Braise had everything a normal dragon needs. Red scales, a thick tail, and breath so hot he could melt a saucepan in twelve seconds.
The trouble was that Braise did not like fire. Not one bit. He found it noisy, dirty, and above all very worrying for the people who lived nearby.
What he wanted to do, he had decided at the age of six while watching the village's red engine drive past: Braise wanted to be a firefighter.
At home nobody understood. His grandmother, who had burned three villages in her youth and still spoke of it with pride, found the whole thing very worrying for the family. “A dragon who puts fires out,” she would say. “Now I have seen everything.”
At the fire stationThe building where firefighters live and work, along with their engines., Captain Roussel had been very polite. “It is a fine idea. But you understand, a dragon in a fire station is rather like a fox in a henhouse.”
Braise had understood. He had gone home. Then he had come back the next day, and the day after that, and for two months, every single morning, to sit in front of the station without asking for anything.
One evening in August the sirenThe device that wails very loudly to tell the firefighters they must set off. went off. A fire in the hills, over by the vineyards, with wind behind it. The bad kind of fire: the kind that runs faster than the engines.
He learned things sitting there. The names of the knots. The sound a beam makes just before it gives way. Why you never open a hot door all at once. He asked no questions: he listened, and he filed it all away in his head.
The firefighters worked all night and could not get around it. In the morning Captain Roussel, black with sootThe black dust that smoke leaves behind on everything it touches., turned round and saw Braise, sitting in his usual place.
“Can you make wind with those wings?” he asked. “Plenty,” said Braise. “And can you breathe in?” Braise thought about it. “I have never tried it in that direction.”
He tried. He went down to the lake, plunged his head in, and sucked so hard that the ducks shot three metres backwards. Then he rose up, throat full, and blew out over the flames.
Captain Roussel stayed quiet for a moment. Around them the firefighters had stopped moving, hoses in hand, staring at the dragon sitting on the pavement as though seeing him for the first time.
The rain that fell that morning did not come from the sky. It came from a dragon. It took eleven trips to the lake, and by the end Braise could barely stand, but the fire stopped dead in front of the first vineyard.
Today there is a red helmet the size of a bathtub hanging in the Fontclaire fire stationThe building where firefighters live and work, along with their engines.. Nobody else can wear it, and nobody has ever suggested taking it down.
Then came three days of smoke, black branches and people coming to say thank you without quite knowing to whom. Braise slept for forty hours straight in the station yard, and nobody woke him.
Braise still breathes fire, of course: he is a dragon. But he has understood something the captain has often repeated since: it is not what you can do that decides your trade, it is what you choose to do with it.
The end, sweet dreams.
