The Sasquatch Escape (The Imaginary Veterinary) (18 page)

Stories about dragons are found all over the world, but the stories that come from Eastern cultures are very different from the stories that come from the West.

Dragons from the East tend to be friendly and helpful. They often have important lessons to teach humans, and they live peacefully. Killing one of these dragons is considered a tragedy.

The tradition in the West is to write about dangerous dragons. These fire-breathing creatures often burn villages to the ground, hoard treasure, and eat sheep, cows, and sometimes children. Stories about Western dragons tend to be about a hero who must slay the dragon to save a village or even a damsel in distress. Western dragons guard their treasure and will kill anyone who tries to take it.

The dragon hatchling that Ben found on his bed
was a wyvern. The wyvern is one type of Western dragon. It is different from other Western dragons because it has two legs rather than four. Descriptions of wyverns differ from story to story, but most describe them as ranging from muddy brown to a greenish color. Like other Western dragons, the wyvern has wings and can fly. In some stories it shoots flame, while in others it shoots poison. It is often said to have a barbed tail and a neck and head that are very snakelike. Some say wyverns come from Africa and that their favorite food is the elephant. But this dragon became very popular in the Middle Ages in Britain, especially in a region known as Wales.

Back in those days, knights would gather for tournaments, fighting one another in contests to see who would become the champion. Because knights wore heavy armor and their faces were covered by helmets, no one could tell who was who. So these knights carried flags and coats of arms to identify themselves and to honor their families—this is called heraldry. Many used the
wyvern as a symbol on their flags. To wear the wyvern on your coat of arms meant that you were strong and fierce.

Imagine that you found a wyvern hatchling on your bed and you decided to keep it. You’ve been feeding it table scraps and hiding it in your closet, but one day you come home and discover…

Pretend you are a knight in shining armor and you are going to compete in a tournament. What will your flag look like? Create your own flag using an image of the wyvern. Remember, it has two feet instead of four.

Sasquatch

Some people believe that there’s a big creature living in the woods in the Pacific Northwest. Other people say there’s no such thing.

Those who claim to have seen this creature say it’s big and hairy, walks on two legs, smells bad, and leaves enormous footprints. They’ve taken pictures of it. But those who don’t believe claim that the pictures are of people in gorilla suits. Does this creature exist?

This much we know is true—throughout history, humans have created stories about wild men and women who live in the forest. They tend to be bigger than normal men and women, hairier, and a bit scary. If you were a kid in medieval Europe, your parents might tell you about the woodwose, a hairy wild man of the woods. If you grew up in Russia, you might know about the leshy, a tall man who protects the forest. If you lived in the
Himalayas, you might go to bed hearing about the yeti, a wild man who lives in the snowy mountains. And if you lived with the Salish people of the Pacific Northwest, you might go to bed hearing about the wild man called the sésquac.

The native people of the Pacific Northwest had so many stories about wild men that someone decided to collect these stories. His name was J. W. Burns. In the 1920s, he worked as a teacher on the Chehalis Indian Reservation, and after he’d collected the stories, he wrote a newspaper article called “Introducing British Columbia’s Hairy Giants.” Mr. Burns is the person who invented the word
sasquatch
. There were many different native names for the wild-man creature, and Mr. Burns wanted to simplify things, so he created one name.

Later, in the 1950s, a bunch of footprints were found in northern California. When a photo of these footprints appeared in the newspaper the
Humboldt Times
, the writer decided to call the creature bigfoot, and that is how the sasquatch got its nickname.

Today, there are many websites and even a television show dedicated to finding the sasquatch. In Seattle, a publishing company and a music festival are named after the hairy beast.

Pretend you are sitting around a fire a very long time ago and you are the storyteller for your village. You don’t want the little children to go into the woods, because the woods are filled with wolves and bears. So you must tell the children a story that will keep them out of the woods. You tell them about a strange creature that…

Pretend you are a newspaper reporter and you’ve just heard that someone in your town has found a giant footprint. You grab your notebook, pen, and camera and hurry to the location. But when you get there, you find something else….

Draw different kinds of footprints. A person, a cat, a dog, a bird—whatever you’d like—but be sure to include a sasquatch. Think about how the footprints compare in size and shape.

Dragon’s Milk

In our story, Mr. Tabby had a recipe for a concoction he called Artificial Dragon’s Milk. It’s a recipe he perfected over the years to give to young dragons when no fresh meat was available. But dragons are supposed to be reptiles, right? And reptiles don’t drink milk, do they? So why did the baby wyvern drink milk?

Reptiles include snakes, lizards, turtles, tortoises, alligators, crocodiles, and the extinct dinosaurs.

Reptiles are cold-blooded animals. This means that they have to rely on the outside world to heat or cool their bodies. So if a reptile wants to get warm, it lies in the sun. If it wants to cool down, it hides under a rock or floats in the water. Reptile bodies do not maintain a consistent temperature the way mammal bodies do.

Reptiles have scales (snakes), shields (tortoises),
or plates (crocodiles) covering their bodies. And all baby reptiles are hatched from eggs. Most of the time, the eggs are laid, but in a few cases, such as with the garter snake, the egg is kept inside the mother’s body until it hatches, and then the baby snake emerges.

So why don’t reptiles drink milk?