Story: Hic sunt dracones
Written for:
brigits_flame, September 2011, week 2
Prompt: Create a story inspired from one of your favorite quotes.
Quote used: "Hic sunt dracones", allegedly used on old maps (but actually only used on the Hunt-Lenox Globe)
Words: 567
Rating: PG
Hic sunt dracones
Hic sunt dracones. Here be dragons. Myth has it that ancient cartographers wrote these words to indicate areas that hadn’t been explored yet.
Dragons. What greater way to warn the traveler of overstepping the borders of civilization! What better way to exalt the imagination, to evoke pictures of unspeakable danger. Do you dare to step into the unknown, regardless of the dangers that may lie waiting? Will you brave being roasted, toasted, eaten alive?
Yet, when I was asked whether I wanted to go into the unknown, to see the dragons, I gave my answer within a day. Of course I wanted to see dragons in the wild!
My mother fretted, my little brother begged me to send him pictures so that he could show them at school and within two months, I had packed my bags.
After traveling halfway around the world, I landed on Flores. One of my new colleagues, whose name I didn’t quite catch, came to pick me up from the small airport in a rickety pick-up truck and chattered non-stop as we traveled first through forests, fields and small villages built alongside the road. After a while the landscape began to turn into the tree-dotted grassland which was home of the creatures I had come here to do my research on.
Once we arrived at the research station, I moved into the room I was to share with Teuku, an Indonesian undergrad student. James, as I found out the chattering colleague was called, showed me around the station, pointing out the kitchen, the showers and the small lab.
The next morning, I set out with Teuku and Ann, who had arrived only weeks before me, setting the large traps, using dead goats as bait. As we traveled across the savanna, I kept hoping for a glimpse of the dragons, but I didn’t have any luck.
Two days later, I finally had more luck. Teuku, James and I were checking the traps. While James was busy telling me one of his stories, I was already straining to see the next trap. And there was my first dragon.
Its short, stout legs stretched out from its massive body, it lay in the sun in the trap digesting the goat. Fascinated, I took in the brown skin, forming folds at the sides of the head.
“Well, looks like you caught your first Komodo dragon,” James said as Teuku grinned at me. “Let’s get to work. We’ll restrain this one, to make sure it doesn’t get you. You get to help restraining the next one.”
I nodded, thinking about its venomous saliva, laced with bacteria.
James and Teuku soon had my dragon’s legs, mouth and tail immobilized with ropes.
Touching the scaly skin with wonder, I took blood samples, while Teuku implanted a microchip in the skin behind one of the hind legs. James measured it.
“181 centimeters long; a bit smaller than average. Female,” he stated, jotting down the figures.
Together, we moved the dragon onto the scale and after weighing it, attached a radio transmitter.
Everything done, we removed the ropes and got out of the way as the dragon waddled off, obviously still too heavy from its meal to move at a greater speed. As I watched it occasionally flick out its long, forked tongue, my mind only came up with one sentence to describe my wonder: Hic sunt dracones.