained me, after all.”

            With an eye roll, she turned her attention back to the rocks in front of her as well. 

            Dirt came off the skeleton incrementally, almost impossible to see the change with a single brush swipe, then, all of a sudden, the bone was uncovered. One minute, reddish dirt, and the next, beautiful bone. 

            The divot was bigger than a notch, as it had originally seemed. The shallow, quarter inch diameter hole connected to a much bigger joint, like eclipsing suns. 

            Pete let out a low whistle. 

            Lermand shook her head and said, “Looks like a joint socket of some kind.”

            “Like a shoulder, if a shoulder came out of your back.” Pete only realized what he was saying as he said it. Like the words were jumping out of his mouth of their own accord and his voice was simply the medium. His eyes widened, and his head shot towards Lermand. 

            She looked back, eyebrows dropping from curiosity to confusion to denial. “No.”

            The joint demanded her attention; she looked away from Pete. It had to be a shark bite, or an immature fossilization of that area, certainly not a socket in the wrong place. But no signature characteristics of either scenario jumped out. No bone chips, jagged tooth marks, or air pockets in the surrounding bone. 

            Sitting back on her haunches once more, she recalled a class she took early on in her tenure at William and Mary: her freshman year COLL class. COLL classes were equivalent to what other schools might offer as Writing 101: a mandatory seminar for incoming students to get the new class up to par on integral skills. But William and Mary was a liberal arts institution and, as such, added some spice to their requirement. Each COLL class combined two seemingly unrelated fields in a course that doubled as a writing workshop. Lermand’s roommate, for example, took a class that combined Chemistry and Art History, looking at light wavelengths, pigments, and forgeries. To round out Lermand’s paleo-driven schedule, she took a COLL class uniting Biology with Anthropology on the study of cryptids, what might be possible and why stories were important. Super interesting class, but she never thought she would find herself recalling some of its lectures in the field. Who becomes a marine biologist and seeks the Kraken?

            She wiped a single drop of sweat rolling down from her temple.

            Now, it was time to see if she learned anything, all those years ago in her freshman year of undergrad. What was the difference between a dragon and a wyvern? Geographic area or body plan?  Number of legs? Type of worship? Material of its hoard?

            She shook her head, not actually believing she was allowing herself to spend precious dig time thinking about fictional creatures. Then again, she didn’t believe she would ever find potential evidence of a suddenly no-longer-fictional creature. 

            “Alright, Pete,” she admitted eventually. “Call everyone over. I’m going to take some pictures of this thing as we uncover it. It’s been buried for over 600 million years. It can wait a few hours more.” 

Pete let out another whistle, laced with a grin. “This will make for one hell of a paper. If you need me, I’ll be brainstorming quippy titles back in the camp. The Beast of Burkina Faso. Dragons in Dedougou.” His hands worked a rainbow in the air.

Lermand just shook her head. He was all too casual for just having unearthed evidence of a dragon. It was like finding bigfoot. There was a large possibility that their academic paper could reach the general public. A case like Sam Huntington. Or, more likely, she would be laughed out of a job. 

“I get to be an author on this paper, right?” Pete was a few steps away from the skeleton, now, and had turned around with downturned eyes. 

“Of course,” Lermand chuckled. “We can throw rock, paper, scissors for who’s first and who’s last.” 

I felt the wind, again. 

Ripping around my waist.

Curling around my body like the tail of a cat,

Marking me as its own. 

Ghostly apparitions appeared,

The resting places of my brothers and sisters.

I remembered the killers came as the sun crested the sky.

They used inventions from other countries—imports, stolen goods

That they could have never come up with themselves—

And bombed our promontory

Casting us into the sea.

Leathery wings are made for flying.

Have you ever tried to drown a bat?

They sink.

The sea floor claimed me as its own.

For thousands of years, my breath was life.

I roared columns of fire;

Glowing bacteria came and feasted.

They thought my pillars of steam came from deep below the crust

But it came from deep in my belly. 

Rage and spite. 

Biding my time. 

What once was foaming, quivering, tumultuous waves

Became pond

Became estuary

Became swamp

Became dirt

Layers more of rock

Striped and striated 

Formed over my body

And I waited for my turn,

My chance for freedom.

They would come. 

They always did.

            Church bells signaled the monks to proceed to daily mass, but Friar Saxe was deep in meditation. He had been strengthening his connection, building his faith for three decades at this point. He never expected to be called upon. 

            As he was translating artifacts from forgotten languages—scrolls in Aramaic, bones with Archaic Chinese inscriptions, tablets with Cuneiform—he felt a tingle begin at the tip of his largest toe. It travelled up his feet, and if his medical anatomy classes served him well, it followed the path of his veins, branching along major arteries, until finally the tingle reached the top of his bald head. He had the characteristic stripe of hair along the circumference of his head, a tonsure, and as the jolt reached his head, his hairs stood on end. 

            He felt electric. Alive. 

            He closed the lid of his laptop, where his notes on the artifacts were painstakingly inscribed, and he walked over to his lamp, switching it off. In total blackness, he settled onto the concrete floor. There were no windows in his cell.

            Crossing his legs, resting his arms, heavy, in his lap, he closed his eyes, and cast his mind. 

            He had played secular games, back when he was younger, back before he chose a career of ministry and learning and spirituality, about fantasy creatures and the powers of faith. Paladins that could heal, and zealots that could smite. When he joined the monastery, he found connection in the spiritual ley lines of the world, but no evidence of physical powers bestowed upon the faithful. He told everyone about the new self-discoveries he made, being more in tune with his mind and his body and his purpose, but nothing supernatural. 

