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“Mammoth,” he replied, clearing his throat. “It’s a herd of mammoth.”
“No way,” she breathed, looking as thrilled as if he had just presented her with the deed to a Neeriyan mansion.
“They’re common here,” he told her. “And very dangerous.”
“How dangerous?” she asked, her eyes wide.
“Well, they’re mostly docile,” he backtracked, “If you stay clear of them, they won’t bother you. But there are occasional injuries and even fatalities. Those mostly happen when people venture too close, especially to a nursing mother and her young.”
“I guess that’s fair,” Kinsley said. “Most mothers are extremely protective of their babies.”
He glanced down at the way she had Nova cradled into her chest and felt a pang of pride.
She is a fiercely protective mother,the dragon crowed.
But now he was staring at her openly.
He tore his eyes away and tried to regain his train of thought.
“The real danger with mammoths is that they spook easily,” he told her. “Their stampedes are deadly, and on the tundra, there aren’t many places to take cover, and not much higher ground to get to.”
“I’d probably be more afraid of whatever they were running from, anyway,” Kinsley put in.
He nodded, admiration flaring in his chest.
She had only just arrived on this moon and presumably had no combat or survival training, yet she had just correctly identified the most dangerous element of the equation. The predators on Sigg-3 would be the real problem, if you weren’t careful.
He hummed to the dogs, but they were slowing anyway, since the sheriff and deputy had already slowed their sled up ahead.
“We don’t want to spook them now,” Kinsley guessed.
He nodded once.
“And I’ll get to take my time looking at them up close,” she said in a happy whisper. “The Old Earth storybooks had drawings of mammoths. They were on the planet for a time, but died out, along with a lot of really scary lizard-creatures.”
“Scary lizards?” Kian asked her dubiously.
“You have to see the pictures,” she told him merrily, her eyes sparkling like she wanted to laugh again. “You can decide if they’re scary or not once you see them.”
He strongly suspected she was mistaken, but there was no point engaging with her further. So, he merely nodded and kept his eyes on the dogs.
“I mean, I guess they wouldn’t be too scary to you,” she conceded after a moment. “You’re a dragon. But dragons are intelligent and noble. Those dinosaurs were justferal.”
He tried to hide his smile.
If young dragon shifters weren’t trained to control their shifts, they too were feral. Kian himself had been taken from his family as a teenager to learn to control the giving over of himself to the beast within.
He wondered if herdinosaurshad been early shifters, gone feral merely because they had no training.
But there was no point bringing it up.
Kinsley was practically swooning at the sight of the mammoth herd up close.
Through her eyes, he could appreciate how large they were, and how foreign to one shaped so differently as the tiny Terran in her only form.
“I love the way they pat each other,” she sighed, as if she were watching the most romantic holo-drama.
He followed her gaze to where a few mammoth couples were stroking each other with their trunks between snatching up mouthfuls of flowery lichen.
