The Lizard That Aimed

The dog found it first.

Her name was Biscuit, and she belonged to the people who owned the ranch where Maya's family was staying for the week. Biscuit was a serious dog with a serious job, which was apparently this: standing over a flat brown lump in the road and barking like the lump had insulted her.

"It's a lizard," Soren said. He crouched. "A horned one. Look at the spikes."

The lizard did not run. It flattened itself wider, like a thumbtack pressed into the dirt, and went very still.

Maya pulled Biscuit back by the collar. Biscuit did not want to be pulled back. She lunged, snapped, and then jerked her head sideways with a sound Maya had never heard a dog make, a kind of coughing, sneezing, offended retreat. Biscuit backed up four steps and started rubbing her face on the ground.

"What was that," Maya said. It was not really a question.

There was a dark wet line across the road dirt. And a fleck of red on Biscuit's white muzzle.

Soren leaned closer to the lizard, then stopped himself. "Its eye looks weird. Like the skin around it is puffy."

"It bled on her," Maya said. "From its face. It bled at her on purpose."

Soren got out his notebook. He drew the lizard, the wet line in the dirt, the distance between them. He paced the distance with his sneakers. "That's most of a meter," he said. "It shot blood almost a meter."

"From its eye," Maya said. She was grinning now. "Soren. It has a blood gun in its eye."

Biscuit, meanwhile, would not come near. She stood at a careful distance, licking and licking, making the disgusted face, deeply betrayed by the universe.

"Okay but here's the thing," Maya said. She had crouched too, close to the lizard, closer than the dog would dare. The lizard watched her with one eye. It did not fire. "Why didn't it do it to me?"

Soren looked up.

"It's terrified," Maya went on. "I'm way bigger than the dog. I'm right here. Why blood the dog and not me?"

"Maybe it ran out."

"Maybe." But she said it the way she said things she didn't believe. She was watching the lizard's flat little face, the way it tracked Biscuit and ignored her. "No. It's choosing. It chose the dog."

Soren thought about that. He didn't like accepting a thing before he understood it, and a lizard that aimed was a lot to accept. "It can't think the dog is more dangerous than us. We're enormous."

"It's not thinking dangerous," Maya said slowly. The list in her head had a new item on it and she was turning it over. "It's thinking something else. Something where a dog counts and we don't."

A bird landed on the fence wire above them. A roadrunner, long-tailed, all business. It cocked its head at the lizard and the lizard's whole body changed. It pressed flatter. It shuffled toward the grass. It was suddenly far more afraid of the bird than it had ever been of Maya.

"It's scared of the bird," Soren said. "More than the dog. The dog was right on top of it and it stood its ground. The bird's way up there and it wants to run."

Maya went still in the way she did right before everything clicked. "It didn't shoot the bird."

"It can't, the bird just got here."

"No." She turned to him. "It wouldn't. Watch. If that roadrunner comes down it's going to run, not squirt. Because the squirt doesn't work on the bird."

Soren felt the back of his neck go cold and good, the way it did when an idea was about to be bigger than he was. "You're saying the blood is for dogs."

"For things like dogs." Maya's words were tumbling now. "It tastes bad. You saw Biscuit. She's still wiping her face off. Whatever's in that blood is horrible to a dog. So the lizard sits still and lets the dog get close, because it knows the dog will hate it. But the bird." She pointed up. "The bird doesn't care. The bird would just eat it. So for the bird there's no trick. Only running."

The roadrunner shifted its weight on the wire.

Soren was writing fast, the pencil scratching. "So it has two completely different plans depending on who's hunting it. Blood for the dog. Legs for the bird. And it knows which is which by looking."

"It knows," Maya breathed, "that its best weapon is useless against half the things that want to eat it. And it doesn't waste it. It saves the blood for the mouths it'll actually disgust."

They both looked at the lizard then, this flat spiny thing the size of a cookie, sitting in the dirt of a ranch road, carrying a defense so specific it could tell a coyote's mouth from a roadrunner's beak and choose accordingly. Carrying it in its own eyes.

"It can taste, sort of," Soren said. "Without a tongue. It made something a dog tongue can't stand and a bird tongue doesn't even notice. It's like it learned what a coyote hates from the inside."

"For millions of years," Maya said. "Lizard after lizard. The ones whose blood didn't bother coyotes got eaten. The ones whose blood made coyotes gag got to grow up." She stopped. "That's what's in those eyes. A few million years of coyotes hating their lunch."

Biscuit, fully recovered, decided she had had enough of all of them and trotted back up the road toward the house, sneezing one last sneeze of complaint.

The roadrunner gave up and lifted off the fence.

The instant the bird left, the lizard relaxed. It un-flattened, took one step, then another, unhurried, toward the long grass at the road's edge. It had not fired a second time. It hadn't needed to. It had read the whole road, the dog, the bird, the two enormous quiet children, and decided exactly how much of itself to spend on each.

Maya didn't move. She watched it go, this small armored thing that knew something about its enemies she was only now learning about her own.

The lizard reached the grass, paused at the green edge, and pushed in until the blades closed behind it and there was nothing in the road but the drying dark line where it had aimed.