            He prayed, researched, meditated, daily, but he never thought anything would come from it. Then again, that was the definition of faith. Leaping out, blindly, without knowing or expecting anything to catch you. And something had caught him. And something came with a powerful aura.

Friar Saxe had done more for River Basin scholars, spanning areas from Central America, to Mesopotamia, to the middle of China than Western academia had in hundreds of years. It made sense to him why an ancient God might reach out to him, instead of a professor, even though they might seem equally devoted. Professors were caught up in grading and grants. Saxe had nothing but time. Gods could sense those kinds of things. 

            Advancement comes from the strange. His faith had finally paid off. Excitement brimmed in his belly. The excitement of a purpose realized.

            Who are you, he thought to the force that settled upon him like a mantle, woolen and stuffy, yet comforting and potentially lifesaving. 

            The force didn’t answer. Gods seldom did. 

            He was curious about who had called on him as its first disciple, but he did not break his meditation. Research could come later. Deeper understanding started from within. 

            He was interrupted an hour and a half into his silent reflection. 

            A quiet knock followed by, “Brother Saxe? Are you in here? We have missed you at our shared mass and our shared dinner.”

            It was not uncommon for older monks to drop dead in the middle of their studies, only to be found hours later, already stiff and smelly from the humid attic cells. If a monk had missed several sessions in a row, one of the new recruits was tasked with locating him—just in case. 

            “Yes, brother, I am here.” Friar Saxe responded. His eyes opened. They felt like they had changed colors. “Come in, brother.”

            The young man entered, shoulders slouched and tonsure disheveled. Brother Oleksaander. Friar Saxe recognized him as a university boy they had recruited on a study abroad tour. Interested in ancient civilizations and attending a nearby archaeological dig, he stumbled on the monastery and found a home within its hallowed walls. He notified his professors of his upcoming absence by handwritten letter, and he never left the building, not even to garden. Friar Saxe had wanted Oleksaander as his apprentice, but Oleksaander had chosen a more mainstream, monotheistic friar to follow in the footsteps of. 

            “I have found a calling.” Friar Saxe’s face betrayed none of the excitement he felt. The words conveyed everything he needed them to.

            Brother Oleksaander’s eyes widened. “Which God, brother? I know you study many.”

            “I am not sure yet. I felt its power call out to me. We can research, now, together.”

            Friar Saxe opened his laptop and typed in his password, all fingers touching the keys at once, curled like talons. 

            A quick google search of “Archaeology” revealed several dumbed-down news sources reporting “Big Finds in Burkina Faso.” Posted two hours ago. 

            He skimmed through one of the articles. A team had found a large skeleton of what they initially thought was a complete Parasaurolophus. As they moved up its spine, they had found a socket near the rear deltoids, what they were calling a wing socket. The article noted further research on the specimen needed to be done, but the team may have produced the first evidence that dragons existed. Friar Saxe knew next to nothing about the ancient lizards called dinosaurs. He scoffed nonetheless. 

            Dragons in Burkina Faso? Ask any anthropologist or legend collector and they would laugh you out of their office. African dragons, though diverse as the continent, are more serpentine than lizard-like. Obviously, this team of academics fell prey to the age-old critique: too specialized. Wyrms or drakes would be the correct terminology. 

            He racked his brain for the names of the African dragons of legend, names he had translated hundreds of times from papyrus and oral tales. Why did they elude him now?

            He cast his mind systematically to where he was most familiar, and old knowledge came racing back to him. Would people in West Africa share the same beliefs as the Northern Egyptians? Egypt was a river valley he was well familiar with. Their God’s King, Ra, was in constant battle with a serpent-like dragon, Apep (or Apophis in more Westernized translations, from Greek retellings), in order to deliver the sun across the sky. An Egyptian basis might suggest a more malevolent presence, or at least, misunderstood. Perhaps, Burkina Faso would share a mythos with Benin and the Kingdom of Dahomey. They were ancient neighbors, after all. He was less familiar with their mythology, but he believed he remembered correctly that they believed in dragons as companions to gods. Damballa and Aido-Hwedo were serpent-like spirits who created the world, twisting to form rivers and coiling to form mountains and valleys.  

            He needed more information. He needed to see the skeleton, its legs, to decide what presence he was dealing with. He needed to do more research on artifacts and stories.

            He shook his head. What he really needed was meditation. His faith would allow the being to reveal itself to him eventually, give him commands. 

            “Brother,” Oleksaander called tentatively. “Have you figured it out, yet?”

            “No, brother. In my quest for knowledge, I have over-committed myself to the ancient gods. I cannot parse one from the other, though I have several guesses that seem more likely than others.”

            “Should I gather some of your old work from the archives, so that you may touch cultures and perhaps strengthen the connection?”

            Friar Saxe thought for a pause. “Thank you, Brother Oleksaander. That would be very helpful.”

            Oleksaander bowed. “I will find those documents, now, and alert our other brothers. We will be here to support further spiritual discovery.”

            Friar Saxe thanked the boy once more, and Oleksaander left Friar Saxe’s chambers. 

            He closed his eyes and settled back onto the floor.

            What do you want from me, serpent spirit? Why do you call on me, brother? Are you benevolent or are you here to sow discontent? 

            Serpentine dragons, from their circle-like body, often signified both sides of a coin, good and evil, creation and destruction, virtue and mischief, all wrapped up in one. Friar Saxe’s faith understood these dichotomies—or rather, nuances—and his moral code was subsequently shaped. No purpose was a bad purpose. All he needed was guidance. 

            I have trained my whole life to be your conduit. Strengthen me. Guide me. Lead me.

            With another jolt, this time starting from the tip of his bald head and shooting down toward his crooked toes, the voice answered back:

O faithful, it is finally time. 

I will not be forgotten again.