Dragon Wrangler Collection I: Second Edition

Buck Johnson

Dragon Wrangler Collection I

Second Edition with Rodeo on Terul

Wyatt Mclaren

. . . a space age wrangling cowboy adventure full of spills thrills . . .

Spring Lake Books

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015

Introduction

Most of us love a good western and/or cowboy tale (which aren’t necessarily the same thing, but often are). We may be reluctant to admit it in the company of our cultured and literary friends, but it’s often true nevertheless. The wild and untamed settings, the more elemental characters, and the big struggles that really matter—these are the things that conspire to make us love westerns and cowboy stories.

It’s all there much like it is in, say, the Odyssey—man battling unyielding nature, man conquering beasts, man overcoming savagery, man against himself, man seeking a home. These are the ingredients of all good stories.

But in westerns it’s the setting primarily that allows a large, adventure-filled, moving, and morally (most often) unambiguous narrative portrayal of these struggles. Trouble is, though, the requisite settings have almost disappeared. Certainly, the nineteenth-century American West is gone. Similarly, in our modern, technologically advanced world, it’s increasingly hard to find models for main characters with the self-reliance and resourcefulness and rugged individualism that formerly defined Americans.

Of course, we can always look backward, return to the past, for settings and characters. But that’s been done—and done too well for the likes of me to try to compete with the big guns. Larry McMurtry and Elmer Kelton spring to mind first here.

So modern stories have largely turned inward. The psychological frontier is now the wild setting where the struggles take place. And that means something of a good story is, consequently, lacking. It becomes more difficult for outward conditions to represent or parallel or be emblematic of the inner struggles. The rough, portentous adventure—played out in a dangerous, unyielding, and at most semi-civilized environment—is missing. And, as a result, so is much of the fun.

Why do you think fantasy is so popular now? Invented worlds permit these struggles to play out unfettered by the constraints of familiarity and our quotidian civilized world. In the invented worlds of fantasy, where different physical and moral laws often obtain, you’ve got clear-cut good guys and bad guys, seemingly insurmountable obstacles overcome (or at least tackled head-on and forthrightly), roughly emblematic settings, and the sheer fun of adventure and suspense. But, although fantasy worlds permit the telling of a good story with realistic struggles, they obviously don’t lend themselves well to all the conventions of westerns/cowboy stories.

For westerns, then, the solution is to keep the defining characteristics of these tales, but to transplant them to worlds where the necessary settings still exist. And that, of course, would be other worlds within our universe—credibly depicted worlds where we can imagine such stories playing out. And that is why we have the sub-genre called the space western.

Here we are, then, with Buck Johnson, as well as Skeeter Evans and Snort Jones, on planet Terul. Here, on Terul, the geography is uninviting, the climate harsh, the inhabitants verging on uncivilized and often truculent, the characters’ aspirations simple, and the struggles large and emblematic. So there’s the requisite rough setting and concomitant trappings.

We’ve all read and seen enough westerns to have certain expectations. If we want to do the genre justice, then, we can’t veer too far away from these. That’s why there’s a main character who is usually in charge, who is often irascible, who is strong physically and plot-wise, and who is often noticeably flawed. Then, too, there are the expected supporting characters: the slow-thinking, slow-moving, loyal sidekick and his more flamboyant foil who is also often a loose cannon. The idea is to deploy the given western form and its standard plot and character conventions in a slightly different way on different worlds.

So how come Buck is out here on this barren world just barely eking out a living anyway? Well, because he had to leave home, Earth, in order to remain free. If there’s one thing a cowboy values above all else, it’s his freedom—even when his striving for freedom leads, ironically, to another kind of servitude. Here are two excellent illustrative examples from movies: Lonely Are the Brave and The Good Old Boys. And Buck’s no different.

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This is a work of fiction. The characters and situations are nothing more than inventions of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance of anything in here to real persons, places, or institutions on Earth is purely coincidental.

Dragon Wrangler

The Dragon Drive?

Trailing the Herd

Drive’s End

Dragon Roundup

Rodeo on Terul

Dragon Wrangler

When Buck Johnson finally managed to breathe a little again and knew he wasn’t dead, he propped himself up on one elbow. He spat dirt out of his mouth—pthit, pthit. Worse yet, the dirt was at least half dragon dung.

