Hodge Watcheth the Dragon-Baiting at Spokane, and Understandeth Little of It

By my troth, I have seen wonders this day, and I set them down honest, though I confess I have not the learning to say what manner of contest this truly was. The criers called it a "wildfire," which I take to mean a fire that hath gone wild, as a hog will go wild if you leave the gate down, and much harder to pen back up again.

I was told to watch the great doings near a place called Spokane, and watch I did, from first light until the tapestry-box went dark. What I saw was this: a dragon of smoke and flame, vast as three manors put together, laid siege upon the hillside, and a company of doughty men and women went out against it with axes, with water flung from great red carts, and with birds — enormous birds, painted orange and white, that flew low and low and let fall from their bellies a rain the color of a harvest sunset, which I am given to understand is not blood nor wine but some clever alchemist's paste meant to smother the dragon's breath before it can catch hold of the dry grass. A marvelous thing, that men should breed birds so tame they will fly straight into a dragon's very smoke and not falter. I should like to see the mews where such birds are trained. I expect the falconer is paid very well and sleeps very little.

The criers spoke much of something called "containment," which by the sound of it is a kind of score, same as when the reeve tallies how much of the lord's grain hath been got safely into the barn before the rain comes. And by all report the good folk fighting this dragon have got more of their containment into the barn than before — the lines hold better than they did, the beast is being walled in on more sides than it was a se'nnight past, and this the criers called good news, and so I too shall call it good news, for I know a full barn from an empty one even if I know nothing else in this loud age.

I will say plainly: I could not always tell where the true contest was happening. Much of what the tapestry-box showed me was a man standing very close to the box itself, speaking gravely into a black wand, while behind him the hillside sat there being on fire in a general, patient sort of way, the way a peat fire will smolder in the hearth for a week if you let it. I watched this man a long while. He wore a fine yellow coat with silver stripes upon it, the sort of coat I imagine a very important reeve might wear if the lord wished him seen from a great distance. He did not fight the dragon himself. He only told of the fighting, which I found a curious office — a man whose whole labor is to stand near a great danger and describe it to others who are not there, much as I am doing now, so perhaps he and I are cousins in trade, he and I, though he doubtless eats better.

There was also, God be good, a stretch of the telling — quite a long stretch, longer I think than the fire itself got — devoted to a cart that dispensed cold drink and shaved ice to the men resting between their labors, done up in bright colors and hung about with little pictures of fruit. I confess I fixed upon this cart with more attention than perhaps I ought, for it was the one thing in the whole spectacle I understood entirely. A cart, a keeper, a good in trade, coin changing hands. I have seen this at every fair from Michaelmas to Candlemas since I was a boy, save that the coin here was passed by touching a little dark tile to another little dark tile, which I take to be a kind of very fast, very silent alchemy, and which frightened me rather more than the dragon did, if I am honest.

The dragon itself I could not look at long, for it hurt the eyes and gave off no smell through the tapestry-box, which seemed to me the queerest cheat of all — a fire that big ought by rights to reach a man's nose from a mile off, and this one reached nothing but mine eyes, flat and colored and silent but for the crackling the box chose to make. I do not know if that is mercy or mockery. I set it down as it was and let wiser heads than mine puzzle it.

The men who fought it I will praise without reservation, for that much I understood clean through, no translation needed. They went toward the burning thing when every sensible creature, oxen included, runs the other way. They dug their lines — I heard the word "lines" and pictured furrows, such as I have ploughed myself, though these furrows are ploughed to stop a fire's advance rather than to plant barley in, which strikes me as a fine use for a furrow I had not before considered. They stood their ground in smoke that would have felled me at forty paces, and by the end of the day's telling they had more of the beast walled up than they had at the start, and none of their own dead that the criers spoke of, which above every abacus-tally of containment is the number I care for most.

I will say too, for it seemed to matter greatly to those speaking, that homes and byres in the beast's shadow yet stand, unburnt, on account of this day's labor. That I understand entire, no translation wanted. A man's roof is a man's roof whether he calls his beast a dragon or a wildfire, and the saving of it by other men's blistered hands is a good thing in any age, under any king, in any tongue I have ever spoken or half-learned.

I do not know if the dragon will be slain outright, or only driven back into the hills to sulk and wait for a drier season, as dragons and debts both have a way of doing. The criers seemed hopeful, in the careful way men are hopeful when they do not wish to promise more than God has yet granted. I shall hope with them, having nothing better to do with my hoping.

The light is going now over whatever field I am meant to tend in this age, wherever it lies, and I am called back to it by a want I cannot name. I leave the dragon to braver men than a ploughman, and pray their lines hold through the night.

Written down honest, as I saw it, by — Hodge o' the Field, who hath never trained a bird nor fought a dragon nor understood the little dark tiles, and remains Your servant in the furrow