see
post 244 for first part/intro of this.
The Lizards
As the leaves and wind whipped by him, Mark was yet again amazed at how fast Kram could move through the forest. The saddle had cost Mark a good amount of his savings, but it was worth it. Kram didnt seem to mind the saddle's straps at all, and Mark was sure that his own weight was barely noticable to his giant friend. Unlike in the fields, here in the forest Kram seemed to take Marks pulls at the reigns more as a request rather then an order. In the fields, as soon as Mark pulled on the reigns Kram would turn, here he seemed to take into account Marks wishes, but found his own best route to go in the direction Mark indicated. When Mark pulled on both reigns to get Kram to stop, he got the biggest shock of his life. Instead of stopping, Kram started moving up a large tree.
"STOP! WAIT! HOLY...!!!...wow..."
The large lizard stopped half way up the great tree's trunk, wraped its tail around the trunk and put its front legs on the thick branches in front of it. Kram turned his head to the side to see Mark with one eye, and Mark was sure he saw that always fleeting hint of amusement in the lizards eye. Still catching his breath after the shock of the climb, and not daring to look down Mark patted his steed on the neck.
"I didnt know you could do that....Quite a view from up here thought."
As he looked at the forest top around him, he looked down, and a terrifying thought struck him...
"Can you get down as easily as you came up here? It's quite a fall from here, I know I wont like it, but you wont fare much better from this hight."
As he finished talking Kram started moving again, at first Mark thought they were going higher up, but Kram quickly reveresed direction and was climbing strait down the tree, his massive claws holding him firmly to the trunk and his tail hugging one branch after the other as if ready to grab on and hold up the whole lizard on one branch.
In a few minutes they were once again racing throught the forest, thought mark was barely holding the reigns now. He was too distracted by this newly discoverd skill. As was the case for most of his recent thoghts, this one too ran to the military application of his friendship with Kram.
"It has to be a prety large tree to hold your weight, but there should be enought ancient trees in almost any forest. They're also usualy the tallest trees, so we could see prety far even in a dense forest like this."
As if to contradict Mark's last thought the world suddenly brightened around him. Kram had brought him to a large rocky clearing inside the forest. Mark had seen many maps of the forest and surrounding lands (had even helped edit some once he started riding Kram into the forest), but he was sure that none of them included a large field in the middle of the forest. As he was looking around he noticed some of the larger boulders in the valley start moving and realized that a lot of what he thought were rocks were actualy large lizards lying on rocks.
As more and more lizards turned their heads towards the new arivals in the valley Mark started to worry that maybe this was not the safest place for him. The fact that none of the explorers who had tried to chart the forest had found this place, probably meant that the lizards conceously kept the humans away from here. Mark trusted Kram not to put him in danger but what if the other lizards didnt react to Marks' appearance as well as Kram expected them to. More and more lizards were now aproaching Mark and Kram and were forming a semicircle in front of them. Mark felt like he was in the middle of some sort of trial or stage. Slowly Mark realized that none of the lizards in the clearing were as large as Kram. There were some large ones but not none larger then Kram. That realization calmed Mark down considerably, enough to start enjoying the presense of so many of the giant lizards. He noticed that some of them were actualy very small and guessed these to either being the newborns or some other species that lived with their bigger cousins.
Some few minutes passed as Mark and the lizards curiously looked at eachother. Then Kram lowered his head and neck to the ground as he always did to let Mark get off him and Mark knew that Kram meant for him to get to the ground but as soon as he got off three things happened at once:
one was that two of the largest lizards surged toward him clearly intent on eating or atleast killing him.
two was that Kram stepped over Mark to intercept the would be attackers
three was that all the other lizards were suddenly considerably farther from where Mark and Kram stood then they had been just a second ago.
Once Marks brain caught up to the situation he almost got sick with the realization that the two attacking lizards clearly thought Kram had brought the human here as food, Kram was showing them that their assumption was incorrect, and Mark had almost become a if not a meal then a red stain on the side of one of three very large fighting lizards. Fortunately, when Kram interefered with their attempt at eating Mark, the other lizards got the point, and retreated and no fight actualy ensued.
Mark and Kram spent the rest of the day with what Mark came to think of as "Kram's family." The smallest lizards turned out to be the babies of the species, there were lizards in every size ranging from once slighly bigger then Marks palm to sizes closer to Kram's. The smallest ones seemed to like Mark the most cause he was warm, one curled up on his head and stayed there most of the day.