Commiserating, Skeeter Evans called across the football field-sized round pen, You okay, Buck? He was pretty sure Buck was uninjured—he was the best hand at breaking dragons Skeeter had ever seen—but the claims of friendship drew the question out of him anyway. Buck, is anything broke?

Finally managing to stand, but with hands on knees and head down, Buck worked hard at re-inflating his lungs, getting as much air into them as he could with each gasp. But the sulfur-tainted air of Terul didn’t give him much help in getting his wind back. Eventually, he answered: Yeah, I’m okay. Too far from the heart to kill me. Did you see what that bitch did, Skeet?

Yeah, I seen it. Treacherous, ain’t she? What had happened was this.

Dragon wranglers have to break a dragon twice—once to ride and then, about six to eight months later, once to flight. So a top-notch dragon wrangler has to be not only knowledgeable in all the techniques of dragon breaking, as well as being a top hand at keeping his forked end down, but he also has to be an outstanding judge of a dragon’s age. And that’s where it gets tricky, especially on Terul.

A top hand like Buck will take a young dragon into the big round pen just at the critical age when she’s old enough to learn, strong enough to rough handle, and still unable to fly. Then he ties her up short to the snubbing pillar with a thick rope braided from strips of dragon hide (the only rope strong enough to hold a dragon calf) attached to the dragon halter. Then the dragon wrangler gets the dragon to accept the dragon-hide saddle. And when she finally accepts the saddle, he starts riding the rough off of her and teaching her to mouth rein. Of course, all this has to happen before the dragon’s age of flight.

But Fourth Quadrant dragons, and especially Terullian dragons, are a small breed—seldom, if ever, weighing more than five or six thousand pounds when full grown. This particular dragon was a smallish Red Kraken, not even green broke yet. And Buck had misjudged her age by several months. It turned out that she was capable of short flights after all—not very high and not very far, but flight nevertheless, much like a fat laying hen flying several feet into the low-hanging branches of a tree to roost. Anyhow, Buck had allowed that she was younger than she really was.

This day, Buck had cut the small reddish dragon—he really liked her looks and was itching to work her to see what she could do—out of the bunch first and saddled her. Skeeter took off his jacket and, reaching high, wrapped it over the dragon’s eyes. When Buck put his left foot in stirrup with extendable and retractable stirrup leathers to allow mounting so high, Skeeter commenced a distracting and soothing murmur: Easy, girl . . . whoa, take it easy, girl . . . it’s all right . . . he ain’t gonna hurt ya . . . easy.

Buck got his right stirrup and settled himself in the saddle. He lifted on the reins and said, a little thickly, Okay, Skeet, let ’er go. Outside! Skeeter took the blind off and scrambled out of the way.

The red girl flapped her immature wings a couple of times, crow hopped a few times, and then settled into an easy trot around the pen. Buck grinned—he sure did like her easy gait and impressive conformation. So he started working with her to teach her to mouth rein, pulling first on one and then the other rein attached to a ring through each side of the dragon’s lower lip and spurring her with his dragon-scale spurs on the off side to help her get the message. She was a fast learner, and both Buck and Skeeter were impressed.

But Buck’s miscalculation soon reared its head.

Just as Buck was putting the dragon through another loping figure eight, she balked, nearly throwing him over her head. But he dug in his spurs, squeezed with his knees, and managed to keep his seat. Then she really did the unexpected.

Getting one rein in her mouth, the dragon took off at dead run flapping her wings for all she was worth, battering Buck about the ears and knocking his hat off. Thirty yards later she was airborne. When she was about ten feet high, she rolled. And just when Buck’s head was pointed at the ground, she slung her tail and launched him straight toward the hard-packed round-pen dirt. He hit the ground hard, and the air whooshed out of his lungs.

And to top it off, Buck weighed more than most dragon wranglers—he wasn’t any taller, but he was broader and thicker. (The extra muscle came in pretty handy, though, in throwing the two-hundred-pound dragon saddle up onto the base of the dragon’s neck just in front of the wings, as well as with all the demanding rope work.) So when Buck connected with the ground, it was no small impact.

Breathing normally once again, Buck leaned against the towering snubbing pillar. (Owing to a dragon’s size and strength, as well as the battering-ram power in its tail, a snubbing