Dragonhaven Tapa dura - 2007

de Robin McKinley

Jake Mendoza lives at the Makepeace Institute of Integrated DragonStudies in Smokehill National Park. Smokehill is home to about twohundred of the few remaining draco australiensis, which is extinct in thewild. Keeping a preserve for dragons is controversial: detractors say dragonsare extremely dangerous and unjustifiably expensive to keep and should bedestroyed. Environmentalists and friends say there are no records of themeating humans and they are a unique example of specialist evolution andmust be protected. But they are up to eighty feet long and breathe fire.

On his first overnight solo trek, Jake finds a dragon a dragon dying nextto the human she killed. Jake realizes this news could destroy Smokehill even though the dead man is clearly a poacher who had attacked thedragon first, that fact will be lost in the outcry against dragons.

But then Jake is struck by something more urgent he sees that the dragonhas just given birth, and one of the babies is still alive. What he decides todo will determine not only their futures, but the future of Smokehill itself.